Vietnamese lesson

Despite what you might have learned from the Vietnam War, this country can be divided into three regions, especially linguistically: northern, central, and southern (hence the three stripes on the old South flag). Although, if we really wanted to complicate things, there are many other dialects that I'm unfamiliar with, plus indigenous and foreign languages. But it's understandable that the northern (Bac) and southern (Nam) dialects dominate. The dialect of northerners is the usual form of communication among bureaucrats and politicians, based out of the capital Hanoi. I think Tieng Bac is also seen as the most formal/educated, as it's taught in Vietnamese-language courses.

In addition to being spoken in the south, Tieng Nam is the most popular tongue of Viet Kieu, which makes sense since most of them fled because of the fall of South Vietnam. I don't know too much about how the dialects work, but for some reason Tieng Nam is closer to what I speak, the central version. That's why I chose to intern in Saigon (though, ironically, most of the people I work with are from the north). People from the north and south understand each other just fine, but they don't really understand those from the central region. On the one hand I find that frustrating because if I improve my Vietnamese it will be somewhat useless, since I'll only be able to speak with people from Hue. On the other, I'll have an advantage if I improve enough to understand all three dialects, while most understand two. I think it's easier for me to learn their dialects than vice versa.

I don't know if the Vietnamese I already know is an advantage or a handicap. I once wrote an article about the hair salon Great Clips (yes, seriously) and a stylist told me that it was harder to train older employees because they'd picked up bad habits that didn't conform to the official Great Clips technique. I might have that problem. When I find new words, my experience makes me somewhat resistant to learning how northerners or southerners pronounce them; I'd rather first learn how my mom would pronounce them. But the experience also means I instinctively know a lot of the connotations of words and phrases, the kind of thing I can't really learn from a class.

Who you gonna call? Mr. Knife.

Vietnamese are superstitious people, especially about the hereafter, and although I think superstition (like religion) derives from lack of awareness, I’ll admit I once believed in some of it. My mom used to tell me that if I left my hair down outside at night, ghosts would hide in it and follow me into my house. I don’t know if she was just trying scare me – like the story about scraping and eating food from sidewalk cracks in the afterlife if I threw any away now – but until middle school it pushed me so far as to hold up my hair by hand when I didn’t have a hair-tie.

I hadn’t thought about those stories much until recently, when I visited my grandmothers in Hue. One afternoon, while some men were preparing a cung, one of my grandmothers yelled across the yard that they better not stand too close to the trees. I’d forgotten that ghosts are plentiful in trees – the greener the tree, the more abundant the ghosts. To humor her, one of the men assured my grandmother that they were safe in the daytime.

Though amusing, the warning didn’t really surprise me. What did surprise me the next day was when my other grandmother invited me to spend the night with her. I wasn’t planning to take her up on the offer, but was even more deterred when I noticed the knife on her bed. She apparently slept with it as protection from ghosts.

The real puppets in Vietnam

Water puppets (mua roi nuoc) are to Vietnam as street performers are to New York: watching them is a very Vietnamese thing to do, just not for local Vietnamese. Most of the audience Saturday night were visitors, and the creators intended the dozen or so skits to teach viewers about Vietnamese life and culture. Some scenes, such as men fishing or animals hatching, could be universally understood. But, ironically, I suspect some of the most interesting ‘lessons’ were beyond foreigners without the context to understand them. Only people familiar with cung would recognize that the puppets carrying plates of fruit in a procession were honoring their ancestors. And though I only vaguely remember reading the legend of the turtle that helped Vietnamese defeat their enemies, I doubt many outsiders recalled the fable when they saw the puppet of the golden turtle. But the figure is as much a part of the country’s folklore as Paul Bunyan is of America’s.

The stage consisted of a long, shallow pool of murky water (the better to hide puppet masters, I’m guessing) in front of an iconic building of red shingles and curved roofs. On either side sat three performers who handled all the sound: wearing traditional ao dai, they voiced the characters of the puppets (human and otherwise), sang when appropriate, and accompanied the entire act with musical instruments.

