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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
fix... the unforgettable delicious of my fix
