T & I: An Introduction

My series, T & I is an attempt at representing I's life and adventures with T (and vice versa).

I and T are friends. I don't want to nail their relationship to the cross of a name, but would rather just say that it evolves in whichever way it wants to at given points in time.

The title is inspired by Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I. "I" is Anna, a 19th century British widow, who travels to the British colony of Siam to be a governess to the children and the many wives of the Siamese king.

The adventures are narrated by Anna and is thus tinged with a bit of subjectivity--it is Anna who tells the tales and "sees"/judges the King; the King, along with the Siamese in general, don't have much agency over how they are perceived.

The relationship between Anna and the King is asymmetrical in many ways, especially in the realm of power, race and gender, but it evolves in a linear and predictable direction, into a relationship of love--the king falls in love with Anna, and improbably, Anna reciprocates.

The King and "I" were lovers.

T and I are not. Neither is the relationship between T and I grounded in any kind of asymmetricity.

Both T and I are women, though both T and I are not women in the conventional sense of the term.

There is very little about I and T that could be dubbed "conventional".

Anna and the King are as conventional as white paint on a wall.

Anna and the Siamese King are profoundly dissimilar.

What can a 19th century white woman hailing from the British professional class (Anna's husband was an Imperial bureaucrat) have in common with a patriarchal, polygamous, tyrannical member of the Thai aristocracy?

Yet even more profoundly they were similar--Anna in her subordination to global patriarchy, and the King in his role as sovereign of subordinate nation, were like two peas in a pod of absolute subordination.

It's the subordination, I believe, that bound Anna and the King.

T and I are likewise very different--as different as bitter is from sweet--and yet in fundamental ways, T and I are irrefutably alike.

The blogs that follow from time to time--intermittently, rather than with regularity--might shed light on the differences and illuminate the likeness.