In some skits, the brightly colored wooden and metal puppets obeyed the constraints of the water – humans rowed, ducks swam, dragons danced and squirted water. In others, the characters miraculously walked on water, acting out the skits as if on land. But the whole time I wondered how the puppeteers maneuvered their dolls. Could they hold their breath underwater just long enough for a skit? Were they lying to the side of the pool, reaching in unseen? Was it all done by machines? The last question was answered when seven or eight puppet masters appeared onstage at the end of the show. Seeing the people drenched from the neck down probably answered the first question, but I’m not much closer to figuring out their secret.

Roughin’ it

The discomforts of day-to-day life are not exactly unique to the countryside, just more numerous than in the city. Most of the inconveniences I encountered in Hue last week are also present in Saigon, though fewer and further between in the latter. The night I arrived in Hue, there was a blackout in the municipal districts that I passed through as well as in the rural area where my uncle lives. My cousin, who had come to pick me up from the airport, joked during the drive home, “It’s because they knew you were coming.” But as it turned out blackouts make daily, planned visits as part of the city’s efforts to conserve electricity. Since Hue is not as busy as the bigger cities, the authorities here can afford to intentionally cut off the energy supply for a few hours a day.

Luckily I had Eugene O’Neill to keep me occupied. My only real problem with the blackouts was that they deprived me of a fan during the hottest hours of the day; I was starting to understand why people here take so many naps in the daytime. I know I shouldn’t have been so weak, but it might have been more bearable if not for the added physical aggravation from, as my cousin liked to call it, Mr. Mosquito. He left at least a dozen “gifts” on my left arm alone, and countless more all along my head, shoulders, knees, and, yes, toes.

I did use some bug repellant but not much because it’s a bitch to wash off, especially when there’s no real shower. The wash room consisted of a pail and a spout not unlike the one in my backyard in Sacramento. I was also scared to enter the room at night because its roofless structure practically invited in Mr. Mosquito.

The outhouse had a roof, though no seat. The toilet looked almost normal, except its white bowl was set in the ground so that you must crouch over it rather than sit down (I’ve learned this is called a squat toilet). To flush required pouring water from a bucket down the drain until the toilet was clean again.

When we were thirsty, we boiled water, and to boil water, we needed firewood. I didn’t drink much unless there was ice, and for that we’d send one of the boys to the small store down the road. It was understandable that there was no ice in the house, since refrigerators are something of a luxury. In fact the house didn’t have much furniture at all, mainly bureaus and beds with planks but no mattresses. I was only surprised when I found that my relatives had a TV. Besides being cheaper than refrigerators, TVs are apparently considered more important (as a link to the rest of the world?), which is why you’re more likely to find a TV in a Vietnamese home than a refrigerator. Maybe things aren’t so rough.

Homecoming

Like most people, my nostalgia constantly pushes me to return to old haunts, I guess out of hope that part of the past can be frozen in amber, that if the places still exist, then the memories live. Though I left Hue too young to remember anything about it, returning there last week still felt like stepping into the past. For three days, I lived with my mother's brother and his family in the village where I was born, where my mother was born, and where her mother was born. The village, nestled in the countryside in central Vietnam, is a five-minute walk away from the beach, where the kids used to sleep under the stars when the nights were too hot at home.

The relatives I met knew almost as little about me as I knew of them, but they remembered me as the baby carried out of there two decades ago. “She was just months old!” they would explain to each other, calculating when I must have been born and when my family must have left. They understood that I wouldn’t remember names or faces, and excused my poor Vietnamese.

Seeing their faces, though, was enough. In them I saw time preserved, I saw lives that carried on as if nothing had changed since that fateful day. I saw what my life would have been if in fact things hadn’t changed. My brother would occasionally tell me, “You know, you were almost left behind. You’re lucky our uncle was there to carry you to the boat.” I don’t actually think my mother would have left me in Vietnam, but it’s true that others weren’t so lucky. Her sister came the same way we did a couple years later, trying several times to get to America through Hong Kong and Papua New Guinea, only to be sent back. They closed the door; that was how she described it to me when I met her.

