Notes From Me

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Long long post about Vietnam and Cambodia

Automatically, when I think of certain places, some film or music-related word and image gets associated with it. All I could think of about my first destination in Vietnam was Hanoi Rocks. The capital city looks like one big village, and I like it there.

In a streetcorner temple at the altars with triple statues, the offerings have been arrayed elaborately--bananas (ripe and unripe, real and plastic), gold decanters, flowers, incense, Christmas lights, money, drinks, huge grapefruit. All trinkets of humans and nature bestowed upon the objects symbolizing the figures who represent God. Vietnamese peoples' prayerhands are always rocking with fervor. In every room here people are preparing offering trays or setting up tables or talking. Several old people are grouped here and there. One of the old men, who looks priestly or like a monk, came over and asked me, "Parlez-vous Francais?" Mais, non. Not enough, but we smile anyway.

Seeing French signs everywhere, and noting the French influence in the coffee and in the opening narration of a water puppet show I went to, I thought of a minor parallel, that when a person in a sense "conquers" another, her or his influence is retained somewhat later. By conquering I mean that, for example, some relationships are more like an occupation of your lands, a person somehow invaded, and for a time you--at the least--tolerated their interests. But even from those kinds of unwitting relationships, the residual essence, like the delicious 18th century style baguettes in Vietnam, or the amazing French-drip coffee, can be pleasant. Why do momentary thoughts take so many words to describe?

In coastal Danang I met back up with Nhan, whom I had first met on the crossing from China to Vietnam. He is Vietnamese but grew up in Germany. I stayed at his aunt's/grandmother's/uncles'/friend Dinh's house. Learned a different pool game involving three balls only. You have to make your ball hit the other two, one after the other. I got to drive a scooter over to Hoi An, Nhan was tired of driving, while he and Dinh shared another. The old section of Hoi An is a lanternlit hamlet with buildings from the 1700s, next to a river as New Orleans is, and with similar architecture, small balconies and tall paneless windows open to the sidewalk. Not as many cats though.

Saigon next. People only write Ho Chi Minh City. In Vietnam a lot of street kids, from like six years old to ten or twelve, have this messed up mafia dependence, and are forced to walk around selling stuff to make their room and board. Or, if they have homes, there might not be room for them to sleep there, so they sell cigarettes or lighters or postcards or whatever all night long. The bars and restaurants have wide open fronts to the warm night air, so the kids come in and stand in front of customers at their tables and keep repeating, "Buy this? Yeah?" and if you say no thanks they go, "Why?" in the most jaded voices I've heard from any kids. They do this selling until two, three, four in the morning. I heard one fellow traveler I'd met say to a kid who couldn't have been more than seven years old, "Hey, do you know what time it is? It's two-thirty," and the kid glanced at the guy's watch and said, "Two-twenty-five. You wanna buy this?" (In Cambodia the poverty situation is far more desperate. The kid vendors act exactly like adults, and many very young children are sold into the sex trade where most of the customers are Western men in their 50's and 60's.)

In Saigon I stayed with Allyson from Australia, who lives in a luxurious four-storey house with only one other person. The streets in Vietnam are all rivers of motorbikes, way more than would normally be imagined for any reason. You wade into them if you are walking across. There are no traffic rules.

I went to the War Remnants museum, during the week of the commemoration of kicking America out in 1975. One of the things that stands out to me is all the torture, the human strangeness of things like GI's taking photos next to the decapitated bodies of those they murdered, holding the heads and smiling about it. Or napalm, or bombs that destroy oxygen in a fifty-meter radius. And the automatic assumption that every village, its children included, was peopled with Viet Cong collaborators. This last point, and the murder of so many children, came up later in a discussion with someone I met in Bangkok. His older brother had been in the war, and once was approaced by a small girl carrying a basket of flowers that also contained a grenade that she threw, killing two of his friends.

While in Cambodia I read The Killing Fields. There is only one person in Cambodia right now who has graduated from journalism school. The Khmer Rouge killed pretty much all educated people between 1975-1979, plus people who wore glasses, or sang songs in French, etc. Just across the border into Cambodia from Vietnam, the temperature rose from 86 degrees to 100. The stilt huts lean over mudpuddles in the dry season. It's a tough place to be, but I like Cambodia.

I left there by bus on unpaved roads with a driver who blasted the very loud horn seriously every few minutes, for hours. An approach warning to the motorbikes, the flatbed trucks crammed with people, and the cows. When we stopped to wait our turn to board a ferry, women and children vendors rushed onto the bus, or up to it with their dirty naked babies in their hands, begging for money or trying to sell small, roasted birds and grilled frogs that they carried in huge piles on trays on their heads.

Some various pictures posted below.

posted by lux at 11:11 PM
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2 Comments:

B Goei commented at 4/15/2005~: about "conquering"... i know exactly what you mean. i mean, i'm a living example! i've talked to people over the phone without having seen each other before, and they're assume i'm some white surfer kid who lives near the shore. in some ways it's true. i talk and dress like an american. i even live in a predominantly white suburb. but i still have a fierce identity as the son of asian immigrants. perhaps it's a bit different, but i know exactly what you mean.

as for the countries you visited in this interval, they seem quite a bit like indonesia, only more pleasant. especially vietnam. it's just packed full of stories to tell, huh?
lux commented at 4/17/2005~: Being away from the U.S. for over a year has me feeling more used to "eastern" than "western." You must have an idea of the result of combining them, I would guess. Meeting people who have left their original countries permanently makes me confirm that don't want to be an "expat." When people from comfortably rich countries, whether those people are poor or not, flee to Asia for life, it seems to indicate something major; I Don't want to excommunicate myself from the country I grew up in. But I think staying abroad for a time can be key to a lot of things.

Yes many stories. Too many for a blog. I've been writing every day. I appreciate your commenting.

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