I took a four-hour train ride from Rhinecliff to Philadelphia, with a switch in NYC. I sat on the right side to take in the Hudson's wide span, cliffs, bridges, canadian geese and an eccentric faux castle on a shaggy islet, but I was too drowsy, my mind drained from teaching a month at Bard College. Talking one-on-one with dozens of writers, artists and musicians, I had tried my best to be useful and encouraging. I didn’t jive, I don't think. I never recommended books I had only glimpsed on amazon.com. Rarely did I say something, mention John Zorn, for example, and thought later, "?!" Kidding aside, I inspired confidence and awe with my expansive, expansionist, imperialistic and full-spectrum knowledge.

There had been a gristly crime the day before. On a Greyhound bus from Edmonton to Winipeg, a Chinese man had stabbed, decapitated and started to eat his dozing seatmate, a young carnival hand going home. They didn't know each other and there was no argument. The killer was simply insane. "Please kill me," he would mutter at court. The murderer had arrived in Canada only four years earlier. Married without children, he swept dirt from a Baptist church, levered a forklift, seared and flipped slyly perfumed, frozen beef patties for the golden arches multinational corporation. I'm lovin' it. He also tossed plastic-sleeved, tightly rolled bullshit onto lawns, porches and driveways, depriving some pedaling boy of a summer job.

The cheapest way to stop and start and stop and start from A to Z, Greyhound serves many legal and illegal immigrants, restless teenagers and poor folks in general. At the stations and on buses, you're likely to see an oddball or two, a disheveled woman plop plopping around in fluffy, pink bunny slippers, complete with ears, eyes, nose and whiskers, or maybe a harassed-looking dude in a tasseled, leather hat, accompanied by three carton boxes and a trash bag among his six pieces of luggage. "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure," Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1986. Also, "Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the great car economy." I own no car and have taken buses my entire life, including Greyhound from Philadelphia to Knoxville, Washington to Raleigh, El Paso to San Ysidro, and Missoula to Olympia, Washington. Greyhound riders tend to be chummy and chatty. "I'm a Montana girl," she cheerfully asserted in her two-pack-a-day voice. "I don't start nothing, but I'll finish it." On the train that day, I felt a little self-conscious since I had a similar tint and crewcut to the cannibal nutcase. No one sat next to me.

"An immigrant is an unenlightened ignoramus, who thinks one country better than another," Ambrose Bierce as quoted often by writer and artist Nguyen Ducmanh. Born in Vietnam, Ducmanh came to France as a teenager, traipsed around Europe, married a Finnish woman, then moved to New York. His English prose is reckless, manic, often ungrammatical yet laced with many serendipitous malapropisms. With more people displaced than ever, with hundreds of millions living in their third or fourth country, the world is full of Nguyen Ducmanhs, those who are not quite at home in any language but have a loose command of three or four. Compelled to write, they could become hyper-conscious and compose in an ultra-correct, conservative manner, or they could let go and behave like a drunken tourist.

"Walking through the petrified forest called life beside the women, I did some metiers to enhance my status: street vendor, typographer, bar-boy, busboy, very good waiter, very snob maitre d', remnants baler lost 25 pounds in no time... ouch for my hernia, barkeeper make good money sending son to Lycee Francais but every medal has 2 faces: John Barley corn got hold of my finance, body, soul and spirit! ...taxi driver, yellow cab (holder of a world record never equal in earth life time: 5 summons issued in one day) ... artist in residence, designer of the Gaelic alphabet (15 letters) in calligraphy and in the tree language, art teacher, gigolo, 3 cushions billiard shooter, nom de guerre "chinito pollo" and do art 4000 year backward [...] You do something in Paris: jalousie they hate it then you do nada they call you a schmuck so the alternative is suppuku... n'est-ce-pas!"--Nguyen Ducmanh, from "To Whom Returns To Naas."

Bierce's bon mot is actually nonsense since no two countries can be equal in anything. All differences are qualitative. During the 1970's and 80's, over a million Vietnamese risked death to escape their home by sea or land. They prefered to become a citizen of just about anywhere else, even Hades. Vietnam is still a mess but things have improved. In December of 2007, Fábio dos Santos, an Afro-Brazilian soccer player with six years in the Vietnamese professional league, changed his name to Phan Văn Santos and became a naturalized Vietnamese. In July of 2008, he was included on Vietnam's national team in a friendly match against Brazil!

"I am very happy to become Vietnamese. The new citizenship will help me greatly in my career and maybe help the national team as well. I have been living and working in Vietnam for six years. I think my decision was the right one, even though it was very difficult. To my surprise, my parents support my decision. When I return to Brazil in the future, I will be a guest, not a citizen... Sometimes I felt sad because I had to give up my Brazilian citizenship. But my becoming Vietnamese is God’s idea."

Alessandro dos Santos, best known as "Alex," is a Brazilian-born soccer player on Japan's national team.

The Canadian table tennis squad is made up of four players born in China, one in Sri Lanka.