The uncle I stayed with has a son who also nearly emigrated from Vietnam. He would have left with my family, but his mother was afraid he’d fight too much with my brother. He and I sat by a window as he reminisced about the days of wrestling with my brother right in that sandy yard in front of us, of walking together to the now closed-down school a few blocks away, of arguing over the goodies they would occasionally sneak from my mother.

Even from his limited anecdotes I could start to imagine that forgotten life. And from the stories of my grandmothers, I could start to appreciate how complicated my family tree really is (for one thing, The Story of Pao comes to mind). The context made it easy to ask for and tell such histories, of course, but the sad truth is that I could have learned all of it and more at home in California. From the scores of young Viet Kieu I’ve known or interviewed, I know I’m not atypical for having seldom thought to ask my parents about this world and for having parents who seldom thought it comfortable or necessary to tell me on their own. But if this summer will change anything, it’s that.

Pain at the [Vietnamese] pump

With the government subsidies and average income level, I figured gas prices had to be cheaper here than in America, but at 15,000 dong per liter ($3.50 a gallon), it was about the same. People just get more out of their money because they drive the relatively efficient motorbikes and manuals.

But over the past few days, while on my meta vacation to central Vietnam (more on that in the coming posts), I started hearing about gas prices going up. "Interesting," I thought last night as I sat in the plane from Danang to Saigon, listening to my cousin read the day's top story and recalling the surfeit of similar media coverage in America. Here the prices just jumped 30 percent to almost 20,000 dong per liter.

It got even more interesting after we touched down and tried to find a taxi home. The first driver was ready to take us, until a woman with a clipboard ushered a larger party into the cab. The next driver wouldn't take us because our house was too close. Every driver after that wanted to charge 150 percent more than we'd paid last week to get to the airport. I didn't get it. Why didn't they just take us home and let the meter run as usual?

I discovered the drivers were negotiating a fee beforehand because their companies hadn't raised fares to match the rise in gas prices yet. For once I felt as sympathetic with them as I do with xe om drivers; still, there's a big difference between 30 percent and 150 percent, so I opted for a xe om, the driver somehow speeding through the streets with my suitcase held awkwardly in front of him.

It’s all about the Ho Chi Minhs, baby

Yesterday I walked home from work because there weren’t many xe om drivers near the office, and the ones that were there tried to charge 10,000 to 15,000 dong for a ride that’s usually 6,000. The truth is I wouldn’t mind spending the 10,000 (60 cents) but if I’m going back and forth everyday I don’t want to pay more than locals. And it’s also the principle; if the drivers aren’t willing to compromise with me, I don’t want to bother.

The short, pleasant walk brought my total spending for the day to less than $2. I had paid 6,000 dong for the morning commute, 12,000 for lunch at the office, and 10,000 for dinner ingredients. Assuming an exchange rate of 16,000 dong per dollar, that works out to about $1.75 (with the unpredictable inflation of the dong, it’s hard to know what the rate is each hour). See, Professor Sachs? Living on $2 a day isn’t so bad.

It’s true that I spend more than that on touristy luxuries like clothes, snacks, and entertainment, but either way, commerce is an interesting thing. Everything is bought with cash, and though most people have bank accounts, few have heard of credit cards. My brother had warned me that if I change dollars for dong, merchants won’t take dirtied money (e.g. if Benjamin’s faced is scratched or the bills are creased), but I didn’t think they’d behave the same way towards local currency. When I bought a dress this weekend, the seller wouldn’t take my smudged 100,000-dong note, so I had to give her a clean one. Oh, well – money’s all about perceived value, anyway, right?

Just along for the ride

Just as Michael Scott ‘loved’ the New York subway, I like the motorbikes (xe may) in Saigon because they take to people of all walks of life – or rather, all types of people take to them. On the street, I pass by motorists in pajamas, jeans, slacks, dresses, business suits, and ao dai. I admit the image is comical; I’m reminded of the days of old when scooters were popular in America, as was footage of businessmen scooting to work. But I doubt anyone cares about that here since few can afford the four-wheel alternative.

