I eagerly await the start of dinner at the home of my American host. We are in a Boston townhouse the likes of which are seen only on MTV, with wood paneling and deer horn hunting trophies and extensive libraries of books that I am pretending to never have read-Plato, Thoreau, Mann, Salinger. Before dinner I swish the conversation around just like I do to the  golden Macallan scotch (pronounced Meckalan-ah spooch) with a practised ease and hope that the inflexibility of an obviously…

She calls me to dinner through the cramped hallway: there’s chicken, pork, beans and rice, and not much else. Protocol dictates that I turn on the TV, and the ritual signifies the start of consumption. There’s a noise now to punctuate this incredible silence, and we are soundlessly mesmerized-like ants gnawing at a noonday sun through a magnifying glass, the TV screen intensifies the reality behind to a level more tolerable to media addicts. But all is not lost in this sweltering asian…