First of all, my apologies to the person who has a hold upon Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks [check catalog]. Yes, I am the selfish person who has kept it overdue, but as you can now see, I had a defensible reason: I was waiting for my hold on Eric Weiner’s new book The Geography of Bliss [check catalog] to trigger so that I could compose this totally indulgent post with both books in hand.

I don’t often get into my personal life on this blog as a matter of self-imposed policy. For one thing, I’m not that interesting, but for another thing, you never really know who is reading. That sounds paranoid, doesn’t it? It is unavoidable now, however, owing to the fact that I have chosen to do a post on two books describing the Moldovan people, that I must reveal at least this small fact: my wife is Moldovan.

You will be forgiven if you haven’t heard of this small slice of a country of roughly four million souls wedged between Romania on the West and Ukraine on the North, East, and South. For the vital statistics, I encourage you to check out the CIA World Factbook, or for a little more, take a look at the BBC Country Profile. The truth of the matter is that when I first learned she was from Moldova, I hadn’t heard of it either, though of course, I researched it and then pretended I had known all along. I can admit this now as a matter of historic record because she’s well aware of my sly ways. Let me give you a short rundown of the relevant details.

The Moldovan people are ethnically Romanian. If you want to go all the way back to the tribes, they were Dacians, Dacia being a province, in the area of the Carpathian Mountains, of the long-forgotten Indo-European Thracian tribes who hung out mostly in Southeastern Europe. Modern Romanians probably owe some of their ancestral blood and cultural heritage as well to the Romans who were fond of pitting their armies against the Dacian people whenever they felt randy for a little wanton rape and pillaging. Well, there’s a bit of simplification in that, but it isn’t as though I’m in danger of being sued for libel by the Roman Empire’s military lawyers, so we’ll just let it stand.

The Emperor Trajan was particularly keen on sticking it to the Dacians; he finally crushed them ‘neath his boot heel around the start of the second century. The comings and goings of those who would plague the peoples inhabiting these lands reads almost like a laundry list of history’s greatest plunderers, starting with the Goths, who forced the Roman troops out around 275, leading through the Ottoman Turks (the Turks were so routinely brutal to the people in this region that Vlad the Impaler actually looked like a good guy by comparison, so what does that tell you?), and eventually the Russian Empire.

The Russians were the ones responsible for breaking off the piece of what was then the principality of Moldavia roughly between the Prut and the Dniester rivers. They called this region Bessarabia; the other half of Moldavia eventually made nice with the Transylvanians and the Walachians in order to form modern Romania. Bessarabia/Moldova was briefly occupied and conditionally unified with the greater Romanian kingdom after the fall of the Russian Empire, though was again annexed by Russia, now the USSR, following World War II.

That is the “for dummies” version of Moldovan history. Moldova has been an independent nation since 1991, though Russia still maintains an ominous troop presence in the region East of the Dniester, despite all international efforts to kick them out. Yes, Russia is occupying territory in a sovereign nation based upon the premise that the Transnistrian region contains a significant concentration of Russians who were left behind with the dissolution of the USSR. Think about that. Try to imagine Russia driving its tanks into Brighton Beach, New York. Darn right we wouldn’t stand for that.

To some of you it may come as a surprise that stuff like that still happens. You just don’t hear about it because nobody really pays attention to places like Moldova. And if you have read The Geography of Bliss, you may be wondering why anybody would want to pay attention.

The Geography of Bliss details chapter-by-chapter Eric Weiner’s journey from country to country as an exploration of the nature of happiness. By Chapter 6, his wanderings have led him to Moldova in an entry he subtitles “Happiness is Somewhere Else”.

Listen, there is a truth in this that cannot be denied: Moldovans have had it rough, and the post-Soviet period has been no picnic even though, as Americans, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that anything would be an improvement over Communism. The truth is, of course, more subtly colored, though on the whole, independence was—I can probably say—well favored. Of course, those were the days when anything seemed possible, even a long-dreamt of reunification with Romanian Moldova. Most of those hopes died early on the vine of potential reality.

The CIA estimates the percentage of population below the poverty line at close to 30%. Like most ex-Soviet nations, the fall of Communism meant that as everything was once again privatized, a few wily robber barons pretty much made off with everything but the kitchen sink, leaving a gaping inequality between the obscenely, corrupt wealthy and…well, everybody else. Some 40% of the people still toil in agriculture for lack of any other real natural resources, and the average Moldovan earns some $880 a year—gross income according to the World Bank. So yeah, it probably isn’t the most fun place that you could be right now.

