(Most
originally published in slightly different form in the Utica, NY
Observer-Dispatch during a 2003 Fulbright.)
Vietnam.
The names of few
countries are as loaded, especially for those of us of a certain age. Vietnam
was the war that the U.S. lost; 50,000 American men and women died. Plieku, Ashau, Ia Drang, Kon Tum, Danang. Hue
and the Tet Offensive. The languages are as exotic as the images are
horrifying: a Buddhist monk going up in flames; a GI with a Zippo lighter
setting fire to a thatched hut and the final picture of a helicopter rising off
the top of the U.S. Embassy as Saigon fell.
Yes, we lost the war.
But in 2001, Vietnam
and the U.S. signed a bilateral trade agreement. The market is open and Vietnam
is not what it used to be. Half of the country’s population is under
thirty—which means they have no memory of what the Vietnamese call “The
American War.” My oldest friend in Vietnam is a daughter of one of John
McCain’s former guards at the Hanoi Hilton—officially “Hoa Lo,” “fiery oven”
prison—built by the French to incarcerate Vietnamese, by the way. After the
war, her parents named her Binh, meaning peace. The Vietnamese have gotten over
the war. “Let bygones be bygones,” a political scientist in Hue told me. There
is a Baskin-Robbins in Saigon and the Apocalypse Now bar is now a fern bar.
The war is over.
We lost the American
War, but blue jeans and MTV and American pop culture—along with education and
trade—will win the peace.
Shortly after Tet, in
February, I will be going to Vietnam for a semester as a Fulbright Scholar. I
will be working at a former extension center of Can Tho University (CTU), the
new Kien Giang Community College (KGCC), in Rach Gia City, in the Mekong Delta
and on the Bay of Thailand. Vietnam has few community colleges but is beginning
to see the wisdom of building more. Several years ago then-Ambassador Pete
Peterson told me, “Every person in this country is underemployed, even the
woman in the rice paddy.” He’s probably right.
At KGCC I will teach
English, but mostly I will help the school develop itself. I will do a lot of
explaining about the American community college. I will also study Vietnamese
and learn what I can about the country. I will do my best to fulfill the
purpose of the J. William Fulbright Program, to increase the mutual
understanding between people of the United States and those of other countries.
I will try to live up to the honor of having been chosen.
A port city, Rach Gia
has a population of 200,000 and is five hours by car from Saigon. Like Utica,
it is on a river and it is something of
a tourist area. Like Utica, it has lots of potential, and by Vietnamese
standards, it is very diverse, with substantial Khmer and ethnic Chinese
populations. But there will be no drinkable water from the tap (even locals
boil it). No little ice cubes in my drinks even on the hottest days. Sunscreen
every day. No driving a car (though I will be driven, usually in a white
Toyota). Since Vietnamese do not drive on the left or on the right but sort of
like fish swim, even crossing the street will be an adventure.
There will be no
regular English newspaper, no public library, most likely no phone of my own,
and certainly no unlimited internet access. No hamburgers, no half-moon
cookies, no cannoli, no salads that are safe to eat—though lots of seafood and
fresh peeled or cooked vegetables and fruit. Rice, rice, rice. Chopsticks.
Malaria pills. No snow.
I will spend my
birthday and Easter on the other side of the world in a socialist Buddhist
country. I won’t see the crocuses bloom in my front yard in March, probably my
favorite time of the year. I am sure there will be times I will be homesick. I will
miss my family, my cat, my friends, my colleagues at MVCC and all the everyday
details and routines that make up my life in central New York state. I will be
one of very few Westerners in a province of more than a million people. As a
woman of a certain age in Utica, I am in many ways invisible; in the Delta, as
the local roundeyes, speaking little of the language, I will be anything but.
But if I wanted things
to be the same as home, I would have stayed home. Call this the semester abroad
that I wasn’t wise enough to take when I was twenty. Call it work, call it an
adventure. Vietnam is not what most Americans think it is. It’s a country, not
a war. I’ve been there before, so I have a sense of what I am getting into, and
my bags are packed. I can’t wait to go.
Come along with me.
***
“Why are you going to
Viet-nam?”
This is a question I
have heard again and again. To some extent it is a legitimate question given
that many adults equate the place with a war, and it is a place that everybody
from my opthalmologist to my auto mechanic has an opinion. A lot of younger
people probably couldn’t locate it on a map, through I did once have a student
whose father had been in the military say, “Two tours of Nam? What did you do
to deserve that?”
Originally, I went as
part of a sabbatical to develop a course in intercultural communication. I
wasn’t planning on falling in love with the place, and I now know the first 45
minute ride in from the Hanoi airport to the center of the city gave me a
classic case of mind-blowing culture shock. The traffic drove every which way,
and incongruously there were billboards for Siemens and Toyota rising out of
the rice paddies as far as the eye could see. In 1998 the place was the 20th
century and the Stone Age at the same time: a few white taxis as the one I was
in, but also the motorbikes carrying entire families, the bicycles carrying
everything from lumber to dead pigs, all to the market. Women walked along with a yoke
over their shoulders and who knows what in their baskets: pyramids of green
oranges, or brown hens or even lots of smaller baskets. The place was energy.
The place was movement. Once I got to my hotel, I went walking again and again
just to see the life on the street. I was in love.
What do I like about
Vietnam? I like what I see as the willingness to work, the toughness in the
face of hardship after hardship. There is no sense of the personal entitlement
that I see in American culture. Certainly there is room for personality, but,
at the risk of overgeneralizing, people in a Buddhist and Confucian society
tend not to whine. (Whining would cause the speaker to lose face.) There is a
sense of connectedness to each other—much less me, me, me. I like the wide French
boulevards, the yellow stucco buildings, the palm trees that do not grow out of
concrete quite the way they do, say, in Los Angeles.
The Vietnamese have an
eye for beauty—not as self-conscious as the Thai and certainly not as moneyed.
This is a culture that designed the conical hat, and that, on some hats, weaves
in a poem or picture that is visible only if you hold the hat up to the light
and look into it. I like the balance between beauty and utility. I like the
national hot soup eaten at any time of the day, pho, and Tiger beer and fresh seafood.
The motorbikes, the
you-can-carry-anything-on-a-bicycle mentality. So many people speak a second
language. (You can tell when people were educated by what second language they
speak: French, Russian, English.) The resourcefulness. The flexibility. The
boys tending ducks on the side of the road, children in their plaid school
uniforms with red neckerchiefs. I like that Vietnamese take a siesta from 12.30
to 2 p.m. every day, the time when it is the hottest.
I don’t like what I
hear about persecution of ethnic minorities. The way the police seem to treat
some people, the terrible differences between the rich and poor. I don’t like
the lack of freedom of speech. (And I would add that I don't like the manifestations of such things in American culture, either.) If I had a choice, I would prefer drinkable
water from the faucet. I don’t like the August heat in New York state, and I
endure it in Vietnam because I have no choice. Still, there are many fans, and
the heat eventually becomes part of the exotic nature of the place.
Just as the national
literary icon for the United States in Huck Finn, an orphan who has to fend for
himself, so too the Vietnamese have the character of Kieu in the medieval Book of Kieu by Nguyen Du. Not
surprisingly, this national child heroine is sold into slavery again and again,
exploited and harmed. Her life is a vale of tears. But in the end, all ends
well. Students still memorize passages of this poem in elementary school.
