In Pictures and Words: Hands of Asia

Laotian hands on the side of a boat on the Mekong River

Some time back I got to thinking:  if I were one day to have an office, what image would I most want to frame and hang on the wall.  My tentative answer is a pair of hands.  The history of one's hands form a complicated story—all they've touched, held, and written, what they've protected and what they've harmed.

Palestinian hands drinking coffee in the West Bank

If one ever forgets who he is and lacks a mirror, the hands held in front of his face will be sufficient to reflect his image back at him.  I thought of the hands that have thrown spears at Thermopylae, the hands that have sacked Constantinople, and the hands that have pulled a trigger in My Lai?  What are they that they contain the power to bring either blood or a smile to another's face?  And who are we that we have been entrusted to operate them however we choose?

An ambidextrous pair of Burmese hands - reading and smoking at the same time

A Sumatran woman's hands resting on my knee aboard a crowded bus

I remembered the Vietnamese farmer holding his rice shoots, the Sumatran peanut seller tapping ash off his cigarette, the Indian bus driver honking his horn.  I remembered the man in a Malaysian mall wiping tears from his girlfriend's face, the mother in a Tibetan town stroking her infant's head, and the Nepalese girl who put her hands on mine when she saw I was feeling down.  We take our hands for granted, but their simplest movements shape the world.

Turkish hands holding a gun in Istanbul

Perhaps instead of an office I'd need an entire museum dedicated to the image of hands.  The hands of Beethoven, Rodin, and Faulkner.  The hands of Muhammad Ali and Elie Wiesel.  The slender fingers of Osama bin Laden, the well-trodden palms of Hugh Hefner, and the trembling hands of an aged Pope John Paul II.  But if indeed I were to curate such a museum, the first framed image one would see would be an infant's hands, with those almost impossibly small fingers and fingernails, which carry the suggestion of innocence and a slate still blank.  A caption would explain that this infant will be a sculptor, for to be human is to sculpt.

A Vietnamese farmer preparing to plant rice in Hue

The final framed image would be the hands of Mother Teresa—hands that acted on the conviction that the poor, the sick, and the disabled are, when properly seen, the center of our world rather than the discarded margins.  And somewhere I'd place a thoughtful quote or two, perhaps one from Kahlil Gibran, who wrote, "How small is the life of the person who places his hands between his face and the world, seeing naught but the lines of his hands."

Chinese hands holding umbrellas in Lijiang