Notes on my post-Christmas Commute

The other day I was talking with a friend about the new helmet law in Vietnam. Although really, the new law is not so worthy a topic. Somewhat higher on the worthiness scale would be the concept of actual enforcement of the law. I'm told that something like 3000 new police were hired specifically to enforce the helmet law. Or perhaps they just hired 3000 old police and provided extra motivation for doing the stuff that police do. But what really happened, that is worth talking about, is that for two whole weeks now the vast majority of people here have been wearing helmets. I would suggest that the law, and even the level of enforcement, have less to do with that change in people's habits than the PR campaign making helmet use, and traffic safety in general, sort of a national fad. After having effectively given up on enforcing a similar law a couple of years ago, I'd say that the apex of Vietnam pc institutions, the propaganda department, has two solid weeks of success on this one! Anyway, we were talking about whether there are any standards regarding exactly how helmet-like the thing on your head has to be in order to pass muster, i.e. the guys with construction hard hats or green army helmets or, say, a sweat-encrusted baseball cap on backwards, do those get you out of a ticket? My best solution was to have the police give any random passing headgear a good wack with their night-stick - if you fall over then you get a ticket, if you keep going then you're home free. After that conversation, I still burst out laughing tonight, in a 5:30 ribs-to-elbows traffic free-for-all, when a policeman who was dutifully blowing away on his whistle to stop traffic one direction and make way for the other direction, upon being completely ignored by one driver, promptly did just that - skillfully administered a good wack on the helmet. After laughing (and checking that my own helmet was well fastened, and making sure I was in the middle of the herd of traffic going my direction - out of reach of any unprovoked wacks) I proceeded thru the intersection with great holiday cheer and best wishes for my favorite cop who is doing his job.

Merry Christmas from Hanoi!

Indeed, maybe I should buy myself a Ford Ranger for Christmas?!? Isn't there something a little more realistic that they can advertise outside the shopping mall?

Oh yes, M&Ms, now that I can relate to. I failed to check, though, if they were genuine Hershey's M&Ms made from PA milk hauled by my former colleagues...

Here is where Santa gets his hot weather clothes. That said, it isn't hot here now, it's actually a wee bit chilly, but something tells me that Santa being from wherever he is from (the BBC says Uzbekistan would be the best location for him but I don't think he takes orders from the BBC) he would not call this weather chilly!

Who is this Bobby?? Somebody tell me, is that like Santa's goofy uncle, who likes purple instead of proper Christmas colors like red and green??

This Santa needs some serious North Beach treatment - how can you be Santa without at least stuffing a pillow under your belt?? I would expect roly-poly to catch on here, everybody is afraid of being too skinny, so shouldn't Santa be even more roly-poly than usual?

This is Santa outside the jazz club, playing the sax quietly under the deafening roar of everybody's motorbike horns. Oh - I got the horn fixed on my motorbike, I can now toot like everybody else. Occasionally that makes me feel better about the traffic, which is really all it does.

My Castle

Well, not exactly "mine" strictly speaking. And "castle" is up for interpretation I guess! So that is my expansive and well-equipped kitchen. Rice, Ramen, Coffee and nước măm. That's it, mostly, I guess that's why I don't cook much!

This scholar guy, or whoever he is, is hanging on my wall above my desk. Question for my Chinese friends - what does that character mean? Does it mean if I study long and hard enough that I will actually be able to speak Vietnamese? Or if I study long and hard enough I will have hair like that dude does? Or both? Maybe it's a subliminal message saying buy this picture it will bring you luck. Who knows. I for one, don't, that's why I asked!

The Unforgettable Delicious

fix... the unforgettable delicious of my fix

This sign says something to the effect of "Please wear a helmet while riding motorbike!"

Allegedly in a couple weeks they are going to start enforcing the helmet law. Or perhaps make a new helmet law and start enforcing the old one. I'm not sure. But I am sure that somebody somewhere wanted a helmet, because today somebody stole my helmet!!! Bugger it, I guess I'm old and naive, leaving my helmet hanging on my bike, but really, it's like an 8$ helmet with my hair all over it, why would anybody steal that?!?!