A few years ago while
visiting Hanoi I stayed in a small private mini-hotel. The first night there I
heard screaming in the hall, and I only found out why the next morning. The
Texas woman across the hall from me had
with her a translator and the 4 year old
girl she was in the process of adopting. The child had been offered to an adoption
agency because the mother had another
child with spina bifida and could no longer
care for both children. So the younger child was being adopted, and that night
had been the first night in her four years in a room with doors. And so she had
screamed, tried to escape and run up and down the hall.
The woman from Texas
and her husband had already adopted a Vietnamese boy two years earlier and
brought him to their ranch. “My husband retired and he and I looked at each
other and said, ‘What good are we doing anybody?’” So they had adopted. (Curiously, the
representative of the California-based adoption agency, also in the mini-hotel,
knew of the city I live in—and of Rosemary Battisti and her work with local
refugee children.) They were all on
Hanoi waiting for the paperwork to be finished.
The woman from Texas
said she had pictures of the girl’s mother and sisters but hadn’t shown them to
the girl. “I’m afraid she’ll start crying all over again.” The girl wore a hot
pink pant suit and white socks and Mary Janes in the breakfast room.
“You are very brave,” I
said to the mother, but I could just as well have been speaking to the little
girl.
***
I took a good look at
the Vietnam memorials on the Parkway in Utica, NY at home before I left. There is a statue
near Val Bialis and then west a few blocks is a list of local people who died
in Vietnam. I prefer the list of names, even they belong people I did not know.
I also like a kind of
item I see in a display case every once in a while in Vietnamese museums: “Here
is the uniform and shoes worn by So-and-So, brave comrade who fought valiantly
during the battle of Dien Bein Phu.”
The clothes are always
terrible worn and, by American standards, very small. Like the list of names on
the Parkway, this reminds me this person was somebody’s child. Many of us who
have not known war and who take so much for granted might do well to hear
people’s stories about war and its aftermath.
Vietnam, too, has
stories. It also has more than its share of museums. In Ho Chi Minh City the
big draw is the War Remnants Museum. Danang has the Cham Museum, Hue has the
Citadel, in Dalat, in the cool central highlands, has Emperor Bao Dai’s Palace,
including his “breeze-feeling and moon-watching room.”
Hanoi has an Army
Museum, a History Museum, an Anthropology Museum, and Ho Chi Minh’s Museum and
Mausoleum. The art in the Fine Art museum is arranged chronologically, so when
you see the art you see the culture and the history. The snazzy new Women’s
Museum includes a display on women soldiers, though there is much more than
that there. (I am told there is even a Border Guard Museum, although I can’t
say I have been there yet.)
The best known to Americans,
though, is Maison Centrale, aka Hoa Lo (“fiery oven”) Prison, aka The Hanoi
Hilton. The French built this good-sized prison to incarcerate Vietnamese,
though now only a small fraction of it is left. A bright new steel and glass
skyscraper occupies much of the space where the prison used to be.
The skyscraper does not
make the inside of the Hanoi Hilton any less somber. (You can’t see it from the
inside of the prison.) Hoa Lo is a dark and limiting place; there is no doubt
that this place was every bit as horrifying as we can imagine. The cells are
small, dark and poorly ventilated. In
the heat of the tropics, they are hot and stuffy but feel cold and dank somehow.
The place feels unforgiving of everyone. I was surprised that, given the pain
and controversy the place has seen, the prison did not smell.
But museums can be
sanitized places. What remains? Cells, a few rooms of displays, and, since the
French built the prison, there is also a guillotine.
When I first visited
Vietnam, I shied away from visiting war sites, and in some ways I still do. In
Ho Chi Minh City, there are still Zippo lighters and dog tags for sale, all
purported to be authentic. But according to a colleague at SUNY Brockport,
Danang is now “the friendliest city in Vietnam.” And there really is a Hanoi
Hilton—that is, a Hilton Hotel. The Cu Chi Tunnels have been widened to fit big
Western tourist bodies when they visit, and for an extra dollar you can fire an
M-16. (I didn’t.)
Vietnam is a gorgeous
place. I had no idea there were so many shades of green, or how brilliant and
beautiful a rice paddy could be shimmering in the sun. The thick air, the
smell, the richness, the sense of possibility, the energy—these are all
Vietnam.
But it must have been a
hell of a place to fight a war.
I went to high school
with people who went to Vietnam, two of whom ended up with their names on the
Vietnam Wall in Washington: Ernie Gamelin and William Joy.
I have read a few of
the stories of the people who survived the war: Lewis Puller’s Fortunate Son, for instance. Hope and Vanquished Reality by Nguyen
Xuan Phong tells his story of being a
South Vietnamese delegate to the Paris Peace Talks. War Torn is a collection of reminiscences by women reporters, most
of them young at the time of the war. There are many other such books.
In Vietnam I get stared
at, and I smile back. I try to be careful not to offend. If everything goes as
planned while I am here, everyone involved—the faculty and staff at the
community college, the woman down the street who sold me Omo detergent, the
waiter at the local Trung Nguyen (the Vietnamese equivalent of Starbuck’s), and
even the teenage guy I asked directions of the other day, whose response I did
not understand a word of, but he did point, so I got to where I was going
okay—will know a little more.
Even me. Especially me.
I wouldn’t want to have
to make the decisions about war and peace, life and death that people like
Colin Powell have to—or American GIs here during the war had to—make. Those
decisions are too difficult. I am a wimp. I admire what it takes to be a member
of the military, but I doubt that I could do what the job sometimes calls for.
Even when it is absolutely necessary. I leave that to others. I do value their
stories, though.
Why? Because I know all
too well lately that the enemy—that is, any possible enemy—has a human face.
***
Notre Dame Cathedral in
Ho Chi Minh City is where renewal—urban and otherwise—meets faith.
Six or seven years ago,
the area in front of the church was unpaved and crowded before and after services.
Getting in and out was like being in a Fellini movie with beggars asking for
money, selling rosaries and raising their imploring faces to mine.
These days, the beggars
are around the corner, and you no longer walk the same gauntlet that makes you feel less Christian or
generous or even decent than you would like. Still: do unto others, I hear in the church, and then outside I step over a legless beggar selling plastic
statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
At home I rarely go to
church, am nominally Protestant and have never been baptized. My parents wanted
me to decide for myself. So I was sent to Sunday school to learn the Bible
stories and color Joseph’s coat of many colors. Sundays at home I read the New York Times, take time to think and
find as much rest and renewal as I can.
But in Vietnam I go to
church because of the cultural experience and in part to cast my vote for
religious freedom. Realistically speaking, most of my prayers happen when I am
crossing the street; the traffic, at best, is a self-organizing system. The
last time I saw a seatbelt was on the plane here.
The easiest churches to
find are Roman Catholic, so I go there. The time of the services is never
posted; I have to find someone who knows when they are. Usually the churches,
like schools, have locked fences around them. There are no hymnals, no prayer
books. Often men sit on one side, women on the other and children front and
center. When the service is over, everyone leaves quickly. During the mass, the
doors are open; the recorded organ music and voices compete with the street
noise, the honking of horns and yelling of street vendors.
In church I never
understand much of what is going on. The 9.30 a.m. mass in Notre Dame Cathedral
in Ho Chi Minh City lasted longer than an hour, and was in Vietnamese and
English. I think I understood the Bible passage was Paul 1:20, but I could be
wrong. I knew communion when I saw it, and I put money in the late when it was
passed. I understood “anh chi em”—brother, sister, child, what I took as the
local version as “all God’s children.” There is a wooden crucifix above the
priest and a statue of Christ with a white neon halo.