Dreaming, I'm often an athlete performing spectacular yet monotonous feats. Even in sleep, I don't fantasize about literary grand slams. "I've never had a standing ovation," Ann Lauterbach told me. A recurring nightmare of mine is to be without printed poems at a poetry reading. Jaded by unending applause from first row to rafters, I believe that a reverse slam dunk in traffic is nothing, that a 5-5, middle-aged guy with a beer belly could fly above the rim if he thought positively. As I opened my eyes, the boxy George Washington Bridge came into view. So clunky, it's beautiful. At Penn Station, I surfaced and walked to Korea Town for a cheap platter of beef, rice and kimchi. Back onboard, I remembered vaguely this passage:

"Aside from becoming a citizen through birth, there is the possibility of naturalization later. It is connected with certain requirements; for example, that the candidate in question is if possible no burglar or pimp; that he furthermore be politically unobjectionable, in other words, a harmless political idiot; that finally he should not fall a burden to the country which grants him citizenship. In this materialistic age this means, of course, a financial burden [...]

"Racial objections play no role whatsoever in this.

"The whole process of acquiring citizenship takes place not far differently than admission into an automobile club. The man makes his application, it is examined and passed upon, and one day he receives a note informing him that he has become a citizen, and even the form of this is cute and kittenish. The former Zulu Kaffir in question is informed: 'You have hereby become a German!'

"This magic trick is performed by a state president. What the heavens could not accomplish, such an official Theophrastus Paracelsus has accomplished in the twinkling of an eye. A simple dab of the pen and a Mongolian Wenceslaus has suddenly become a regular 'German.'"--Adolf Hitler, from Mein Kampf, volume 2, chapter 3, as translated by Ralph Manheim.

When I came to the US in 1975, one of the very few East Asians on television was Sulu of Star Trek, played by George Takei. He married a white man recently, I read.

Remember the Pink Lady?

During Christmas of 2002, I saw four Mongolian musicians on a Munich promenade. Dressed in blue robes and black hats, they played traditional string instruments, throat sang, drew a large, mesmerized crowd. Many people gave money, others bought CDs. Later, after gluhwein and bratwurst, my wife and I decided on a whim to enter a go-go bar on Schillerstrasse. We bought tickets, bumped through a turnstile to find ourselves in a red-lit room with a dozen morose individuals, not counting the bar maid. The only action was video, beamed from about ten monitors showing the same-old-same-old, but more freakishly and often up close. Everywhere, rods and orifices, now out in the open. There was a horse and his female trainer, menacing toys and shiny accessories. After ordering a Lowenbrau, I looked around and saw, to my surprise, three East Asians, a scrawny pimp type with an improvised panty hose on his head, a scalpel enhanced, buxom Thai and an all-natural, free ranging Filipina. The girls would take turns dancing in a mini-theater adjacent. No Teutonic entertainment that night. After a while, I noticed that many of these sorrowful, hard up guys were glancing at my wife with impatient hunger. Suddenly I realized they had assumed she was a new dancer, ready to perform next, and I was her boyfriend and pimp.

A German friend said, "Asian women are hot in Germany. The last thing a German man wants to see in a go-go bar is a German woman."

In Amsterdam, most women displaying themselves in windows of the red-light district are from Eastern Europe, Africa or Southeast Asia.

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy is half Hungarian, a quarter French and a quarter Greek Jewish. A law and order man, he has cleared street walkers from all residential areas of Paris, forcing them to work in darkened, wooded areas, mostly in the suburbs. Near Champigny, you can find about 15 vans a night. The whores are all black. Unless supine, each woman waits in the driver's seat, a burning kerosene lamp on the dashboard indicating her availability. A car slows to size up, moves on. Regular customers are important. Sometimes, nothing for hours.

Look at that scorched van! Go ahead, leave your Volvo and inspect it. I wonder if anyone was hurt?

The newest ones speak little French, of course. If you want to talk, try Babel Fish on a laptop.

Where are you from?

How long have you been here?

Do you like it here?

Each month, hundreds of physically or mentally-challenged or age-gifted Taiwanese and Korean men descend on Vietnam to select a nubile wife to cart home. Mediocre pho restaurants now appear in Taipei.

Many lovelorn, horny Italian men travel to Romania or Cuba to get laid or marry. The English prefer to raid Thailand. That's why you can find a Thai restaurant even in small UK villages. The best Thai food I've ever had was in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Miss Italy 1996 was Denny Mendez, a black woman born in the Dominican Republic. Beauty pageants are huge in Italy, with the national contest a week-long affair shown nightly on prime time. Mendez was chosen unanimously by the judges and the vast majority of TV viewers.

Miss Suora is an online beauty contest for nuns. Its creator, father Antonio Rungi, explains in Corriere della Sera, 8/24/08: "Do you think that all nuns are old, shrunken and depressing? That's no longer true, thanks to the foreign girls injecting youth and vitality into our country: there are nuns from Africa and Latin America who are really very, very pretty. The Brazilians above all..."

