To the rabbit hole

Welcome.

Or maybe I should say greetings.

Greetings from Vietnam, where I will be living, working, and blogging for the next two months. This will not be the first time I explain what possessed me to spend the summer here, and it won’t be the last, but here’s the old refrain: I was born in central Vietnam but don’t remember a thing because my family immediately moved to the United States. For that reason alone I’ve wondered about Vietnam since I was old enough to grasp it, and it seems to me there are two kinds of Viet Kieu: those who want to visit Vietnam and those who don’t. It’s not that I have a family connection to the war, it’s not that I’m eager to visit relatives, and it’s not that I have any reason to suspect that of all countries, this is the one that holds something magnificent for me. It’s just that I’ve wondered, and I want to go.

I’ve been on the journalism track for half a decade, so I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until last fall that if I’m going to intern somewhere, it may as well be in Vietnam. So that’s the plan. Learn about journalism. Learn about Vietnam. And if I could improve my Vietnamese, that’d be nice, too.

But mostly, learn about Vietnam. Really, now that the unpleasant task of introducing the blog is out of the way, that’s the point of this page. With exactly two weeks in Saigon under my belt, I already want to rattle off all the differences between Vietnam and the United States, and all the preconceptions that proved to be false (or true). Just this once, though, I think I’ll resist drawing conclusions about the motorbikes and humidity and pho. I’ve made enough drawings to fill a book, but I’ll sleep on those sweeping statements and if they still make sense tomorrow, well, let the commentary begin.