A cyclo parade forcing its way through a swarm of motorbikes...

Lenin's Skate Park

My Armchair Travels

Actually, I don’t have an armchair. But if I did, I would certainly use it! I am back in Hanoi, for anybody who didn’t know, wandering in small circles as usual. Re-entry has been fairly smooth – I have the same room, same motorbike, same ‘job’ and am studying the same language. Phở is still good for breakfast, and better here than on Fruitville Pike, no surprise there!

Being something less than half employed and being something less than a model (laborious!) student, I spend inordinate amounts of time soaking up caffeine in one form or another and reading books (which is really an armchair sort of activity, unless you happen not have an armchair - in my case it is a child-sized-plastic-lawn-furniture activity, as that is what sidewalk cafes here have to sit on). So, at the risk of flooding my blog with things other people have said, here are some comments and notable quotes from my latest stack of books.

* * * * *

Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, describes the life and work of Dr Paul Farmer. Dr Farmer’s primary work is in a clinic in rural Haiti, although he is also part of a great many other projects in public health all over the place. This book is really good. While I know next to nothing about public health issues, the way you can see idealism (naiveté, in another word) put to practical use here is a little inspiring to me. It is a comprehensive perspective on life that sort of reminds me of all the opportunities that are out there, even for me in my type Z personality world…

* * * * *

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Xiaolu Guo, is one very funny and insightful novel, on language and cross-cultural experience and relationships. It is the story of a Chinese student who goes to England for a year of study, and as the title suggests, it is primarily about the linguistic and cultural conundrums inherent in her relationship with her boyfriend there. The writing is in the voice of someone just learning English. You might think that I see enough fractured English already, being an editor, but the use of that simplistic yet direct and forceful style adds a lot to the story.

Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language. But, English language is boss of English user.

Every night I coming out Tottenham Hale tube station and walking home shivering. I scared to pass each single dark corner. In this place, crazy mans or sporty kids throwing stones to you or shouting to you without reasons. Also, the robbers robbing the peoples even poorer than them. In China, we believe “rob the rich to feed the poor.” But robbers here have no poetry.

I sit in pub alone, trying to feel involving in the conversation. It seem a place of middle-aged-mans culture. I smell a kind of dying, although it still struggling. While I sitting here, many singles, desperately mans coming up saying, “Hello darling.” But I not your darling. Where your darling? 7 o’clock in the evening, your darling must be cooking baked bean in orange sauce for you at home … Why not just go home spending time with your darling?

“You’ve invaded my privacy! You can’t do that!” First time, you shout to me, like a lion.
“What privacy? But we living together! No privacy if we are lovers!”
“Of course there is! Everybody has privacy!”
But why people need privacy? Why privacy so important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son, and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.

We argue all the way back to home. Open the door, make a pot of tea, you start woover the floor again.
So noisy. It makes me headache immediately. The woover must be invented by mans. I sit on chair not let the big dragon swallow me and take out the Little Red Book from my drawer. There are some pages about womans and equal in Mao’s speech:
In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production.
This must be the original thoughts which became legend “womans hold up half of the sky” in China.

In Italy: Inside of taxi, so close, I can see his face clearly. He looks bit formal in his plain suit and black leather Made-in-Italy shoes. His hair is very few in the middle of his head. He seems sincerely but a little boring, if I can judge like that.
“So what do you do?” I ask.
“I am an avocado,” he replies.
“Avocado?” I am surprised to hear. Is a fruit also a job? “Please explain me,” I ask.
“If you are going to be put in prison you can hire me to help you in court,” he says.
“Ah… is like a lawyer?”
“Yes! Yes! Avocado is lawyer.”

