My Year in Vietnam

In a recent posting, I expounded on some of the things that really bugged me about Hanoi.  Now that I have just left, I would like to reflect on some of the many things that I found delightful about living in that crazy city.

The roosters, which regularly woke me up in the morning, sometimes to my great annoyance. But eventually I came to love this incongruous sound and sight in such an intensely urban setting.  Not only were they crowing bright and early, but they were on street corners held captive at the little street restaurants, waiting for slaughter for pho or some other meal of the day.   I even saw some strutting in the middle of a bookstore in Hanoi:

The life on the street, which despite the clogging of any available through-ways, always surprised and amazed me with everything that happens out in the open at all hours. Makeshift barbershops and hair salons serving clients right on the sidewalks, people hanging out in their pajamas, eating their breakfast of pho, and the old, always thin women in conical hats who cleaned the streets, and picked up garbage, hauling it on bamboo baskets perched at the end of poles.

The life on the streets include the early-morning exercisers, mostly old folks who congregate around Hanoi’s many lakes about 6 am, to engage in calisthenics, badmitton, ballroom dancing, aerobics, fan-dancing, completely oblivious to how foolish they might look, at least to some of us.

The caged birds, the only sort of pet that you really see in Vietnam, since most of the dogs and cats are kept on short leashes and raised for food (!).  They sing beautiful songs, with long, complicated melodies, some of which I swear have been copied as cell phone rings on Vietnamese mobile phones. They too would be part of my early morning wake-up routine, and their songs still run through my head.

Though occasionally, you see contented dogs and cats on the streets as well.

Flowers, which you saw blooming all year long, everywhere and for sale as well – helping to dress up Hanoi’s otherwise haphazard, cluttered appearance. 

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The Cinematheque, a wonderful cinema club that I frequented regularly, where I took refuge from the crazy, stressful life of the city.  There I saw more great foreign and indie films than I ever get to see in the US – films from Sweden, Spain, Argentina, Germany, France, India, Korea, Japan, lots of art and cutting edge films from the US, and of course, many films from or about Vietnam.  They also often invited film directors to lead discussions about their films after the showings 

And finally, the motorbikes.  As much as I truly despised them for their overbearing presence and rude behavior, I couldn’t help delighting at times in their oversized burdens.   

Allow me to complain a little about Hanoi, my host city. I hope I don’t come off sounding like a boorish, culturally insensitive American. I just would like to vent a bit about things that have gotten on my nerves since I have been living here.

By far the most annoying about Hanoi, as I have indicated before on this space, is the lawless, chaotic, and, if I may say so, rude traffic. In this city, motorbikes rule – over streets, over sidewalks, over people. We are talking driving the wrong way down a one-way street, driving in the wrong lane in two-way streets, driving on sidewalks, turning right and left at every corner, not stopping or even PAUSING for a red light, never mind a pedestrian, who is simply a target to narrowly avoid while rushing to a destination, as in a video game. People are the lowest forms of life, although they are often forced to walk IN the street because the sidewalks are otherwise claimed as parking lots for the motorbikes and as sites for the ubiquitous street restaurants or vendors. This makes crossing the street, or walking almost anywhere, quite a stressful and dangerous undertaking, several times a day.

Navigate these sidewalks

Never mind the danger to themselves, since whole families with two adults and two or more children, regularly travel on one motorbike. And although a helmet law was adopted a couple of years ago – for adults only, children are exempt! — a good 20 percent of motorbike drivers don’t bother with them.

Plus the incessant honking horns. When you walk on the street, cross it, or ride your bicycle in it, a motorbike or car coming in any direction will honk at you, often causing me to jump out of my skin. It seems to me as one more way to tell you to get out of the way as if nothing else matters but their right of way. The constant background noise, at virtually all times a day, is a real irritation.

The traffic never stops, not even when it floods.

Like the traffic, people can be pushy in their physical behavior, although they are exceedingly polite and deferential when they speak with you. Vietnamese people getting on elevator don’t wait for the person to get off before they push their way through. No one lines up while waiting for a bus or at a ticket counter, they just push and elbow their way forward. Keeping a respectable distance from the person in front of you means that you will simply lose out in your place in line. On flights, Vietnamese people unbuckle their seatbelts as soon as the plane hits the ground and start unloading their luggage and pushing their way to the front, not bothering to wait until the seatbelt light turns off.

Another Hanoi-yance is the different sense of personal space among Vietnamese. On the sidewalks, where again, there is already almost no space to walk already, people will stand in the one way and not mind are blocking allowing you passage around the motorbikes or plastic tables and chairs,. Same with an entrance to a shop or restaurant, which are almost always narrow, people will stop mid-stream to wait for someone or answer their ringing cell phone and just stay planted. Even when you say “xin loi” (excuse me), they often fail to move. And, to make matters worse, women will saunter leisurely arm in arm down the sidewalks or street, two or three abreast, and make it impossible for people to pass them.