On March 19, 2002, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka gave a lecture at Florence's Teatro della Compagnia. His host was Claudio Martini, governor of Tuscany. As Soyinka strode onstage, his packed audience stood up. "Eccolo!" the woman next to me blurted excitedly. Speaking a charismatic Italian, the man enthralled. I've never seen anything like it.

Marco Polo spent 17 years in China. Awed by what he saw, he began countless sentences with "You must know that."

You must know that all mouths gravitate towards food. 150,000 Chinese live in Italy. You read that right. There's a new book, I Cinesi Non Muoiono Mai [The Chinese Never Die]. On the cover: "They work, earn and change Italy, and because of this, they frighten us."

That rocking motion is compulsive. People will breed, breed and breed, but this fuck boat is going down, I'm afraid. There are simply too many of us. Mike Davis writes, "more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one--absolutely no one--has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity."

Ask for sweet crude oil. If they don't give you oil, ask for pipeline-grade natural gas. If they don't give you gas, slaughter them.

Counting soldiers, civilians and their dependents, about 400,000 Americans are stationed at 737 military bases in 130 countries. Four hundred thousand! No other nation comes close to this shock and awesome, full spectrum dominance.

What is the Constitution?

What is the Bill of Rights?

What is Habeas Corpus?

Who has the right to declare war?

"The young subject of German nationality is obligated to undergo the schooling prescribed for every German. He thus submits to education to make him a racially conscious and patriotic national comrade. Later he must perform the supplementary physical exercises prescribed by the state, and finally he enters the army. The training in the army is general; it must embrace every individual German and train him in the field of military service made possible by his physical and intellectual ability. Thereupon, after completion of his military duty, the right of citizenship is most solemnly bestowed on the irreproachable, healthy young man. It is the most precious document for his whole life on earth [...] The citizen is privileged as against the foreigner. He is the lord of the Reich. But this higher dignity also obligates. The man without honor or character, the common criminal, the traitor to the fatherland, etc., can at any time be divested of this honor [...] The German girl is a subject and only becomes a citizen when she marries. But the right of citizenship can also be granted to female German subjects active in economic life."

Who was Bessy Ross?

Who helped the Pilgrims in America?

How many American soldiers are in Iraq?

Who won the last Super Bowl?

Like gung-ho mercenaries, ballsy retirees, child molesters and the politically persecuted, many writers have skipped home to plant themselves overseas. Just think of James, Hemingway, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Bowles, Bowles, Barnes, Baldwin, Notley and Corman, of Lafcadio Hearn turning Japanese and changing his name to Koizumi Yakumo, of Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Brodsky, Milosz and Bei Dao spending decades in the US, of the German W. G. Sebald brooding away a nice chunk of his brief, magnificent span on this earth in black-flinted, seriously eroded, drizzly, grey and wind-swept East Anglia, of the German-speaking, Romanian-born Paul Celan in France, the Polish Gombrowicz in Argentina then France, the Czech Kundera, Irish Beckett and Chinese Gao Xingjian in France...

In 2007, Serbian-born Charles Simic became the 15th poet laureate of the United States. If you don't believe me, ask John McCain.

Phạm Thị Hoài is one of the best Vietnamese fiction writers alive. She attended Humboldt University in the former East Germany, where she met her future husband, Dietmar Erdmann. Courting her, he followed her back to Hanoi, stayed for several years where he learned to eat fermented fish, I've seen him do it, and speak Vietnamese almost like a native. The couple now live in Berlin and publish talawas, by far the most interesting Vietnamese webzine ever. Its name is Vietnamese/German, meaning "we are what?" Focusing on arts, society and politics, talawas features three or four substantial new articles each day, unless Hoài and Dietmar are on a rare vacation.

The first Germans arrived in America in 1620, settling in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. In 1677, William Penn went to Holland and Germany to encourage immigration to Pennsylvania. Packed into foul and stuffy holds, many died during the eight to ten-week ocean crossing. In 1683, Germantown was founded by Francis Daniel Pastorius, a wealthy polymath from Sommerhausen, a tiny village in present-day Bavaria, not far from the go-go bar in Munich. Germantown is now a section of Philadelphia.

After slaving from three to seven years, most indentured Germans regained their freedom, with some granted land in Indian territories such as the Mohawk Valley in New York. "Mohawk" is a Narraganset word meaning "they eat animate things," i.e., "they're man-eaters." The Mohawk called themselves "people of the place of the flint."

Some Germans were kidnapped or killed. Others butchered, prospered and fathered many law-abiding citizens.

The first Canadian gold medalist at the 2008 Olympics is wrestler Carol Huynh. An ethnic Chinese, her parents escaped Vietnam by boat.

Ignored by passing ships, they drank and ate whatever that was available.

I’m half Senegalese, half Syrian, half Laotian, half Venezuelian, half Ukranian, half Slovenian, half Liberian, half Corsican, half Kurdish and half Finn.

[Photos from top to bottom: Koizumi Yakumo (Lafadio Hearn) with his family; Vietnamese goalie Phan Văn Santos (Fábio dos Santos); Denny Mendez, Miss Italy of 1996; Carol Huynh, Canadian gold medalist wrestler at the 2008 Olympics.