And yet, Weiner’s attitude going in still bothers me.

Yes, I need to travel to the dark side of the planet, some place not merely a bit blue, a bit down in the dumps, but truly and deeply miserable. But where?

[...]

Then it occurs to me: Moldova. Of course. The former Soviet republic is, according to Ruut Veenhoven’s data, the least happy nation on the planet. Even the name sounds melancholy. Moldoooova. Try it. Notice how your jaw droops reflexively and your shoulders slouch. Eeyore-like. [...] I can even imagine the word “Moldova” doubling as a synonym for generic disquiet.

I know that he is attempting to be entertaining here, but come on—even the name sounds melancholy? I could similarly say something about his last name, couldn’t I? Weiiiiiiner. Just let that play out along your tongue. Doesn’t it sound like somebody who, I don’t know, maybe whiiiiines.

Look, if you travel to a place expecting to find the darkest depths of unhappiness, you will find the darkest depths of unhappiness. Unsurprisingly, Weiner’s journey leads to observations such as the following:

All around me, I see misery. A blind man with sunglasses and a cane, like some caricature of a blind man, hobbling down the street. An old woman hunched over so far that her torso is nearly parallel to the ground. I hear someone sobbing behind me, and turn to see a middle-aged woman with dark hair, her eyes red from crying.

At which point the author questions if he might be experiencing confirmation bias—and this is a good question in that he has described his experiences here as though he had accidentally happened upon one of the lower circles of hell—though he quickly discards that possibility.

On my way back to Luba’s apartment, the bus suddenly stops. The driver makes an announcement—apparently there’s a mechanical problem—and everyone starts to get off. What strikes me is the resignation. No grumbling, no sighing, not a word or a sound. It’s tempting to conclude that the Moldovans are accepting of their lot in life and have achieved a Buddha-like acceptance. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I suspect something more is going on here.

Weiner compares Moldovans to “the poor man in a rich neighborhood”, and so after chronicling what he assumes to be rampant yet joyless alcoholism, a total unfamiliarity with the notion of altruism, stomach-turning cuisine, and even taking a moment to disparage the one export for which Moldova is fondly known—their wine—he sums the Moldovans up as follows:

The seeds of Moldovan unhappiness are planted in their culture. A culture that belittles the value of trust and friendship. A culture that rewards mean-spiritedness and deceit. A culture that carves out no space for unrequited kindness, no space for what St. Augustine called (long before Bill Clinton came along) “the happiness of hope.” Or as the ancient Indiant text the Mahabharata says: “Hope is the sheet anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself.”

No, there is nothing I will miss about Moldova. Nothing.

To an extent, this is fair enough. Even the Moldovan people are migrating out at a rate of more than 1 per 1,000 people per year, which probably doesn’t take into account the scads living and working abroad in menial positions in order to provide for their families, many of them undocumented. But still…I am going to go on the record here and say that Eric Weiner is a bit of a prat.

And so as an antidote to Weiner’s negativity, I offer you instead Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by the British comedian Tony Hawks. The plot, in a nutshell:

Hawks has played some tennis, never quite getting anywhere with it, though he did earn “a medal for winning the British Actors’ Equity tennis championship. (Most of the entrants hadn’t been any good, and hadn’t even acted like they were.)” and some other minor accomplishments. So when a friend vexes him by asserting that any natural athlete, such as the ill-fated Moldovan footballers (that’s soccer for most of you) that were in the process of losing to the England team, could probably pick up a racket and give him a beating in tennis, Hawks takes that bet and dashes off to Moldova in order to defeat every member of the Moldovan World Cup team.

Yes, it’s a gimmick, and Hawks is—as reviewers will quickly point out—a humourist and emphatically not a sociologist, and yet, I actually found Playing the Moldovans at Tennis to be the far more perceptive of the two books dealing with Moldova. In part, it may simply come down to the fact that Hawks, himself, spent much more time with typical Moldovan people, whereas Eric Weiner took most of his non-observational information from American Peace Corps volunteers and Moldovan citizens whom he already knew to be angrily discontented, such as an acerbic blogger named Vatalie.

But it also has to do, I think, with the fact that Hawks isn’t particularly looking to prove or disprove anything except that he can beat the Moldovan World Cup team in tennis. He calls it “kind of like a scientific experiment to prove that optimism produces results.” He elaborates in this discussion with Adrian, the teenage son in the family with which he is staying:

‘I am interested by what you are doing in our country,’ he said at one point, grabbing my arm and leading me in a wide arc, presumably to lessen the chances of my falling down a manwhole, ‘but I do not see how you will succeed.’