Yet another Haoi-yance is text-messaging, which people use like crazy. There is virtually no voice mail in the country, except on some landlines in high-end offices, so everyone texts like crazy on their mobile phones. I suppose they do it also because it is cheaper to text than to talk by phone, since the country uses a system of pre-paid minutes. I HATE texting, especially since I bought a cheap cell phone that has no keyboard. And yes, people text and talk on their mobile phones while they are driving their motorbikes.

This country has one of the world’s highest traffic accident rates – is it any wonder? But forget trying to get police to enforce the laws. Police spend a lot of time eavesdropping on phone calls, intimidating dissident groups, promoting social order and stamping out what they call “social evils” (drug use, prostitution, homosexuality, etc.) The few that are on the streets supposedly controlling traffic only stop violators when they want to make a little extra money on a bribe. A few months after I arrived, I wrote a letter to the editor to the English-language daily suggesting that police would be better used to control traffic and allowing pedestrians right of way than to control information and opinions. Of course, it was not published — all news here is government-controlled. How naïve I was.

I have been very, very negligent in keeping up this blog for many, many months.  I actually wrote the post below last March, and since then I have been going through a difficult personal period, and it just sapped me of the motivation to write about my daily life here.  But now, just weeks away from my departure from Vietnam, I do want to get a few things down for the record.   Sorry to disappoint those of you that I had promised to keep updated.

A couple of weekends ago I attended a yoga retreat in the lovely village of Mai Chau, four hours outside Hanoi.   In between 3-hour yoga sessions and cycling through the rice fields, I took the opportunity to read up some more on Buddhism.  The lovely old man who owns the house I live in works, Cu, in the library at the Buddhist temple around the corner, and keeps me plied with books on Buddhism in English – Buddhist proselytization,I guess(a contradiction in terms),  .   I want to share some insights into yoga and Buddhism that came to me there

Yoga

• Stretching a limb into an odd and unfamiliar position and holding that position for a while is a practice in learning how to confront and live with with serious discomfort, even pain.  (This seems an apt metaphor not only for physical pain, but also emotional pain.)

• Deeper breathing while in that position assists the process of accepting and relaxing into the pain. 
• The more you practice, the deeper and further you can stretch yourself to face  and move beyond this discomfort, and the result can be very impressive and beautiful – or very odd.

Buddhism

Some of these concepts are pretty basic, but still struck me as profound when I truly try to absorb them.

• There is no “God”  or “God’s will” that rules over people’s destinies.  Infinite possibilities are within each person, and that person should try to discover and unfold these possibilities.
• Liberating yourself from constraints (these  include ignorance, the sense of “becoming” rather than being, and sense pleasures – not sure I buy into this last one) takes perseverance, self-exertion and insight, not prayers to a God.

“You are your own refuge.  Who else could refuge be?”  

The Buddha

• Buddhism is not an ethical code, nor is it simply intellect.  It goes hand and hand with “purity of heart”  which partly mean having authentic, loving intention (and I am guessing attention).
• Part of liberation is acceptance of change, that things are impermanent.  (This is a concept that I really struggle with.)
• 

I just finished reading Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, which is set here in Vietnam during the resistance to French colonial rule in the early 1950s. A fabulous study in American destructive idealism and misguided interference, the myth of dispassionate, objective journalism, and the cynicism but brutal honesty and decency of an aging man who has left and deeply hurt women in his life and then is left himself.  Full of wit and irony (from the British narrator) and utter lack of irony (from his American protagonist). I would like to share some artful passages from the book, some of which resonate with my own life right now.

Where other men carry their pride like a skin disease, his pride was deeply hidden, and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being. All that you encountered in daily contact with him was gentleness and humility and an absolute love of the truth; you would have had to be married to him to discover the pride. Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride.

Scenes from the2002 film, The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine

It was a long time since I received a letter from my wife. I had forced her to write it and I could feel her pain in every line. Her pain struck at my pain; we were back at the old routine of hurting each other. If only it were possible to love without injury; fidelity isn’t enough? I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately, the innocent are always involved in any conflict.

I began – almost unconsciously – to run down everything that was American. My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandal of American politics, the beastliness of American children. It was as though she were being taken away from me by a nation rather than a man. Nothing that America could do was right. I became a bore on the subject of America, even with my French friends who were ready enough to share my antipathies.