Another image that comes to mind: China in 2003. But instead of protection from SARS, Vietnamese drivers wear face masks as shields against the dust and smog. I’ve been fine without the coverings, and actually I wonder why more motorists don’t wear eye protection, which in my experience would have been more useful against the pollution. It’s also common for women drivers to wear arm-length gloves as protection from the sun. I’d like to think they want to guard against cancer or the heat, but no, women just hate getting dark.

Still, everyone’s a slave to the elements. When it rains, out come the ponchos. There are even ponchos made for two, I guess to make it easier to transport another person on the xe may. But even after the rain subsides, beware: a motorist sped through a puddle next to me two nights ago, leaving most of the puddle on my right half.

Whatever the weather, heat is a concern. As if the humidity and triple digit temperatures weren’t enough, the main source of heat is your xe may and those around you. Vehicles anywhere can get oppressively hot, of course, but it’s much more noticeable when you’re waiting at a light, wedged in the middle of a pack of xe may without car doors to keep out the heat of other engines. Then again, whether in motion or stopped at a light, you’re conveniently close enough to hold a conversation with your friend on the xe may next to you.

I have to say the worst thing about xe may, or any vehicle in the city, is the never-ending beeping. I thought Times Square was bad, but drivers here seem obsessed with honking at other people. They beep when the light changes. They beep at pedestrians. They beep whenever they exhale. It makes me wonder, what would they do if someone just did away with all the horns?

Everyone under the sun

"La Fenêtre Soleil" (French for sun window. Or window sun? Sunny window?) is the name of the cafe/bar, but on Thursday nights it turns into a club for the Salsa, Bachata, Merengue, and the like. Maybe the owners didn't know what kind of dances would become popular when they first named the place. That, and Vietnamese generally know more French than Spanish.

At first I thought it would be strange to hear Spanish music in Saigon, but it wasn't. The city is the most cosmopolitan you'd find in Vietnam, and I suppose the bourgeois need someplace to hang out. I was told to wear a dress, but the attire at La Fenêtre Soleil ran the gamut from gym clothes to business suits, miniskirts to Salsa dresses. Though nothing compared to the pieces of cloth girls wear to American night clubs, the dress here was racier than that of your average local; I think I saw my first thong in the city, bras optional.

The clothes fit the dance, which was innately sensual. It began with a practice session for newcomers, but experts took over for the rest of the night. I was more than a little impressed with how well the dancers handled themselves – confidently relaxed, cheerfully proficient. I could hardly keep track of the dozen or more couples who graced the tiny floor at any given moment, as they switched partners with each new song. Everyone danced with everyone else. I wondered if it was because people didn't need to know each other to dance together (one stranger did ask me to dance). But it turned out that the same crowd goes to that club every week, so they all knew each other. Free love, baby.

Even more impressive was the diversity of the crowd. We were in District 1, so I wasn't surprised to see foreigners, but these weren't just any foreigners. In addition to the Vietnamese and a few tourists, there was a healthy handful of foreigners who'd made their home in Vietnam, and no one seemed to notice skin color. I especially liked the Mick Jagger look-alike, the half-Vietnamese who appeared more Anglo, and the Russian who spoke better Vietnamese than me. But in a way I was lucky that just about everyone – Vietnamese, Indian, French – defaulted to English.

Stairway to heaven

When I was nine, maybe younger, my nanny asked me if I might like to give God a try. She was Christian and didn’t try to persuade me, just told me about him and about praying and crossing myself. Who knows what made me give in – maybe the shiny cross she gave me. I wore it for a few days until my Buddhist cousin saw it and cried, “Do you know what that is?” while removing the chain. That’s pretty much the extent of my contact with God, and anyone who knows me would be shocked to hear that I even got that close.

