Clatter

Engines are not designed to clatter. That, at least, is my opinion. Purring as in a 425 Cat or barking as in an R Model are not to be confused with clattering. What my motorbike developed, slowly but surely, was unmistakably a clatter. Something akin to the noise made by a ball peen hammer inside a tin kettle in the back of a CJ-7 on the washboard road to Shenk’s Ferry. This particular clatter, I like to think, was there when I bought my motorbike, albeit in an undeveloped form - small, fuzzy and slightly charming, like a Rottweiler puppy. If the clatter was there when I bought it - that means it’s not my fault, right? Eventually, the clattering got to be hard to ignore, which is saying a lot for a clatter – I have long and well documented experience in ignoring funny noises in vehicles! My favored motorbike mechanic started, a couple years ago, to tell me every time I stopped in that I need to buy a new motorbike. He long since gave up on that, instead he took to shaking a crankshaft in my face and telling me I needed one of those. I took my bike up Ba Vi Mountain last fall, and started thinking about that noise, as it got louder. Then I came back down the mountain and didn’t think about it so much. That happened again the next time I went up a mountain. Then it started clattering on flat roads. I was kind of waiting for it to fall apart underneath me, then I would know that it was time to fix it, but it’s a Honda and I just kept on waiting and waiting…

Eventually my mechanic prevailed, convincing me that I didn’t really want it to fall apart underneath me in the middle of nowhere, where I go occasionally. So he replaced the engine, which is roughly the size of a small Thanksgiving turkey. He also replaced the “transmission” which is the size of a short stack of pancakes at the Iron Skillet. Deconstructing my bike into a couple pieces of plastic, a pile of greasy bits on the floor, and a sad, skeletal wheels-frame-and-seat nha quê looking affair didn’t take long at all. Reassembly with the new bits inside didn’t take much longer. So, after two hours or so of drinking tea on the sidewalk, my bike came back. That set me back maybe 10% the cost of a new motorbike, or, say, 17 hours on the clock of doing whatever it is I now do! Unfortunately, you can’t really see any of the shiny new bits unless you look underneath, but for the driver it does indeed feel like a whole new machine.

The next week, as I was still driving around getting a big smile on my face from hearing the sound of a new motor with the conspicuous absence of clatter, I had a flat tire. Rounding the corner at the end the alley to my house I heard something metal stuck in my tire clicking on the pavement. About a centimeter long, the thing I pulled out of my tire appeared to be the broken off tip of a sewing machine needle, the tip bent slightly so as to catch a tire rolling over it even when lying flat, and of course it is hollow and therefore perfect for quickly releasing the air in your tire. There are no sewing machines that I’m aware of at the corner of my alley. There is a sidewalk motorbike mechanic who sits there waiting to fix flat tires all day …

My theory of ill intent is, of course, only a theory. But, having said that, the next day I decided I needed a nice walk for exercise, so I pushed my motorbike with the flat tire out past the sidewalk motorbike guy, who followed me three hundred meters telling me more and more stridently that he could fix my flat tire, really, he could, truly, then I wouldn’t have to walk, really, honestly, that’s what he does, fixes flat tires. I smiled and walked another couple blocks to my regular mechanic. Sadly, he wasn’t there that day, the tea lady on the sidewalk outside his shop wasn’t there either, so I had to get someone else to patch it, and it went flat again right away. Then I got a new tube put in and was swindled by the guys in that shop who knew that no other motorbike shops in the neighborhood were open that late, and seemed very happy to swindle me. Karma like a defective boomerang…

Shortly after that I decided that since I had fixed the engine and could really go now, I should also fix the brakes. Yes they worked before, but the rear brakes seemed to offer about as much resistance as, say, dragging your feet wearing bowling shoes. Upon dropping the back wheel and looking at the brakes, my long-suffering mechanic pointed out that half the thing holding the wheel bearing was, well, gone, somehow. Oops. Thanks to too many sidewalk mechanics banging in new bearings (with less attention to alignment than me pushing the knob on my Bodum) to fix the noise, which wasn’t the bearing to begin with! So I got a whole new wheel. A new shiny bit you can see this time, and the brakes work very well. Beyond that, I can go to the middle of nowhere, clatter-free, and relax without fear of being stuck in the middle of nowhere for longer than I want to be there.

On the farm

Another Green

Feet on the Street

Moving

For Sale

Presentation is really everything in retail ... everything belongs in the stacks

New to my Shelf

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge
Chanrithy Him
A memoir from Cambodia, this story is well written and, as you would expect in a story of genocide, sometimes painful to read. The author grew up in a relatively well-educated family in Phnom Penh, whose life was turned upside-down when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. The book is full of dignity and humanity, standing witness to the appalling lack of either from those in power at that time.