In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m. when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practiced. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older – I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out.  War and Love – they have always been compared

“She’s no child.  She’s tougher than you’ll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn’t take scratches?  That’s Phuong.  She can survive a dozen of us.  She’ll get old, that’s all.  She’ll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she’ll never suffer like we do from thoughts, obsessions – she won’t scratch, she will only decay.”  But even while I made my speech, I knew I was inventing character just as much as Pyle was.  One never knows another human  being.  For all I could tell, she was as scared as the rest of us: she didn’t have the gift of expression, that was all.  And I remembered that first tormenting year when I had tried so passionately to understand her, when I had begged her to tell me what she thought and had scared her with my unreasoning anger at her silences.

A man’s body is limited in the acts which it can perform and mine was frozen by memory.  What my hands touched that night might be more beautiful than I was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty.  She used the same perfume, and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I’d lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal.  I moved away and lay on my back and the desire drained out of me.

This past Monday, March 8, was International Women’s Day, one of many that I have celebrated throughout my life, but the only that I have celebrated here in Vietnam, of course.

I am coming off my third event honoring the day, and I must say I am more than a little bit surprised to discover how it is  recognized here.  International Women’s Day has its roots in the struggles of women textile workers in Massachusetts to limit work to 8 hours per day, and after it was declared a day of recognition in honor of women’s demand for “bread and roses” by the International Socialist Party Congress in 1910, it has grown to be a day commemorating women’s struggle for fair and equal treatment throughout the world –  or so I thought.

But here in Vietnam, a socialist country, after all, it resembles something much closer to what I have come to expect on Mother’s Day or even Valentine’s Day.  Women and girls are given flowers (the price of flowers goes up dramatically this day), taken out to dinner, and many restaurants and stores display large red hearts encouraging customers to honor women with gifts.   Women are celebrated for their traditional roles as wives, mothers, and daughters, for their self-sacrifice and their nurturing qualities.  One of my Australian friends who is working at the Women’s Museum here said that the male staff presented the female staff with cake, wine and flowers, and serenaded them with sentimental karaoke songs.   Not that there is anything wrong with that, but where is the demand for women’s rights, for ending all sorts of practices that stereotype or discriminate against women, or that inhibit them through all sorts of cultural expectations of roles and behavior? 

 Women warriors who resisted Chinese rule

Add on top of that the centralized, top-down structure of the Communist Party, some pretty strict limits on freedom of expression, and the whole Asian thing of “saving face” and  what you get is a carefully scripted exaltation of all the great things women are doing as mothers, workers, and “cadres” in the military and the party, and all the great things government is doing in support of women, with hardly even a nod to any challenges that women still face, or some of the awful treatment they must endure.  For example, domestic violence is pretty pervasive here and pretty accepted, and there is lots of trafficking in girls and women, but most people either want to ignore these issues or feel embarrassed to acknowledge them.

 Singing soldiers and female cadres celebrating women

So it was a bit surreal to find myself in a Women’s Day event last Monday with the Vietnamese Women’s Union – the Communist Party’s so-called “mass organization”  for women in Vietnam, organized from the national level all the way down to the “commune” village level.   There were all sorts of sentimental musical and dance performances – a virtual Oklahoma musical reenacting women throughout Vietnam history – and  endless speeches celebrating women in ways that make me a little uncomfortable. The (male) head of the Gender Equality Department in one government ministry talked about how media was increasingly responsive to women by airing more beauty programs, and  at one point expressed his wish that all women stay “young and beautiful.”    Various leaders of the women’s union, mostly elite women all decked out in their traditional ao dai national costumes, extolled women’s role in supporting the (male) soldiers fighting the wars of independence from the French and from America.   Only the head of the United Nations (whose speech I helped to write) dared to mention the continuing problems that women face, and the need for men to change in order to stop oppressing women and to create more possibilities for them.

So join me in wishing the women and men of Vietnam much more liberation from straitjacket of tradition, and much more freedom to voice constructive criticism. 

Duong visits me every Wednesday evening, coming on her motorbike from some far-flung part of the city, often bearing gifts of fruit or special Vietnamese food.   We settle down for a 90-minute lesson in Vietnamese. 

Duong (pronounced Zu-ohm) is outgoing and self-confident, as eager to improve her English as she is teach her own impossible language.  Truth is, we spend at least as much time chatting, chatting, chatting in English than we do in Vietnamese.  It is an instructive nonetheless, for  Duong offers a fascinating window into the life of a young, working class Vietnamese woman at this moment in time here.   

Duong and me at dinner

She is 25, married with a 16-month-old son, and a husband who seems quite bent on making his first million by age 30 through his mobile phone business.   Her mother-in-law and father-in-law take turns living with her family during the week, to watch her son while she and her husband work, then return to their village some 30 km outside Hanoi on the weekends.   This arrangement causes her some distress, because the “mother-in-law” syndrome seems almost (not quite) as oppressive in Vietnam as it does in other Asian countries.  Her mother-in-law is a nagging judge and critic of her cooking, housekeeping, parenting, and wifely duties.   And Duong, born and raised in Hanoi, clashes with the more provincial mindset and expectations of her parents-in-law. 