You are cooking some obscure pie for me. It is called q-u-i-c-h-e. I have never seen if before. On the bag it says Even Real Men Eat Quiche. Quiche, q-u-i-c-h-e. I can’t believe it when I am swallowing this piece of shapeless hot stuff. Such an ambiguous piece of food. Totally formless. I wonder about what my parents would say if one day they come to this country, and they eat this. My mother probably will say: “It is like eating something from other people’s mouth.” And my father will say: “It must be left from earlier meal so they re-cook it but inside are already messed up.”
I will agree with my father: it is a piece of big mess indeed. You tell me it is actually from France. I don’t believe you. I think the English are too ashamed to acknowledge it is their food. So they say it is French to defend themself.

“You know, you never tell me things like this.” Now you get up from the bed. You must feel better.
“But you never really ask me. You never really pay attention to my culture. You English once took over Hong Kong so you probably heard of that we Chinese have 5,000 years of the greatest human civilization ever existed in the world… Our Chinese invented paper so your Shakespeare can write two thousand years later. Our Chinese invented gunpowder for you English and Americans to bomb Iraq. And our Chinese invented compass for you English to sail and colonize the Asian and Africa.”
You stare at me, no words. Then you leave the bed, and put the kettle on.
“Do you want some tea?” you ask.

* * * * *

Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala, another novel, describes the life of a child soldier in West Africa. It is an utterly personable and humanizing story about a topic that is not easy to address.

Every night they are making fire and soldier is sitting down and talking. After some time I am getting up to go and sit with them around the fire. It is warm and it is making me to feel a little bit okay and I am happying to be back at the camp because it is nice here – at least nicer than having to be in place with all of its screaming people that you are killing all the time. And here, I am relaxing because there is no enemy that I have to be watching out for if they are wanting to kill me. But I am sitting here listening to the other men talking and breathing and breathing and somehow looking alive. When it is so, we are really all just waiting to die, I am still sadding too much. I am not liking to be sad because being sad is what happens to you before you are becoming mad. And if you are becoming mad, then it is meaning that you are not going to be fighting. So I cannot be sad because if I cannot be fighting, then either I will die, or Commandant will be killing me. If I am dead, then I will not be able to be finding my mother and my sister when this war is finishing.

Then I will go back to church. I will go back to church to ask God for forgiveness every day. And I will go back to church and sit on the bench under the fan that one day will just be falling and crushing me and I will not even be minding the splinter that is chooking into my leg because I will be paying attention to Jesus. I won’t even be moving my eye from the statue of Jesus and instead I will just be sitting there watching Him and watching Him until one day He will be telling me that it is okay.

* * * * *

A Prayer for Burma, by Kenneth Wong is a travel memoir, but it is more about the authors experience in the tourist v. native son quandary than it is really about Burma particularly. While this was of course written before Burma hit the news again this summer, the situation there was not much different then. However, the book is almost exclusively from a personal perspective; refreshing if you are accustomed to reading about Burma from the perspective of the Western political establishment which is a whole different story.

On paying the ‘camera fee’ when entering a temple:

I showed him the small Canon dangling from my belt. “Oh, that’s too small,” he said. “We can’t possibly charge you for this. Just go right ahead.” Both the man and the young woman seemed so congenial that I couldn’t imagine them chasing after tourists who refused to pay. They probably wouldn’t. They operated on the premise that everyone was fundamentally good; they trusted that everyone would do the right thing, and those who didn’t would eventually be punished. That was characteristically Buddhist.

Finding a meal:

“Can I get dim sum here?”
“Yes sir.”
“What do you have?”
“We have steamed chicken, steamed pork, and a few others.”
“Some egg rolls, please?”
“Sorry, sold out. Try the steamed chicken.”
“Thanks, but I’ll take some steamed shrimps instead.”
“Sorry, couldn’t get shrimps at the market today. But the steamed chicken is good.”
The Burmese are too polite and too embarrassed to tell a visitor that he or she doesn’t have any options. So they offer options that are not actually there to begin with, and gently guide the visitor back to the only option there is.