“The world is charged
with the grandeur of God,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, and sometimes
I think he was right. There are rare moments when out of nowhere I find myself
marveling at a baby’s fingernails or the fur on my cat’s nose. I don’t know how
it got there, evolution or creation. That doesn’t matter. It just all of a
sudden seems right.
In those moments I feel
humble and grateful. I don’t need church for that, but sometimes it helps. Or
as Santayana said, “We live not on things but on the meaning of things.”
At the church I sat
myself at the back, unfortunately not near a fan. The acoustics were so lousy
that most of the time I couldn’t tell if the language was English or
Vietnamese. But it didn’t matter.
A young family sat down
in the pew near from me. The parents and I nodded. The young son, maybe two, looked
up at me. His mother tried to discourage him, but he wrest his arm free. I
smiled at her and she let him go. In sandals and short pants, he moved closer.
When he got near me,
with great concentration and care he hauled himself up. He knelt, then stood,
holding the back of the pew, looking and looking at me. Standing there did not
seem easy for him.
I smiled and said a
quiet hello. I asked his name, but he was not listening. I am big and Western
and I have brown hair. I am a woman of a certain age. He reached out to touch
my hair. He looked at me and broke into a delighted, celebratory and yes, even
holy, laugh.
Amen to that.
***
Most days I eat soup
for breakfast.
With chopsticks.
The soups range from pho, the national salty noodle soup made
with beef or chicken, to any other kind of soup—I usually choose seafood, so as
to avoid chewy (formerly “running”) chicken and beef that may have been an
overworked water buffalo in a previous life. The soups are always heavy on the fresh vegetables and rice noodles. The
noodles are on the bottom of the big bowl, then the vegetables and fish and
then what looks like a sprig of parsley. I take the chopsticks from the center
of the table, wipe them with a napkin as if doing so is going to make them
clean, tap their tips on the table to make sure they are even, and have them
assume the correct position: the top chopstick moves and the bottom one does
not. I stir the soup and lift the noodles. Slurping is acceptable. In fact, it
is encouraged. A soup shop at breakfast time can be a very slurpy place.
Between the soup, the seafood
and the fruit and veggies, I am planning on losing twenty pounds. I have had
shrimp and crab, mudfish and eel, oyster and clam. Blood oysters. I have seen
uterus (but of what?) on a menu, along with sautéed weasel and pigeon. Fresh pineapple, watermelon, rambutan and
longan. Jackfruit. Starfruit,
breadfruit, mango and persimmon.
I knew years ago
Vietnam was a hat culture, so I always brought hats as gifts, not T-shirts. If
the amount of soup—at almost any meal—is any indication, the south of Vietnam
is also a water culture. Soup, soup, soup.
The Mekong, one of the greatest rivers in the world, has nine heads, as
they are called. The “harbor” in Rach Gia City, Kien Giang Province, looks less
like Boston Harbor than it does the Mohawk; the ports are the canals through
town. In some areas, small boats are more common than motorbikes.
But
every time I think I know what is going on, even with the food, I am surprised.
A
few American friends and I were having dinner in a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City a
while ago. Among the four of us we had, together, completed about ten trips to
Vietnam. We were not Vietnam rookies. We were also, I might add, well into some
Australian shiraz.
Out
of the kitchen into the dining room and to the six Asian men in the national
uniform of white shirt and dark slacks at the next table the waitress brought a
platter of…a critter. She carried it with great aplomb, as if this were a
Thanksgiving turkey or a suckling pig. She showed it to the men and then just
as quickly returned it to the kitchen.
The
creature had no head. Most food doesn’t. But that sucker was big--and it had a
long tail. And even though it had been
cooked, its four legs made it look like it was at the starting line for takeoff
at the Boston Marathon. It looked kind of dinosaur-like, though close to the
ground. This was not T-Rex, but maybe T-Rex’s cousin with the stumpy legs.
We
drank some more wine. After the waitress returned to the men’s table with a
huge pile of very dark meat, we dared ask her what it was.
She
thought for a minute and put her finger to her lips. “Very good,” she said.
“Porcupine.”
I
knew I had seen no quills. I also knew that, with or without a few glasses of
wine, I had no idea what a porcupine looked like without its quills. One of my
friends pointed out porcupines do not have tails. This critter had had a long
tail curved around its body. And I swear I saw zig-zaggy markings around the
body.
Maybe
something got lost in translation.
The critter was a
subject of conversation for a couple days. It was a Vietnamese dinosaur. It was
the Mekong’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster. The best explanation we got was
that it most likely was a kind of huge lizard. I am told that eating lizard,
like eating gecko in the Delta, or drinking snake wine or scorpion wine, is a
guy thing. It’s believed to be an aphrodisiac.
I
like adventure, but on this one, I am glad I am not a guy.
The
moral of this story?
Understanding is as
fluid as soup and as big as the nine-headed Mekong. The minute I think I understand
where I am and what is going on, something happens to remind me of how little I
know and how much I can learn.
Even as I lose weight, travel is
broadening.
***
Before
I left home, I heard a phrase the British used about people who went off to
Asia and never came back. They had “gone bamboo”. I never found a dictionary
definition for the phrase, but I gather it was not a compliment.
“Going
bamboo” seems to be the kind of thing someone pasty-skinned and wearing lots of
wool in damp and foggy London would say about someone who had gone to Asia,
managed in some ways to become part of another culture, even as a kind of
overlord or Pooh-Bah., wore light clothes and got a tan and thus by definition
had gone a little bonkers. Or perhaps the heat had gotten to him. I mean, who
in their right mind, given the choice of foggy London (or snowy New York state)
on the one hand, and the tropics—palm trees, fresh food, light and flowing
clothes, and in many ways a simple and rewarding life—would choose the tropics?
And
thus go bamboo. But I understand why someone might. I really do.
In
Vietnam I live in what is basically a studio apartment with only a teakettle,
not a kitchen. I eat in the canteen, a nearby restaurant, or with Vietnamese
teachers in the teachers’ dining room. The food is freshly made and is usually
more than I can eat. The one time I worried about the fish, for instance, most
likely coming from the river that does not always look the cleanest, I told
myself the fish was at least preservative-free and not frozen. I have learned
to eat just about everything with chopsticks except fried eggs.
I
am used to people staring at me. While I was walking on one of the main
streets, a young woman feeding her baby on her front stoop stopped what she was
doing when she saw me. She froze.
And
then she gave me a big smile.
Staring
is not considered rude here. I nodded and I smiled.
But
most Westerners—not that there are many of us here—don’t venture into such
neighborhoods much.
Living
here is probably the closest to being a celebrity—albeit one unnamed—as I will
ever be. I don’t have much privacy. Almost every child knows, “Hello, hello.
What’s your name? Where you from?” Every day they look and they giggle. Their
mothers look at me, and then if I have to ask, give me directions to the bank, which
actually turns out to be a block away, or point so I can get out the raw meat
section of the market, a place where I never wanted to be in the first place.
There
is a sisterhood, after all.
Okay,
so it’s more than a little warm here. The electricity goes out every once in a
while, and one Sunday there was no water because of nearby construction (or so
I was told). There is the occasional small lizard on the wall, one that chirps
if I turn up the air conditioning too high but otherwise seems to do his (or
her) job of eating the occasional bug. The morning shower does tend to be cool,
and I wish there weren’t a spark every time I plug in the laptop or the
hairdryer. When I first got here, I turned on one of the local TV stations
looking for the evening news (any news) but instead found, to my surreal
horror, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, talking black cat and all, dubbed in
Vietnamese. (I had never seen it in English.)