Duong’s son Tubi

She comes from modest, but quite typical background. Her mother worked in Bulgarian factory for four years when she was young – like so many other Vietnamese who have done time working or studying in Russia, East Germany, Cuba, or other socialist bloc countries.  Her father worked as a mechanic for a Vietnamese state company until he was forced to retire early in an economic downturn, and now makes his living driving a xe om (motorbike taxi). She has two younger sisters, one 15 and another 9 years old. When she graduated from high school at 18, she did not pass the difficult and competitive test to enter university.  Instead she went to “tourist college,” a two-year college which seems to prepare many of Vietnam’s young people to work in the burgeoning hotel, restaurant, and tour companies, catering to a mostly Western crowd, and often leaving them with much better English speaking skills than their grammar-heavy high school course.  

For example, a couple of months ago, she showed up for a lesson and told us  she had just discovered she was unexpectedly pregnant again, just over a year after her son’s birth.   She was not thrilled with this news, and was struggling with the decision whether to keep the baby.   Abortion is quite common and accepted here, even actively promoted by the government, which has a loosely enforced policy of limiting family size to two children.    She returned the following week and told us that she had spent the weekend in the hospital having the abortion.   Later she let me know that she married her husband just four months after they began dating, even though she would have preferred not to marry so young, because she had a medical condition that her doctor said would improve if she became pregnant.

A couple of weekends ago, Duong invited me as well as another of her students –a Japanese woman and her two Japanese friends –  to attend festival in the small village where her in-laws live outside Hanoi.    The festival revolved around a troupe of singers who crooned traditional Vietnamese songs from a boat slowly floating around the perimeter of a lagoon, accepting alms in a large woven basket from villagers gathered on the banks.  We also paid a visit to the local pagoda, amid massive crowds of people still carrying out their post-Lunar New Year duties to visit at least six pagodas and send appeals to their ancestor spirits

Her in-laws’ cement, 3-room house houses maybe 10 people over three generations. They served a lavish lunch of bun cha, a grilled pork and noodle dish that has become one of my favorites, and many  New Year holiday special foods.   Though when it came time to sit down to lunch, the men were invited to a sit around a straw mat one be served first, and we woman sat down to eat separately on another straw mat once they were settled — a practice that seemed to embarrass Duong a little.   The men also shared round after round of the local moonshine known as “rice wine” here, pretty high-octane stuff, and several of them got completely tanked, while we woman were expected to drink green tea or at most a beer. 

Tubi with his cousin peering into their grandmother’s house

It is mostly  this interesting insight into the life of an ordinary Vietnamese woman like Duong that has made me decide to stick with Vietnamese lessons, even though I would rather spend time improving my Spanish, which is much more useful in the long run.   But I realize I am telling you a lot about Duong and  almost nothing about learning the actual language, so I will save that for another day.

I am writing to apologize for my several month absence on this blog.  It had been my strong intention to write frequently, to record my daily experience here in Vietnam.   But in the last couple of months – actually a little more  than that – I have been suffering from terrible heartbreak, which has paralyzed many aspects of my life.   I don’t want to say more, because I have always hated blogs that are so confessional to the world, that expose so many aspects of deeply personal situations to strangers, that I refuse to indulge in this.  I only want to be honest and not deceptive about what is happening to me, and to explain by absence.   I am trying mightily to regain my momentum, my hope, my interest in my new surroundings, so I can make the most of my experience here, which will be brief, after all, and I do plan to try to return to this soon.  In the meantime, please “hold me in the light,” as Quakers say, while I try to find peace, happiness, and delight in my new experiences so far away from my familiar surroundings and desires.   Thank you (Xin cam on in Vietnamese.)

The Vietnamese literally wrapped themselves in the flag last week when the country’s national soccer team (called football here, like in most of the rest of the world) faced Malaysia in a key match for the Southeast Asia region. 

I was reminded of when I lived in Italy years ago, and soccer matches would literally shut down Rome for several hours.  You could hear a pin drop strolling through the deserted Rome streets, though every once and a while the silence would be punctuated with huge cheers or yells flowing from bars or homes.  

Here, although a look inside some cafes showed groups fixed to the TV, since so much of Hanoi life occurs outside, the crowds overflowed the streets, with people watching TVs while dining at the informal street restaurants or just grouped around an electronic store selling large TVs, all tuned to the game.  In fact, the already dense street traffic got quite snarled as these crowds spilled so far into the street that any through traffic was reduced to barely one lane.  

The nationalist spirit was at a high pitch, and of course, always attentive to commerce, the street vendors were out in droves.

I did not stick around to watch the match myself, but I understand that Vietnam lost.  : – (