Postcards From The Delta

(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 20^th 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 21^st 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