But
the coffee is rich and sweetened espresso, and the people’s faces are great. I
begin every morning by opening the outside grey
French-style shutters to my porch and windows. From the second floor I
look out on palm trees, the campus, roofs of nearby houses, and the
neighborhood in the distance, including one boardinghouse that has a room
occupied by friends, a young newly-married couple.
One
of them works at the college, and both of them have degrees in English. One
night the first week I was here, they invited me over after work. Outside their
room we took our shoes off and inside we sat on the floor and ate cookies as
they showed me their engagement party and wedding pictures. I daresay
everything they own in their young life is in that one small room—clothes, bed,
hotplate, teakettle, old computer, a couple pieces of furniture, and their one
shared motorbike. I don’t know what their prospects are, but materially
speaking, by American standards, they have very little. Everything they own fit
into one place. They didn’t care; they invited me over. I was new there and
knew just about nobody.
How
kind. How generous.
Who
wouldn’t consider going bamboo?
*****
Believe
me, nobody found the idea of me in a motorcycle helmet funnier than I did. I am
not a motorcycle helmet kind of girl.
Or
so I thought.
But
when the cultural attaché at the U.S. consulate suggested I bring one, I
listened. I wouldn’t be driving a motorcycle myself, but in Vietnam 100cc
motorbikes are the preferred form of transportation. A one-speed bicycle comes
with my studio apartment, but it is likely I will be offered rides on the back
of Honda Dreams.
As
I said, I have thus far not been a motorcycle helmet kind of girl. (Not that I
had given the idea much thought.) The closest I had come to a motorcycle was
reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance.
My
friend Bill Hysell told me what I needed to know. He suggested I go to
Harley-Davidson of Utica, and he even offered to come with me, but only after
he observed, “If you’re getting a helmet now, can a tattoo be far behind?”
I
don’t know about the tattoo. I do know that the people at Harley-Davidson were
helpful and kind. I ordered a white DOT-approved, one with a plastic face
panel. My color choices were simple: black or white. Hoping the lighter one
would be a degree or two cooler in the tropical heat, I chose white.
I
decided I did not need the full-chin helmet; I am not going to be riding on the
back of a hog but on the back of a piglet. I will be one of three westerners in
a city of 200.000. Local folks do not wear helmets. The locals look at me no
matter what I do. I might as well be safe, even if my ‘do is ruined.
When
my 12 year old nephew saw me with it on, he said immediately and with no irony,
“Rock on, Sandy.”
Regardless
of how goofy the helmet looks, how much it looks like a rice cooker on my head,
regardless of how un-me it may initially appear to be, I have decided that I
like the kid’s attitude. Just as Henry David Thoreau suggested, I have always
been a little wary of enterprises that require new clothes. No one would ever
call me a fashion plate. Until I needed one, I could not even have told you
where to buy a motorcycle helmet.
This
attitude has started to change.
I
plan to ask one of the women on the faculty at Kien Giang Community College to
accompany me to a tailor to have an ao dai made. The Vietnamese ao dai is a
high-necked, long sleeved and flowing tunic with a fitted bodice over loose
trousers. For people my normal American size, ao dai need to be custom-made.
The bodice has no zippers or buttons but a series of tiny snaps up one side and
up a shoulder. I have already been warned that if I raise my arm too quickly I
could pop all the snaps and find myself standing in front of a class or faculty
meeting half-dressed. I have also been told that the long sleeves and the high
neck don’t matter; the weather will be so hot that it won’t matter what I wear.
I will get used to sweating. But wearing the standard local uniform for women,
so to speak, sends an important cultural message having to do with knowledge of
and respect for the culture, and a willingness to try to fit in (no pun
intended).
I
assume the measuring process will be similar to what happened when I had a silk
dress made in Ho Chi Minh City a few years ago. I picked out the material, the
woman who owned the shop and I negotiated a $25 price, and then she took my
measurements, shouting them out to the seamstress on the other side of the
store. So much for my privacy.
Somewhere
I have read that one of the largest determiners of human behavior is location:
people in supermarket act supermarket. People in church act church. I don’t
know how my behavior—or I—will change once I get settled. Or if I will. The
idea of my owning a motorcycle helmet still cracks me up, and the idea of my
owning an ao dai still makes me smile even though I am reasonably sure that,
unlike Vietnamese women who look sylphlike and graceful in it, in mine I will
more closely resemble a water buffalo.
So
be it. Maybe I will learn, at 50-something, that after all, I am in fact a motorcycle
kind of girl. Maybe I have already learned that I am. “I contain multitudes,”
Walt Whitman wrote, and in many ways he was far more interesting than old Henry
David Thoreau.
I
have in all this joking and thinking about identity learned something about
attitude and possibility that I had not realized that I had forgotten—and I
relearned it from my nephew. His voice is just starting to change, and in the
past year he dropped out of Boy Scouts and started taking both drum and guitar
lessons. He is beginning to study languages. For the first time, this year he
was in charge of sound for his church’s Christmas pageant. Close to turning 13,
he doesn’t have to remember or remind himself what change is like.
Rock on, indeed.
***
When
I was an undergraduate, I lived in International House, a dorm that housed
American and international students. I had friends from Taiwan, Thailand,
India, Ecuador, Tibet, Japan, Tanzania, Mexico, Ethiopia. My brother remembers
my bringing them home.
So
even though I am surprised sometimes to
find myself in the Mekong Delta, at least ten time zones and 10,000 miles away
from home, writing this in longhand with my hand sticking to the page in the
heat, my brother is not surprised at all.
“The
house was a U.N.,” he said.
I
studied French, German, Latin and Spanish; I lasted one day in Sanskrit class.
But until I was almost middle aged, I did not have the money to travel
overseas.
What
I did instead is set out to make a life for myself. When I was offered a job in
Iowa (not Ohio, not Idaho), I figured out an itinerary, packed my Cutlass, and
left. (Two years later, I moved to Utica, New York. I first had to look it up
on a map.)
My
parents were supportive, something I appreciate since few family members ever
moved away from New Hampshire. There was never any question. My parents gave me
the gift of going, and although they were reserved New England Yankees through
and through, they managed to let me know in their way: Go. Do. Be brave.
I
can’t image anything more difficult—and happier—than teaching that to a child.
And half a lifetime after my parents’ deaths, I find myself in the Mekong
Delta.
Every
Vietnamese family has, in a place of honor, a shrine to their ancestors—incense
sticks and fruit nearby. Vietnamese consider having children good in part because it means someone will pray for your soul when you are gone and your
soul will not have to wander endlessly or remain untended. This is far more
meaningful than the wry Western observation: “That kid is going to choose the
nursing home I am going to end up in.” (I brought pictures of my nephews and
nieces so folks wouldn’t worry about my wandering soul.)
In
the 1950s, my father made very good money, the kind that suggests a big house
in an upscale neighborhood. We bought a house, but in a mill town. My best
friend’s father was a foreman in a shoe shop. When I asked, much later, my
father told me we moved there so my brother and I would know what the real
world was like while my parents managed all the advantages: dancing school, two
week vacations in Maine cottages, and eventual trips to Europe.
Even
when they were asked, my parents did not join a country club: country clubs
were exclusive. You did not choose who you spent time with based on money or
social status. When I went off to college, the one suggestion my parents made
was that I might not want to join a sorority. Exclusion was exclusion.