Snow on the Moon
Keith Heller
I picked up this book quite randomly at a used bookstore - there is one bookstore in Hanoi with used English books which I found long long ago J . A novel loosely set in a small town in Spain late in World War II, it is written in a style which reminded me of so many English literature ‘classics’ that I’ve read. The impression was strengthened, I think, by the actual book – a high quality paperback that is dog-eared from use and brown from humidity. The story is snowy and mysterious, the strength of a child’s prescient naiveté playing against an adult’s hesitant willingness to be involved.

Catch 22
Joseph Heller
I guess this is one of those classics that I never got to until recently. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and spent a great deal of time laughing while I was reading this book. The story is of a bomber pilot at the end of World War II. The story, however, is in the telling of it. The satire is sharp and irresistible, it’s just been too long since I read something which made me laugh and think at the same time!

The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
A beautifully woven story of complex characters, Arundhati Roy’s first novel is transfixing in detail and inexorable in tragedy. It is a novel truly deserving all the praise heaped on it. I’m not sure how it happened that I didn’t read it sooner.

Dragon Fighter: One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace with China
Rebiya Kadeer
The endless expanse of the Gobi Desert, paradoxically ancient yet fragile and crumbling remains of Silk Road cities, Kashgar’s incredible carpet bazaar, the cool underground streams of Turpan on a sunny afternoon, a blood-stirring drum and fife sidewalk performance by local boys in Urumqi, the friendly welcoming smiles of new acquaintances, long hours on uncharacteristically (for China) empty trains; these are my memories of Xinjiang, western China. Rebiya Kadeer’s memoir recounts her experiences growing up and her life as a mother, entrepreneur, big business owner, government representative and, eventually, prisoner, in Xinjiang, and finally as a Uyghur activist from the other side of the world. It is an inspiring story of fortitude.

China in Africa
Chris Alden
A technical and analytical look at the rapidly growing influence of China in Africa, economic and otherwise, this book is short and full of data. I appreciate the academic approach to this topic; it seems that most of what I come across to read on this theme, from my Western-centric media consumption habit, is in passing, shallow and frequently inflammatory. Alden presents a well-supported overview of China’s impacts on Africa, as well as exploring the various motivations for this natural expansion of influence and the potential ramifications both for Africans and Chinese.

Wolf Totem
Jiang Rong
This is a truly fascinating novel set in China’s grasslands of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. A Chinese student travels to the grasslands to live among the Mongol herdsmen to learn about them and, as usually happens in such cases, to learn about himself. It was written and published in Chinese before being translated, and features a great many philosophical discourses ranging from the respective characteristics of nomadic vs. agricultural societies, the Han Chinese relationship to ethnic minority groups, the impact of development and migration on nature, to, perhaps in the most grandiose interpretation, a general critique of the ‘Chinese character’. It is a very compelling read. While sometimes veering into an overly idealistic view of nomadic life or presenting a simplistically monolithic view of the above-mentioned ‘Chinese character’ (from an outsiders perspective, the diversity of China seems more prominent to me), the fable-like tone of the writing makes it a good read regardless of one’s interpretation.

Winter in Hanoi

Streetwise, fight-ready!

West Lake - catching shrimp, maybe ??

Faces jockeying for space in a painting shop in the Old Quarter

Nyama Choma Mzuri Sana :)

Warm Christmas

Christmas in Saigon is warm. Hot, sometimes, and bustling to the point at which a bustling atmosphere bleeds over into a madhouse atmosphere. It had been almost a year since I was in Ho Chi Minh City, and I had almost forgotten how much time I spent there sitting on my bike or in a taxi, waiting for the endless current of vehicles to dissipate. In any case, aside from a few occasions when I got caught at the wrong place and wrong time, i.e. at the same place as a thousand other people, I successfully got around the city. Downtown streets are festooned with lights and decorations of all sorts. Back alleys, at least in certain neighborhoods close to churches, are also decorated and sprout grotto/manger scenes in random corners and, indeed, sometimes in the middle of the road. The prize for the oddest decoration goes to one here in Hanoi though, a giant 30-foot Christmas tree shaped spiral of Heineken beer bottles. I’ve got nothing in particular against Heineken I guess, but, a Christmas tree made of bottles of beer … I’m still trying to figure that one out!