That phenomenon, by the way, is common here as well. You can call it polite embarrassment or you can call it optimistic advertising, when only half of what’s on the menu is actually available, either way it sort of helps people be flexible about their eating…

Brutal reality undermines everything quaint in Burma; few outsiders are capable of enduring what most Burmese suffer with dignity and humility every day. Yet, like a desert traveller mesmerized by a mirage, I found myself drawn to the deceptive charm of Burmese life. It was time for me to leave but I was reluctant to go. Travellers are a strange and stubborn bunch; contrary to the dictates of rationality, they seek ease in discomfort, reward in depravity, meaning in absurdity, and a surprising number of them report that they actually find what they seek.

If I were rating books this one would be low to medium, while it definitely has its good points, somehow I didn’t feel like I learned much from it.

Some Books of My Summer

Among the books I’ve read this summer, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, is the only one about Vietnam. That was not really intentional, but as I am going back to my place in Hanoi next week, it seems appropriate to aim my blog thoughts in that direction again. The name of the book refers to the high bamboo walking bridges that were common on the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. I cannot claim much experience on them myself, but they require a certain agility and poise, I am told, in order to avoid being dumped into the Mekong, or the mud, or whatever is under the bridge.

The book is more specifically about the agility and poise required to navigate life in America as a Vietnamese immigrant after the war. I tend to shy away from novels on my to-read list, but this one struck me as unusually effective in illuminating the various perspectives, or worldviews, relevant to the story. The traditional Confucian structure of life in Vietnam is embodied by the main character’s grandfather. Confucianism is very structured and clear-cut, but, as with most philosophies and religions in most places, the application of the theory inevitably ushers in a practical mingling of the things that make sense for the time and place with the rigidness of the ideal. The main character, as a young person thrown into life in America, adapts with a flexibility and willingness that her mother, although in some way seeing the necessity of it, cannot display. The practical necessity of accepting one system and essentially rejecting the other is clear.

The difficulties of migration, under any circumstances really, are not easily understood by people like me, who are fortunate enough to live with the luxury of choosing so many things about life which most people can only dream of. However the human experience, across the lines of geography, ethnicity, wealth and religion, is more alike than it is different. The depth of the characters in this book and their accessibility to the reader, while remaining firmly rooted to the place and time of their lives, demonstrates that parity.

* * * * *

On rather another subject entirely, but also this summer, I read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. It describes the genocidal reign of King Leopold II of Belgium over the Congo beginning in the late 1800’s. The backbone of the book is the facts. Most of the facts are disturbing, to put it mildly. This is not news, not many people would be surprised to hear of the horrors of colonialism in Africa, or anywhere else.

This book, however, is made significantly more intriguing by the numerous character studies undertaken on those who were part of the movement against Leopold’s Congo, those who understood the nature of “the system” and made great efforts to expose it to the public and change it. I was fascinated to see how he linked the earlier abolitionist movements, the campaign against Leopold’s Congo, and modern humanitarian organizations. Frankly, I would have liked reading more of that evolution and less of the endless deceits and shrewd political manoeuvres implemented by Leopold to keep his murderous personal colony sending him profits, as more and more people understood the brutal nature of it.

If you know anything about the DR Congo, you can see the connections between the methods used by Leopold’s people and the general mindset of the government into the present. I say that, really, rather blindly, not having any particular knowledge of DR Congo other than a book or three and reading the news. It’s a good book if you are up for a disturbing bit of history that is, well, not widely known, if not swept under the rug.

There was a really nice documentary on the Congo I saw in Hanoi awhile back, my comments are here.

* * * * *

And speaking of humanitarian organizations, here is another summer book about the dangers of idealism run amok. Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins tells the true story of a young British woman who gets involved in aid work and ends up in southern Sudan married to a local warlord. Hmm.