I
have spent my career in open-admissions colleges, places where anyone is
welcome. And now I find myself in a socialist country that is developing a
market economy. As in the United States, in Vietnam there are social classes
and there are not. There is a certain sameness to the people on the street.
They do all belong to the same culture, after all.
But
I’ve also seen a new BMW near the art museum in Hanoi; in many big cities there
are still many street kids—unaccompanied as far as I can see—selling everything
from postcards to books to Chicklets. Compassion fatigue sets in soon.
But
there are a couple restaurants in Hanoi run by a woman who trains former street
kids to be waiters and cooks and thus keeps them off the street and out of the
sex trade. And she puts some of her profit into what is basically a privately
run sheltered workshop for the handicapped—again, getting them off the street.
Vietnam
is a place where generations of families live together under the same roof, and
where any object 21 years and one day old is an antique. This is a Confucian
Buddhist culture that values elders while zooming into the 21st
century on a motorbike. It’s a matter of time before the boy tending a water
buffalo is using a cell phone.
Things
evolve.
Aa
at the community college I work at in the U.S., many students in Vietnam are
the first in their families to go to college. They want to go. They want to do.
They are curious. When my American students are apprehensive, I say, “Remember
first grade? Remember how second grade sounded so frightening? The next step
always is. You’ll be fine.” I try to give them the gift of going—or at least
some encouragement.
As
I write this draft, my books on the community college and ESL are nearby, the
BBC on the radio is a little faint and the sun is going down on the Bay of
Thailand. I wonder how my cat is doing, what political highjinks are afoot at
home and what changes I will see on my
return.
To
their credit, my parents always had books around the house: the World Book,
Nancy Drew and Dr. Spock. I don’t have a shrine to my parents, but I find
myself thinking of them lately, and I think they would agree with writer Barry
Lopez:
“Finally,
I said, ‘tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don’t
necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language,
to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar.
Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the
familiar, and give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these
things.”
Go.
Do. Be brave.
***
Riding on the back of a
motorbike is fun. There’s a breeze, so it is literally and figuratively cool. I
get looks because sometimes I am one of
a few people wearing a motorcycle helmet—and a dorky white one at that. My head
is hot, but the rest of me, for the 15 minute ride to the market, is cool.
Though
there are daily accidents, the back of a motorbike is probably the safest way
to travel. Walking is sweaty business. My bicycle is usable but the motorbike,
car, van and cement trucks and pedicab traffic—plus pedestrians in the road—is
daunting. The streets are noisy and the traffic moves the way fish swim. Mostly
nobody bumps into anybody, but there’s a lot of speeding up and slowing down,
and more maneuvering than I can easily do while wearing trifocals in a strange
neighborhood.
Even
more difficult than navigating the traffic, learning a language in middle age
is an act of love. That’s the only way I can explain it. I have studied French,
German, Spanish and Latin. I like languages. But Vietnamese is a tonal
language, and sometimes I genuinely dread the difficult lessons.
Vietnamese
has five tones. Ma said with one tone
means mother. In another team it
means horse and in a third it means rice seedling. Every syllable has a different
tone. One tiny flyspeck diacritical mark separates the word to live from the word for river.
On
the bright side, the words for water and nation are the same—and they are
pronounced the same. Hallejullah. But it is almost impossible for my mouth to make
an ng sound without my tongue
touching any part of my mouth, but that seems to be what I need to learn. There
is a sound that is between a D and a T but I have problems making it. I am a
visual learner, but seeing the words is not helping me say what I need to say.
I am slow. I mispronounce. I stammer. I
strain. Be that as it may, at an International Woman’s Day gathering in early
March I was asked to speak in two languages. A Vietnamese friend helped me
prepare and listened to me practice for hours. In my traditional ao dai I went
to the podium and spoke. I am told I said things correctly. I know the audience
applauded even though I suspect my Vietnamese made absolutely no sense.
There
is a part of me that is lost in translation here in Vietnam. I have reconciled
myself to the fact that a good chunk of the time I do not really know what is
going on. I have had to grow accustomed to never hearing the word no. Instead I hear “Maybe next time,”
or “not yet” or “maybe later”. “Not yet” is a way of saying no without
embarrassing anyone—me for asking or the speaker for having to give me bad
news, a no. “Not yet” is a way of saving face. When I hear it, I smile and nod.
I
smile real hard here—and a lot. Every once in a while I don’t even understand
what I hear in English. A couple times I have not been sure if the person
speaking to me is speaking English or Vietnamese. Weird.
A
fellow Westerner advised me when I got here, “You have to be Zen about this
place.” He was right, and I have been trying to be. So I have resolved to try
to reprogram my brain—to look less hard at the print on the page and to listen
more carefully to the sounds.
In
the meantime, it is kite-flying season in Rach Gia. There is always a breeze on
the Bay of Thailand, but people here fly kites only at this time of year. Every
night on the city’s coast hundreds of people gather to fly them as the sun
sets. They bring a picnic or buy food from vendors. It’s a happy, fun event.
Occasionally a kite crashes, but
mostly they go as high as they can. It really is a magical sight. As the sun
sets in bright shades of pink and blue on the Bay of Thailand, the sky is
filled with giant yellow and green butterfly kites—plus fluorescent sharks, red
dragonflies, and even a few clear homemade kites with hundred-foot long colored
tails, all adjusting one by one as they move on the invisible air.
***
I spent Sunday morning
in a garbage dump, and I would do it again in a minute.
More than that, I did
this with Professor Ken Herrmann of SUNY-Brockport and his students spending
three months in Vietnam in a unique study abroad program that combines learning
and service for 15 credits.
Over the years, some
people in Vietnam have moved from the countryside to the city in search of a
better life. Unfortunately, this better life has not always happened, and as a
result, over 450 families live and/or work near Khanh Son garbage dump in
Danang. Some literally live on the garbage mountains that rise from the side of
the dirt road running to it; the people fashion lean-tos and then try to make a
living by doing what we would politely call recycling: they collect and
assemble anything that might be salable: plastic bottles, for instance. If they don’t live on the garbage dump, they
live nearby and go to work, if you will, picking garbage. Sometimes the worker
is the father, sometimes the mother, and sometimes the whole family, including
the children, work there. (Not surprisingly, this is not a healthy place to
work.)
So on Sunday morning,
we loaded a truck with food and detergent and went out to the dump. Residents
and other workers had had to put their names on a list to be able to get a
ticket and then get a package. (To do otherwise is to risk a fight or even a
riot; think of a bakery without a number system right before Thanksgiving.) We
took a tour, if you will, of the dump, and then as word spread that we had
arrived, people started to arrive at the truck. As the students handed out the
food to people with tickets, they used both hands, smiled and made eye
contact—all of which was culturally exactly right. The temperature was over 90
degrees, but they never flagged in over two hours of constant work.
As for me, my part was
small. I helped keep people in line, and I took pictures. But mostly I
marveled, I just plain marveled, at what was going on around me.
I have seen extremely
rich and poor in both the United States and Vietnam, but I had never seen
people who lived—lived—in a garbage
dump. They were as noisy and as polite as any other group of people I have
encountered in Vietnam, and I suspect that even if we had not been distributing
food, they would have been just as friendly. It’s just how people are here. The
whole operation managed to seem both efficient and generous. The undergraduate
students had been in-country only two weeks, and I can’t imagine a more
powerful experience. This is my sixth trip to Vietnam, and I thought I’d seen
everything.
Wow.
