How does that work?

Recommending a short article on "real life" and tourists in Vietnam. And me sitting here wondering if that guy gets paid to ride around on a cruise ship and write about it, or if he just does it for fun...

Festivale!

I have to interrupt this photo-stream for a little to talk about Hai Bà Trưng, the Trung sisters. The Trung sisters lived around the beginning of the 1st millennium, just outside present-day Hanoi, and were, like, seriously good at kung fu. One Trưng sister fell in love with a local dandy named Thi Sách. Mr. Thi Sách had a lot going for him; he had a shiny Japanese motorbike, one of those burnt-yellow Korean boy band hairstyles, and a mobile with 4893 ring tones. However, much to his dismay, the Chinese (who wore the big hats here, back then) caught up with him one day and he wasn’t wearing his helmet so they took him away to someplace for people who don’t wear helmets. Now, that left one Bà Trưng up the creek with no paddle, as it were. So she rounded up her sister, and all the intrepid women in the neighborhood, they made themselves an army and chased away the Chinese. The army included elephants – those are the elephants in the Hai Ba Trung Temple (picture, I’m talking about the picture of an elephant in the dark) who the Trưng sisters rode into battle, since Thi Sách’s motorbike had been impounded. That elephant told me that Bà Trưng was not particularly thrilled to be on one Vietnamese pachyderm express instead of one Japanese motorbike, but that is how the cookie crumbles. So, there are the roots of Vietnamese matriarchal society, or Vietnamese society’s matriarchal roots, or at very least a nice story which can be interpreted with a matriarchal cast. The rest of the story, well, Hai Bà Trưng were queens for something like 3 years, then the Chinese came back with a bigger madder army, and the elephants got rumbly tummies (the Chinese had left an ox-cart full of peanuts at the café down the road). The legend (this bit is actually the legend, not me, honest) says that the Chinese went into battle in 1st Century birthday suits, and the Hai Bà Trưng being honorable women, turned around and ran away, and so the battle was lost. In any case, along with a Hai Bà Trưng Street in every city, town, village, and berg in Vietnam, there is also the Hai Bà Trưng Temple here in Hanoi, with elephants and occasional festivals.

This picture reminded me of some photos from when I was in Tibet, inspiring me to post some of those photos in an archival sort of way (these are from January 2003), by clicking here you can find my essay on the bus journey out of Lhasa, and photos of the place.

Anyway, back to Hanoi, night on the lake.

Những quyển sách mùa đông

No Man’s Land, Duong Thu Huong
****
This epic novel revolves around a highland village in post-war Vietnam. The strength of this book is in its characters, well-crafted enough that you eventually see each of them, even in their competing roles within the plot, as you would a friend. By virtue of familiarity with their experiences as well as their aspirations and ideals, you come to identify with all three main characters, and thus are brought face to face with the classic Confucian conundrum of the story (a tragedy of sorts), where the allegiances which are designed to bind you into society are twisted to the task of tearing you apart. Truly a book you can get caught up in.

Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Ben Fountain
***
A collection of short stories that takes you all over the world, this book is exceptional in its portrayal of Americans in international settings. I was impressed with it – the characters and settings are real in their complexity and refusal to be ‘boxed’ or explained. In spite of all the time I spend reading about (or dreaming up) precisely that – explanations of the world that makes sense to my head – it is only the ideas and places most opaque to me that are able to hold my attention. Which is why I like the book, it’s about people who are out of place!

The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne
**
A call of sorts for Christian communalism, this book is at times inspiring in its real, simple, logical application of spiritual concepts that are often religiously clichéd beyond recognition. There are a lot of ideas here, about the value of community, about living reasonably in a rabidly materialistic world (well, America, at least), about treating people always and first as simply people like yourself, which I very much agree with and have a great deal of respect for. That said, this particular revolution would have been a bit more irresistible to me had he expanded the motivational basis for the appeal to a simple and more basic human level. Inspiration for living with decency and respect for others can come from any number of sources.

Perfume Dreams, Andrew Lam
**
A collection of essays relating to the Vietnamese-American experience, this book is well-written but I found the structure (or lack of) not very conducive for creating a big picture. A little fractured, maybe that was the intent though.

The American Soul, Jacob Needleman
****
Needleman’s goal here is to, in his words, ‘re-mythologize’ the idea of America, by looking at the ideals and characters of some American historical figures, and how the actions of America through history have reflected, or rejected, those ideals. The character studies on Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln are explicitly focused on the ideals of the men, as such they do not aim so much to examine their lives as to explore how their ideals are relevant to America today. The most fascinating part of the book looks at American experiences in direct opposition to the stated ideals of the nation, like the dehumanizing of the American Indian, and slavery and racism. He also has a small section on Vietnam, although to be clear it is on ‘the Vietnam experience’ within America, with little relation to Vietnam itself. After recounting the story of Conrad Beissel and the Ephrata Cloister, he moves on to Walt Whitman. All in all I very much enjoyed this book, it is more spiritual philosophy than history, and is a bit more rooted than philosophy often is.