Aside from reacquainting myself with a few of the street cafes I remember, I also went to a birthday party for the one-year old daughter of a friend of mine. All good fun, and I think that is the first time I’ve eaten ostrich … a good impression! While walking around the mall in search of a birthday present for the one-year old, I was truly amused to see the advertisement in front of a dental clinic, for a “revolutionary beauty treatment”, teeth whitening I believe. It featured giant side-by-side iconic portraits of Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe. It seems I think about advertisements too much – but as I did not run out and buy cases of Heineken for Christmas or spend any money whitening my teeth to look like Che (?) I guess being amused by them doesn’t let them into my wallet!

The new experience of my trip south was Cần Giờ. I had read something about Cần Giờ and wanted to go there last year while I was living in Saigon, but just never got there. This area recently became a sort of outlying district of Ho Chi Minh City. Incidentally, expanding city boundaries seems to be a national fad, I think it was last year that Hanoi absorbed Ha Tay province, so now you can drive for two hours west of Hanoi into the middle of nothing resembling city, or even village, but you are still in Hanoi… Anyway, Cần Giờ is billed as the “green lung” of Saigon, it consists mostly of mangrove swamp between the city of Saigon and the coast. To get there you go out thru District 7 (what I like to call the Southern California district of Saigon), cross a ferry and keep on going straight. After a bit you get past the remnants of town, and into the mangroves. They are building a pretty significant road out to the coast, so at the moment there are stretches a unbelievably nice road, considering the paucity of traffic on it, and stretches of the old road, which is perfectly adequate as long as you don’t want to go too fast.

The area is of course very flat, but there are several significant channels that you cross over on bridges and you can get a look over the trees. Along the way locals were set up along the road selling dừa nước – the fruit of the nipa palm. In spite of being called DỪA nước (water coconut) in Vietnamese, as far as I can tell it is no relation to coconut. It is apparently the only palm tree that is also considered a mangrove. Truly a pretty weird tree, it has a “trunk” which grows horizontally underground, or under-mud usually. What you actually see are technically just the leaves, bunches of green palm fronds that are big enough you’d consider them trees just by themselves. The fruit is a giant, brown, spiky thing that looks like, shall we say, a pineapple-of-doom… But, you can separate each big brown point into a piece about the size of my dictionary, then you hack at that a bit more and inside the woody hull is something edible. Softer and juicier than coconut meat, it is refreshing but doesn’t have a strong flavor at all. Mostly, I suppose, it was refreshing to get off the motorbike for a bit!

The mangrove trees themselves are also, well, funny to look at. I have travelled I-10 across the Gulf Coast enough times to know what a swamp looks like, but I honestly couldn’t say if those are mangroves! These mangroves, in any case, look like what I suppose most any tree would look like if it were about a meter or two higher. I mean, a meter or two off the ground, the trunk stops and the roots start, and by the time they reach the ground there isn’t anything bigger than a couple inches in diameter, just a lot of them. So you look into a forest of these trees and you can’t see any dirt (or mud or water) or anything underneath, you just see trees coming up out of something resembling the backside of a gigantic shag carpet.

Just before getting to the coast you can stop at Monkey Island. It does indeed have monkeys; it is not, however, an island. It has a small museum, with bits of a prehistoric skeleton, a few remnants from the war, and a lot of stuffed and mounted animals. Including a beaver with a hairy tail. Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that beavers WERE beavers because of the slap-happy tail, without that wouldn’t they just be really big, buck-toothed lithping rat-th?? ?? After the museum you pass a “circus” with loud karaoke music coming out of it – I did not have the nerve to go in there so I cannot report what exactly a circus (or karaoke masquerading as a circus) is doing in a mangrove swamp. Monkeys ran around everywhere, eagerly ripping anything shiny or delicious out of the hands of careless visitors, and generally making mayhem. You could actually buy feed for the monkeys, but you had to buy it from the staff there, and then you had to give it to the monkeys really fast unless you wanted to take part in the squawking and brawling that ensued whenever food came into the picture. I had enough fun watching. The crocodile mud-pit seemed well stocked, and there was a truly rancid concrete pit about eight feet long with a giant monitor lizard in it, about 5 feet long I’d say. Apart from those diversions, you can take a boat down a bunch of little swamp alleys to visit an old military site from the war.

After escaping the monkeys with all my possessions intact, it was only a few more kilometers to the coast. The coast here is a bit muddy, not a great beach by any standard, much less by Vietnam standard. But, under thatch-roof shade with a good book and an extraordinarily delicious seafood hotpot, I didn’t much care if the beach was muddy!

So my warm Christmas in Saigon is over, I’m back in Hanoi. To be fair, it’s not THAT cold here but there are no beaches or monkeys, so I’ll settle for the attack cat behind my house and the café next to the lake with baby turtles in it.

Đang giắc mở về con khỉ nhan nhản, béo bổ và buồn ngủ!