“Make yourself useful,”
my mother used to say, and the Brockport in Vietnam program provides not only
coursework but also an opportunity to work with lepers (more politically
correctly referred to as people with Hansen’s Disease), people in a nursing
home, and children affected by Agent Orange.
The program is open to students at any university, and, depending on the
home university, the cost of three months in Vietnam may be less than the costs
of going to school in the U.S.
A word of caution,
however: Vietnam is not a travel destination for wimps. You can find whatever
you want here: resorts, golf courses, ecotourism and snorkeling, and lots of
history. You can find streets right out of Paris. But living here is not the
same as a semester in London studying Shakespeare. The people are the
friendliest I’ve ever met, and on the whole, the place is absolutely gorgeous.
But travelers need to learn how to cross the crowded streets, and sooner or
later every Western passenger in a vehicle closes her eyes because she is
convinced they are going to have an accident and she will die on the spot. The
more off the tourist trail you get, the more high-impact, if you will, the
place is.
Once in the Mekong
Delta as I was walking along the shady side of a street and carrying my conical
hat, a woman vendor wearing a conical hat motioned for me to put mine on. I
obliged. Clasping her hands in front of her, she went into gales of laughter. I
laughed, too; I have seen myself in the mirror and I know what I look like in
the hat. I am more than a little incongruous in a conical hat. But I’m also
here.
If I had it to do over,
I’d have one of the other vendors take my camera and take a photo of the two of
us, the vendor and me, in our hats, just to commemorate the occasion.
I will never get used to
being a celebrity, to being identifiably not a local. Never. But I am getting very used to the fact that I may well be
one of the first—or the first—Westerner some people have ever encountered. This
is not the case in Hanoi or Saigon, but it may be the case in other places I
find myself. I am myself here, but I am also a representative of an outside
country—a country that fought a war here some years ago. As Ken Herrmann points
out, we can’t change history, but we can try to make new history. He has a deep,
booming, enthusiastic laugh, and he tells a story about meeting the family of a
Vietnamese soldier who had been killed during the war by Americans. The
children had been taught that Americans were devils. But as he left after
meeting them, one member of the family told him through a translator, “Anyone
who laughs the way you do cannot be the devil.”
In one case I was told
at the end of the visit that I was the first Westerner ever invited into one
family’s house, and I know there may have been others even though no one mentioned it. Some of the families
have been well-off, and one didn’t have electricity or running water. At first
I thought my being this kind of novelty was unusual, until I realized a few
days later than Oneida County, New York, where I live, has had 10,000
immigrants and refugees arrive in the past ten years, and, well…I have not had
occasion to invite even one of them into my house.
If my behavior is any
indication, maybe New York and Vietnam are not so different despite their
differences.
So if you want
high-impact travel, come to Vietnam. And if you’re staying home, do
yourself—and all of us—a favor: invite someone in.
Make history.
***
The military guys have left town.
But let me begin at the
beginning, starting with my having been located in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam,
three hours from the Cambodian border.
A few weeks earlier a
Vietnamese friend of a friend told me that he’d met four Americans in town, two
of them African-American, and in some combination from Virginia, Texas, and
Hawaii. He said they were “very big” and they had told him they were here
“digging holes.” Three had shaved heads and one looked like Mike Tyson, he
said. The first names he told me sounded
like they were four characters in a John Wayne war movie—Chip, Joe, Rocky. My friend of a friend—let’s call him Lam--knew
their ages and where they were staying. I explained to him that usually in the
U.S. I’d know where someone worked before I would know anybody’s age.
But things are
different in Vietnam, where the terms of address in Vietnamese require that you
know someone’s age. Asking such things is a habit of English-speaking
Vietnamese. He had run into them on the street, and when they asked, he’d
helped them find a good restaurant. His English is very good.
Then a few days later
he told me there were now fifteen American men who said they were here digging
holes. He didn’t know all their names and ages any more, but he knew they were
here for a month. I gave him my bilingual business card and asked him to show
it to them and ask them where they worked. I figured oil drilling. Or doing
something for the local cement industry. Multinational companies do not send
laborers to Vietnam, I figured, but who knew?
Lam also told me that
he thought one “has a very generous
heart” because as one night wore on, he had asked him if he wanted another
beer, counted how many empties were on the table, and then bought beer for
everyone. Plus he always tipped the waitress.
As kindly as I could, in that teachable moment, I explained to Lam that
the guy’s heart may well be generous—I don’t know—but what he was doing was
called “buying a round.” It’s what Americans do, I explained, and yes, they
normally tip the server. These were idioms and customs he had not known.
Eventually
one night my business card went around in the bar, too, and Lam told me one of
the guys said he was from a place very near my city when he saw the card. In
fact, he sent the now-soggy business card back to me (everything sogs in the
Delta, even outside a bar) via Lam with SAUQUOIT written in ink in block
letters along the top of the English side of the card. Sauquoit is a small town
ten miles from where I live in upstate New York when I was not in Vietnam. “They
are technicians,” Lam told me. “He asked me to bring him here to meet you last
weekend, but I could not,” he said.
By this time I had
heard a rumor that there was an American MIA team in town working outside the
city. I wasn’t really sure what that meant except that maybe the guys were not
here drilling for oil.
Understand that I was
in Rach Gia, on the Bay of Thailand. For the most part, this is not a tourist
destination. Without the fifteen men, the Western population of this city of
almost 200,000 consisted of a Swiss woman married to an overseas (and frequently
returning) Vietnamese; an Australian woman here working for a water company; an
English teacher from New Jersey; and me. English spoken by a native speaker was
not something I heard a lot of.
So Lam gave me the
hotel and room numbers for Mr. Sauquoit, I left a message at his hotel in my
halting Vietnamese, and he called me back. We talked for a half hour and agreed
to meet the next night.
We met at Em Va Toi,
(You and I), a coffee shop and bar. He brought another guy (a Marine, no less)
and I brought the male English teacher from New Jersey, though both left after
a half hour. We had a beer.
Since this essay is not
cleared by the US military—I don’t have that kind of time or influence—I can’t
tell you Mr. Sauquoit’s name or rank. I can’t even tell you what branch of the
U.S. military he is in. I can’t tell you where he has been stationed. I can tell you that his was an interesting
enough story. I hope his family is
proud. And maybe finally that is what matters the most here, that his family knows
exactly who he is, even if you, dear readers, do not. It’s his job that is most
important, finally.
I can tell you that the
rumor I heard along the way that an MIA team was in town was true. He was a part of the Joint Task Force for
Full Accounting, which has its headquarters in Hawaii. Their task is to
investigate, recover and positively identify the remains of American service
personnel who were lost. (You can check out JTFFA on the Web.) Nineteen hundred
were MIA in Vietnam. But JTFFA has also been to Laos, Bosnia, and many other
places.
Basically, as I
understand it, they block off an area where they have reason to believe there
are remains into a grid with string and start to dig and sift. And sift. And
sift. “It’s Groundhog Day,” he told
me. “You ever see that movie?” The same
thing over and over. And it’s also archaeology. And it’s important.
They would be leaving
in a few days, and maybe they would be returning or maybe another team would be
returning. Or not. It depended on what the people in Hawaii who analyzed what
the MIA team here found decided. They had come to look for a month for the
remains of a single downed pilot. They would not know for certain if they had
successfully found what they had been looking for until everything got analyzed
and evaluated. He didn’t know for sure, and I may never know. But what I heard
that night was heartening—if in fact what they found is confirmed as what they
were looking for—and it may be a relief to an American family somewhere.