‘Why not?’

‘I do not think that the players will agree to play you.’

‘Oh I think that they will.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I can’t be sure. We can’t be sure of anything,’ I averred, immediately adding, ‘And I’m not even sure of that.’

‘So, why are you doing this? It is a big risk.’

‘Because I want to win my bet and I want to prove my point. The risk doesn’t bother me. I’m a risk taker.’

‘This is bad — to take risks.’

‘Oh I don’t agree Adrian. Not to risk anything is to risk everything.’

‘And what does that mean?’

I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. Profound remarks carry so much more weight when left unchallenged.

I won’t spoil any of the book, though I will tell you that it is very funny, and it had both me and my beautiful Moldovan bride in stitches at many parts. Suffice it to say that his whimsical risk brings him into contact with all manner of both colorful and colorless characters alike, including:

• The kind-hearted doctor and patriarch of his host family, who applies his trade for pennies while corrupt goons with idiosyncratic names like “The Television” splash mud upon him as they wrecklessly careen about in their flashy European cars. Though he speaks almost no English, he nevertheless shares a warm kind of friendship with Hawks;
• The mother of the gypsy king, Arthur, to whom Hawks delivers a cheap, plastic round table (this is a rather light-hearted encounter, as she, bizarrely, trades him a pair of underwear in exchange for the table, but in fairness, Hawks tends to trivialize the gypsy royalty, whose riches most probably derive from some rather unsavory practices, such as human trafficking);
• And the absurdly egotistical Russian owner of a Transnistrian football club who paid 25 pounds for a sandwich in Manchester and thinks all British are millionaires, whom Hawks cajoles by claiming an interest in a business partnership to bring a tourist trade to what I believe Hawks at one point calls the worst place on Earth (i.e. the contended and dangerous Transnistria region in which those of Moldovan ethnicity are persecuted inside their own country).

Hawks, himself, eventually leaves the country somewhat ambivalent about it, as an Air Moldova official manages to scam him out of his last fifty dollars as a result of his baggage being overweight.

So far as I was concerned it was a scam, but at least my rather brazen actions had got the price down to an acceptable level. Now when I got home, I could make use of one of the bottles in my luggage to drink two toasts to Moldova — one to some of the beautiful people I had met, and one to the relief of finally being out of the place.

In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t yet been to Moldova, though I’ve got a pretty good idea about it. If you ask my wife or one of her Moldovan friends, none of them is going to spin a fairy tale yarn for you about their country. But I’ve heard the other side of the discussion, as well, and I don’t think that hopelessness and disregard or even envy for the good fortune of their own countrypeople is somehow programmed into the Moldovan DNA, as Eric Weiner seems to believe. Which is why I am inclined to say that Tony Hawks’s observations are the more accurate of the two, if only because Hawks sees the glimmer of optimism in his dealings with the Moldovan people—an optimism that has merely been beaten down by literally millennia of serving as the red-headed stepchild of Southern Europe. It’s a bit of a revelation for Hawks when he begins to notice it:

It wasn’t until much later, when I finally stumbled into bed, that I was struck by the full significance of what had happened that night. Not only had the family’s plan set my task back on track, but it had been the first time in my entire stay that anyone from Moldova had been anything other than reactive. Up until now I had always been the one making the suggestions, inventing hairbrain schemes or pushing for this or that. Finally someone else had come up with something, and bloody good it was too. It seemed odd that this moment hadn’t arrived until I’d actually given up on things. Maybe it was because this was the first time that I’d appeared vulnerable and really in need, and this was something with which Moldovans could empathise. Or maybe the help arrived because they didn’t want me to fail, and they didn’t want me to fail because they cared.

In the end, it is debatable whether Tony Hawks has anything of great import to say on the character of the Moldovan people, but then again, that was never his intention, and he wisely makes no pretense of having anything other than a comedian’s acute though skewed observations to show for his journey. He more or less ends his journey with the conclusion that “Moldovan footballers are a nice bunch,” a phrase he spells out in all caps as though it is meant to be Playing the Moldovans at Tennis’s take-away mantra, for better or for worse. And as a mantra, it’s not a bad one for a guy like Eric Weiner, I’d venture to say.

Tags: eric weiner, geography of bliss, moldova, playing the moldovans at tennis, tony hawks, travel books

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