The book includes some history of the conflict in Sudan, which seems to me a good thing – it puts the news articles and ‘starving child’ TV ads in at least a little bit of perspective. Not that starving children need perspective, but me, I need perspective. After all, the UN and NGO capital of East Africa would be Nairobi, and I’ve been there. The southern Sudan conflict is at least similar to, if not directly related to the current situation in Darfur, which is next to Chad and I’ve been there. Having been somewhere gives me license to want to learn more about it, not to make blanket statements on things I know nothing about… Oh yeah, the book, I was talking about the book.

Aside from what it tells you about Sudan, the book also explores the world of humanitarian and aid workers in conflict zones. It’s a funny job description which requires an extreme degree of dedication to a cause or plain craziness to provide motivation for the position, and in the face of that, the realism and pragmatism to actually live and work in a war zone without getting killed. Emma, the subject of the book, had both of those, for the most part. Well, at least at first... In any case, it’s a great story – read the book.

Railtrail Bike Ride

Saturday I chased my brother (et la bourgeois bicyclette) and my newest sister through the woods on a very nice rail trail.

Astonishingly well-equipped with lunch (that was us) and picnic tables (that was the trail), the day combined healthy exertion, fine food and conviviality... whatever, we had fun.

I even got ahead of that Cadillac bike once or twice!

Grainy video with ominous music...

Con mèo phật

These cats were 'om om-ing' right before I took this shot. Seriously. For anybody who is puzzled by the sudden burst of Americana pictures on my allegedly Vietnam, Mangos, Beaches, Street Food kind of blog, I'm going back to Vietnam in a couple weeks. Hang in there. I am.

Indeed

So my blog is a month and a half out of date, yes I know. In spite of my personal attitude toward life, my life's attitude toward me is such that it keeps on going with a fair degree of alacrity, independently of my state of readiness to deal with it, or of course, to put it on my blog.

After saying all that, I will just post a slew of pictures from the last 7 weeks and leave it at that.

It seems I've been working a lot lately, so, some pictures from within my cubicle walls:




My job involves a lot of darkness. A lot of being awake when you should be asleep, and of being asleep when you should be awake, eventually leading to a perpetual state of bleary-ocrity, deftly controlled with coffee or assuming a horizontal position, as appropriate.

Occasionally the darkness actually improves one's view of the world; masochistic asthetics.

But usually it just makes me sleepy...

Peace in the Park

And when I'm not working I can go to the park and watch the lake in the kind of silence that Hanoi never hears, play with my camera and read a book :)

Family Festivities

My brother got married in August, which was a great occasion for everybody involved. Ran into loads of friends and relatives whom I hadn't seen forever, and generally had a fine time in every respect. And apart from me having fun,

MY BROTHER GOT MARRIED!!!

...dude, who woulda guessed...

And while my family was all in one country - and one state - we went to the mountains for a long weekend, just to be sure we were tired of each other before leaving again.

choma-ed some nyama...

...and sat in the woods with our feet up.

Mia Familia Grande

This is my family. The people who know me better than anybody else and who still put up with me.

Recommendation

I have actually done a couple things since I got home, but before getting to that I just wanted to put the word out, to anybody reading this who is going or may go or will go but doesn't know it yet, to Hoi An in central Vietnam, go talk to my friend the tailor. Tell her I sent you, maybe she'll pianyi yi dian for you. You can find out more about her by clicking on this link.

Cuối Tuần Đi Núi

One of the first things I did upon getting home was go away ... for a weekend at a cabin in the "mountains" with my sister, nephews and neice, and brother and his fiancee. The mayhem graciously provided by three small children, and the natural solitude and peace of the location, roughly balanced each other out, making a very nice weekend. The cabin was an actual hunting cabin, as evidenced by the dead animal parts hanging on the walls.

The prize for being cute, even in a bad picture, goes to this one.

And the two most energetic people in the cabin bounced around hunting tigers and falling out of bed and roasting marshmallows ... and running after anyone who would run away from them. Mostly smiles all around - even for someone desperately trying not to smile!

A weekend full of family and natural solitude, two things that I never got much of in Hanoi. Well, none of, actually!