As with a lot of folks,
Mr. Sauquoit’s work goes largely uncelebrated. And when, in contrast, I said my
working with a developing community college seemed feeble compared to what he
does, he shrugged. “We all play a role.”
I had gotten used to
what I think of as Asian indirectness and tact, to just about no one ever
saying no directly, but such a
comment seemed, especially for an American, even-handed to the point of
generosity. It’s the long view rather than the short view, the kind of
inclusive view rather than my job is better than yours and my house is bigger
than yours that a lot of Americans seem concerned with. At least from 10,000
miles away. He and I agreed in the course of the conversation that most
Americans have no idea how good they have things.
Understand too that I
came of age at a time when peace was good and the military was bad—largely
because of the war in Vietnam. Right
there, where we were. One of the
many ironies of my working in Vietnam off and on the past few years is it has
made me much more appreciative not of the military in general but of the
individuals that make up he military. Granted, maybe some are still a little
creased and starched compared to my artsy-fartsy tendencies to make inductive
leaps from A to J. No doubt some of the people I know who are militarily-inclined
think I’m nuts. But when Mr. Sauquoit and his friend were a little late to meet
us, my friend and I agreed they would show up. Those “army guys”, as we were
calling them before we knew what branches of the military they were in, “don’t
fuck around.”
There are at least two
morals to this story, maybe three. First, the world is small. Two people from
Oneida County, New York, in Rach Gia on the Bay of Thailand where most days
there are four westerners? Coincidence happens.
Or maybe it’s synchronicity. I don’t know what to call it.
And too, there is Lam’s
role in this. The people I had once thought of as “the army guys” had offered
to pay him for translating and whatnot, but he had declined. For a few beers
and the chance to practice his English, he showed them the local discos and
found them motorbike drivers and whatever else (possibly women, but I didn’t
ask) a few nights each week they were here. “We are friends,” he told them, and
he even took Mr. Sauquoit to meet his wife and two small children at home, to
what some might call his tin shack. I
still don’t know if he knows what they were really doing—it wasn’t a secret,
just something they choose not to advertise--but for him it may not matter. Lam
still speaks of them fondly. He has made American friends. And he was right,
even though buying a round of beers is not the example I choose: the work the
MIA team was doing, grubby and thankless as it might sometimes be, does indicate a generous heart.
And there’s more. After
the team left, I explained whom I had met and what they were doing to a young
Vietnamese friend. She was 22 and had no memory of the war. I explained, “He
was from my city. The US military was looking for the remains, the bodies, of
American soldiers who they think died here.” She did not understand until I
said, “For their families.”
Then
she understood.
Generous hearts all around.
***
In mid-June, U.S. ambassador
Raymond Burghardt came to visit KGCC where I am working, and I have to admit
that the US flag flying on the Land Cruiser as we went through town looked
damned good, so much so that I took more pictures than I would like to admit.
And I did this wearing my very best ao dai.
The ambassador came to
visit because I was the first community college to community college Fulbrighter
to come to Vietnam and because Dr. Tran Xuan Thao, Director of Fulbright in
Vietnam, suggested it to him.
This is a country that
needs economic and educational development, and the American community college
model provides a potentially useful model. We provide short- and long-term
training and education. The community college makes education available to
everyone—some people have been surprised that even with a Ph.D. I have taken
courses at MVCC. Our door may be open to anyone, but I would match our
standards for graduation with those of any other college. And our graduates get
jobs.
“We are the people’s
college,” I tell people. In Vietnam at that time only 10 percent of the high
school graduates went on to higher education, and the country knows it needs to
provide more opportunities. A community college can increase opportunities is
lots of ways.
There are lots of ways
that Vietnamese and US partners could begin—or continue—out connections,
starting with faculty and student exchange. As I told the ambassador, both Rach
Gia and Utica are in the real world. The people in both cities both have strong
backs and big hearts.
Maybe that’s part of
why I like it here.
As I said, it was
really something to see the small U.S .flags above the headlights--just like
on The West Wing—going down the main street, Nguyen Trung Truc. I say this not
having had enough time to be homesick, although I did have a dream about a Land’s
End catalog. And, as hard as I’ve worked and as busy as I have been here, I
never thought for a moment that I’d hear a high-ranking member of the
Provincial People’s Committee say at the lunch with the ambassador, “Everybody
who has met Sandy loves and respects her,” which prompted the ambassador to
raise a toast, “Thank you for your service to two countries.”
I was so taken aback
that I remember that I sort of raised my glass, thanked them, and probably said
something so inane that mercifully, I
have forgotten it.
Even if this kind of
thing is just social noise, or even just standard operating procedure in
diplomatic circles and the kind of thing that has been said a thousand times,
it as the first time I had heard anything like hat.
I do know that in the
time I have been here, in a time of war, when KGCC students were protesting the
war in Iraq, as sappy as this sounds, I did in a very small way do what I could
for peace.
As I have told people
here, sometimes Americans say we have to make our opportunities and not wait
for things to transpire. Still, we cannot predict the future. But I have
started to think about other essays. I have invited to give a presentation on
the community college and Vietnamese education by the equivalent of the US
Department of Education.
Between now and then,
I’ve ben invited to attend a U.S. Independence Day party at the Consulate in Ho
Chi Minh City. Unfortunately, the person I know best, Robert Ogburn, public
affairs officer, can’t be there.
By the way, he got his
start at a community college.
My guess is that it
will be a diverse crowd, and I’m curious to go because everyone I have been at
the consulate has been a class act.
Maybe we’ll eat hotdogs
(my first in at least 5 months) and hamburgers and corn on the cob. Watermelon
is grown everywhere here. I doubt there will be American fireworks over Ho Chi
Minh City, but you never know.
There will be an
American flag there, though. Right now there is nowhere I would rather be on
the fourth of July.
***
It’s almost time to
leave.
I’ll miss the smiles
the most. I’ll miss my colleagues and friends here at Kien Giang Community
College (KGCC). I’ll even miss being a minor celebrity—-such as it has
been—-with local people looking at and even staring at me, as if they are
surprised I exist among them in the same world. Here in Kien Giang for a
semester I have been remarkable; at home I will go back to being invisible.
Here my presence has made two children cry.
I will not miss the
heat and the blazing midday sun.
I will miss the sunsets
over the Bay of Thailand, the lush smell of the tropics, a smell that changed
almost day to day. I’ll miss the chirp
of the lizard high up on the bathroom wall when I crank up the air
conditioning, as if he were saying, “too cold, too cold.” I’ll miss the sheer
romance (no pun intended) of sleeping under pale blue mosquito netting. I’ll
miss the midday siesta and the daily adventure being here has provided. When
you’re in a place where your grasp of the language is marginal at best and you
don’t look like a local, even a trip to the market has the potential for
turning into a goodwill tour with people staring and smiling and children
calling, “Hello, hello. What’s your name? Where you from?” (Or, I suppose, if
things had gone badly, there was always the potential for an international incident,
now that I think about it.)
I’ll miss riding on the
back of a motorbike.