But a couple days ago I got much closer, right up to the foot of the man himself. On a mountain in Vung Tau, a resort city two hours away from Saigon, stands a 100-foot statue of Jesus, holding out his arms as he surveys the laity 600 feet below. “You know,” my coworker Nguyen said after I saw the icon for the first time, “there were some Boat People who escaped Vietnam a few decades ago, and when they returned, they built that statue as a gift.”

There must have been something in my face because she asked what was wrong. “Nothing. I just think it’s silly of them to take up public space like that. It doesn’t just belong to Christians.”

The next day we made our pilgrimage to the man upstairs – up a very, very long set of stairs. I went for the same reason I would stop to look at a car accident, but in fact if there were nothing up there but an abandoned car I’d still have gone for the sake of climbing the small mountain. The trek was tiring, with plenty of landings where we could rest and gaze down at the town, at the sea that turned into sky, and at the progress we’d made. Like holy harbingers, clusters of statues would occasionally greet us, as if to say: almost there.

The actual statue at the pinnacle of the hike was flesh-colored, domineering, and anticlimactic. I might have been more impressed with a golden calf, but it wasn’t really Jesus’ fault; he had to compete with a breathtaking view. On one end I admired the coast packed with ant-sized beachgoers and grasshopper-sized palm trees curving around the peninsula. I knew I was looking at something so many others must have seen in brochures. On the other end was infinite water and sky. The sight alone made me feel weightless, or as if I were filled with nothing but that floating blue.

Jesus compensated as best he could. Tourists were allowed to climb inside the statue like they would Lady Liberty, either to the balcony built into his robe, or farther up to his outstretched arms. Earlier, when my boss had told me people could do this, I’d asked, “Isn’t that a little sacrilegious?” Little did I know there was a sacred screening process. You cannot enter the body of Christ wearing shorts, skirts, or tank tops, and you must leave your shoes and water bottles at the opening. I wasn’t disappointed, but I felt bad for anyone who’d gone through all that trouble just to be turned away at the gates.

So we'd faced our maker and by providence no one was smote (smitten?) by lightning. Then again, we did get caught in the rain on the way down, Mr. Pina Colada would be happy to know. If it had come just five minutes later we would have been dry in a taxi, but I’m glad it happened. We were only a few flights from the bottom when I stopped to enjoy the wind that was picking up. On the horizon, the same wind was bringing in clouds and, to our amazement, we could see them raining into the sea before the storm reached us seconds later, the sky still light. We ran to a tunnel for shelter and did what was only logical while waiting out the storm. We ate ice cream.

I ain't afraid of no ghosts. Ma'am.

MacBeth and The Phantom of the Opera are about as "scary" as it gets when it comes to any stage productions I'd heard of, let alone seen, until last night. Nguoi Vo Ma (Ghost Wife) is a popular play here in the city, and although I can't get through a scary movie without covering my eyes, I figured this had to be interesting.

Less than $5 got me admission to a theater smaller than most American cinemas. I joined a boisterous audience that required more than a few warnings to hush down throughout the play, which just made it more entertaining. I think that's part of the nature of the performance – as professional as the actors were, this was no ballet or symphony (I'm saving that for next week). People come in their everyday clothes and prove it's not just the players who can break the fourth wall: when we first saw the sinister-but-still-living Wife, one audience member shouted, "You're too beautiful to be a ghost!"

The actors took it in good humor. During another scene, an overwhelmed audience member screamed in the middle of a dialogue, so the actor slipped it into the play: "What! Who just screamed?" he timidly asked his partner, earning a few laughs.

That about exemplifies the show. On the one hand, the performers were hilarious, playing on the cowardice triggered by belief in a ghost and making jokes that even someone with my level of Vietnamese could understand.

On the other hand, the play scared the hell out of me. I could see no difference between this title character and the long-haired star of The Ring, which also happens to be the scariest movie I've ever seen, if only because of the girl. But this ghost was worse because she was 50 feet away from me. Alternating between covering my eyes and clinging to my cousin, I could feel the same tension among the audience members because we could usually anticipate a scene with the ghost, thanks to the ominous music and erratic lighting. I'd never sat in a pitch black theater for so long before.