My time here has been
an extraordinary experience beyond even what I expected, and I expected a lot
of this country and of myself. I thank the J. William Fulbright Program for the
opportunity. Rector Do Quoc Trung, Mr. Nguyen Duy Khang and the faculty and
staff here at KGCC have been patient and generous. President Michael Schafer
and the MVCC Board of Trustees were enlightened enough to make my accepting the
Fulbright possible, and my family, friends and colleagues provided support from
afar. Dr. Tran Xuan Thao of Fulbright in Vietnam was gracious and helpful, as
was Tom Carmichael, the US Embassy’s Public Affairs Officer. In Ho Chi Minh
City’s US Consulate, Robert Ogburn, Shannon Dorsey, Vo Dac Khoi, and Nguyen Huu
Luan (who got his MA from Cornell, by the way) were the best support troops I
could have asked for. US Ambassador to Vietnam Raymond Burghardt was professional,
informal, and generous. Everybody at KGCC liked him. Bob Ingalls provided
Boilermaker Road Race in Utica baseball
caps—-one of which I gave to the Ambassador, along with a pitch for the
race—-and Friendly’s provided menus for teaching tools for ESL. Alex Wood was
as good a neighbor as I could have had. My friends at The Vietnam Center at
Texas Tech University offered daily email support, and my debt to MVCC former
Vice President for Instruction John Bolton for suggesting that I travel to
Vietnam in 1998 and later that I apply for a Fulbright is absolutely unpayable.
As are my debts to Bob Lacell and Sharon Zohne at MVCC and to Beth DiCocco at
the Observer Dispatch [where many of these pieces were first published]..
It’s going to be hard
to say goodbye. Hen gap lai: hope to
see you again.
I have to admit that
going home worries me a little, though. I’m afraid it won’t be long until all
this seems far away and long ago, and, after all, I can’t expect people to
listen to every Vietnam story I have. Did I tell you about the time I had
dinner with middle school teachers who live without water and electricity in
the countryside? Did I tell you the story about the tour guide named Tango? Did
I tell you about the trip to the hospital, or about being locked on campus (as
close to house arrest as I ever want to get) after war with Iraq broke out?
Even if this wasn’t a
vacation, we all know how boring other people’s vacation pictures can be. My
stories may be, too.
You had to be here.
I am afraid, too, that
about the third time someone complains to me about a hangnail, I am going to
lose it bigtime. “You call THAT a problem? What kind of whining self-obsessed
jerk are you? You should be ashamed.”
But it is time to say
hello to my family and friends. Phone calls to and from Vietnam are some of the
most expensive in the world, so I haven’t spoken to anyone I’ve known for any
length of time for months although we have exchanged almost daily email. I’m
also looking forward to drinkable tap water, long roaring hot showers, using
bath towels that do not seem a little damp, listening to NPR, and hearing the
sweet (yes, sweet) sound of a vacuum cleaner. Reading by incandescent lights.
Talking to lots of people who speak English. Reading a couple newspapers in
English every day. I’m looking forward to going to a library and driving my
car. Ordering from Lands End since I’ve lost weight—-one size and maybe two.
Back in that parallel universe, I want to get my hair done.
I am looking forward to
convenience.
And I am looking
forward to seeing my cat Camden, tended all these months by my friend John
Gilbert whom I cannot thank enough. I want to see my family and friends, but I
also really want to see Camden at home, curl up on the foot of the bed, yawn,
blink once at me, and then fold her tail over her nose and go to sleep.
Then I’ll know I’m home.
***
Now I understand the
phrase “re-entry adjustment”, cousin of culture shock, far better than I did
before I spent a semester in Vietnam. I hadn’t counted on how good hearing
“welcome back” or hearing how many people telling me they enjoyed my columns
would sound.
I am happy to see my
family and friends, to safely drink water from the tap and to be in the land of
free speech and a free press. In a lot of important ways, it’s really good to
be back.
But I came back to
surprises. I came back to learn about “freedom fries” and that duct tape is an
offensive weapon. Seeing a “Give War a Chance” t-shirt was a little disconcerting.
The morning news still
tends to begin with an announcement of how many have been killed in Iraq, and I
am at a loss as to why more Americans are not protesting. Considering the
intelligence and good sense of the few people I met who work for the U.S. State
Department in Vietnam—and by extension, the State Department anywhere overseas—I
do not know why our foreign policy is what it is. Maybe Defense has more to say
than State. I just don’t understand.
Back home, having a choice
of 30 different sizes and brands of mayonnaise and more than 60 television
channels seems a little more than unnecessary.
Most Americans do not
have any idea how good we have things and how much we take for granted. In
Vietnam I had an authentic—that is, not designed for tourists—experience. Some
homes I visited were nicer than mine; some were not, and others had no running
water and only a generator. But the people were unfailingly generous and
friendly.
I miss the smiles.
I miss riding on the
back of a motorbike—not rolling thunder but angry buzzing bees. I miss being in
traffic, handlebar to handlebar. Cars, trucks, motorbikes, vendors pushing
carts, yoke ladies, pedestrians—these are all on the street in Vietnam. Life on
the street there is rich.
I miss the smell of the
tropics and the sense of possibility. I have heard that Vietnam has changed
more in the last 10 years than in the last 100, and I believe it. The constant
movement, the people who manage to work hard and to be consistently
pleasant—all this and the smell of the tropics suggests, despite the
constraints of tradition and the government, that almost anything can be
accomplished.
I am back. I know I
will spend even more months getting caught up with what happened with my
friends. I have also found in myself, in weird moments of hubris, wondering how
people around me managed without having such a powerful and possibly
transformative experience as I did. I am enormously grateful for having been
able to leave—and for being able to return home, too.
I do not miss seeing
the role Vietnamese women are sometimes expected to play: to get married and to
serve the husband’s family. Most of the people with authority in Vietnam were
men; the glass ceiling is there, too.
Many people did not
understand how someone would manage to be single and childfree—and that it
would be an acceptable way of life. I tried to explain it again and again. But
finally I just said, “It’s different in the U.S.,” and let it go at that. I did
not try to explain how invisible I would be, back here, as a middle-aged woman.
Things here are not perfect in the land of the young and the cute.
In the next month or so
I will plant crocus bulbs so they bloom at the end of the winter. At about the
time other people are reading seed catalogs and planning their gardens, I’ll be
browsing through travel books. Cuba, Tibet, Morocco: I have a list of future
destinations. In the past, every time I returned from Vietnam, I assumed I had
finished with the place, but now I know better: I know I’ll go back.
And I know that the
hardest part of going anywhere is
getting off the couch, and now, traveling to see something I already
recognize—the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa—will not be exotic
enough. I have learned in my relaxed, not-so-destination-driven kind of travel,
things happen. On China Beach an old man with one eye stopped and had a long
and one-sided conversation with me in Vietnamese, and I saw my first Vietnamese
cross-dresser. I met students who were the first in their families to go to
college—and their $100 tuition was paid for by their American relatives. One
vendor told me that if I didn’t buy a mango from her that day, her babies would
not eat. When I broke down and bought one for all of 30 cents, she sat down
next to me and ate one, too, nice
companionable gesture. I met people who I later heard had been Viet Minh war
heroes and people who fought on the side of the south. Vietnam is a complicated
place, and it yields a lot of stories.
I want to live more
stories.
I was away too long but
there for too short a time.
Once I returned, after
I’d slept for a week, I finally unpacked my suitcases: photos, silk scarves and
skirts, t-shirts, a copy of Jane Eyre (my
favorite book) in Vietnamese. My beloved white motorcycle helmet. I put my
suitcase in the basement.
I got my hair cut,
bought milk and eggs and convenience foods and got used to the abundance and
comfort of being at home. (My cat did recognize me and meowed at me for 15
minutes before hopping onto my lap.) I started to settle in. And then, as I
have in the past, I bought a new travel journal and put it in that suitcase as
a promise to myself that, one way or another, I will go again.
Copyright Sandra A. Engel