Luckily, I haven't had any nightmares yet, although when the play ended at 11 p.m., I walked four blocks home, the longest four blocks I've ever had to walk.

To grandma's house

To make my mom happy, I had simply planned to visit my grandma in nearby Dong Nai Province as another checklist item, so I didn’t know what to think when my aunt (who lives with my grandma) told us to arrive by 8 a.m., in time to go to the cemetery. Long past the stage of surprises, I wasn’t jarred by the request, just curious. Things are seldom what I’d expect.

After an hour-long ride, my two cousins and I reached Dong Nai early and walked through a narrow alley of puddles and cracked pavement to get to the house. As we approached, the street widened and the buildings shortened, letting in the brilliant, peach-colored daylight. Before I knew it, my cousin was walking through an open door as if he’d done it every day of his life. I didn’t follow him far because my grandma was sitting on the ceramic-tiled floor next to the entrance. I joined her, as instructed.

Although it took some time to explain which one of us – me or my cousin – was her granddaughter, this actually wasn’t my first time seeing her. I’d almost forgotten that my grandma had visited us in America several years ago. Then again, maybe I had forgotten because all I ever remembered was how lonely she’d been and how much she looked forward to returning to Vietnam. Seeing her face now seemed right, not in the way that you recognize a face from your past, but in the way that a piece fits a jigsaw puzzle you didn’t realize existed.

She’s ninety-two, I learned at some point. Then, as if she were discussing a noodle recipe, my grandma started telling me about her funeral arrangements.

It wasn’t until 9 a.m. that fourteen of us – cousins, aunts, and uncles I’d never heard of, plus my two cousins and I – piled into a rented van with fruit, rice, chicken, and flowers. The ride to the cemetery lasted almost as long as the one to Dong Nai, but with a better view. Along the countryside, leafy plants formed their own roof-like layer a foot above the ground, and beyond them lay forests, some natural, some, upon closer inspection, comprised of neatly planted rows of shadowy deciduous. Something like a mix between a bus stop and a gazebo, structures of wooden posts and thatched roofs dotted the highway and enclosed several hammocks. I couldn’t imagine how people could live there, but then why else would there be hammocks? My camera batteries had died of course.

Concealed behind a small rambutan grove, the cemetery could only be reached by a muddy path barely wide enough for our van. Among the things you don’t think about until they happen: I’d never really visited a cemetery before. But based on those I passed by or saw in films, it wasn’t hard to notice the differences. Here the graves were packed tightly together in geometric rows, with just enough room for pedestrians. While most graves I’d seen in America were hidden below ground except for their headstones (therefore creating the illusion of space), these tombs included visible, coffin-like boxes I would expect to find in a sepulcher. Standing next to one of them, I thought with dread, could there be nothing but the edge of the small concrete block separating me from a corpse? The anxiety later dissipated when I looked through an opening on top of one of the “boxes” only to find it empty but for dirt. The bodies, then, must have been six feet under.

Except for that lapse, the trip was so absurdly detached as to be worthy of Meursault. My aunts prepared for the ceremony, arranging the food and incense on top of my grandpa’s “box,” while the men pulled weeds from another tomb that had no covering. Weeds and dead grass were commonplace. The grave turned out to be that of an uncle who died fighting for the South. I hadn’t known about him, not because I believed I had no uncles, but because my parents told me little about my relatives. Out of sight, out of mind.

The ceremony, I realized, was just like any cung I’ve had at home. Walk into almost any Vietnamese house in America, and you’ll find a ban tho, a sort of bureau on which families place photos, flowers, and incense to remember the dead. During a cung, families make food and sometimes burn paper clothes and (valueless) money. Just as at home, where the cung is performed out of respect, not mourning, our trip to the cemetery wasn’t meant to be morbid. So while the adults went through the motions, I joined the kids, who had run off to pick rambutan.