Out of wonderland

If I were to make a diagram of my experiences in Vietnam, there would be one branch for things that turned out as expected – generally, goods are cheaper than in America, journalism is more submissive, and fashion is equally mixed. There would be a branch for things that surprised me, either because they differ so much from America (take off your shoes when entering a shop), or because we’re not so different after all (is there anywhere the income gap isn’t a problem?).

Of things that aren’t so different, I don’t know if my biggest discovery would disappoint or delight, but it is this: many of the pleasures of visiting another culture (language, food, customs) were, in this case, already available to me in America. I spoke Vietnamese at home, of course, but also in the Vietnamese stronghold of South Sacramento, people generally don’t need English to conduct business, read the paper, or just carry on with daily life. In South Sacramento and at home, I have also eaten most of the same cuisine I’ve had in Vietnam – mi xao, banh xeo, bun bo hue, etc. I noticed this because people here constantly asked me during meals whether the food was OK, and I’d constantly explain that yes, we have all of this in America. That might be the reason I haven’t gotten food poisoning. Unfortunately, that also means it was hard to try new foods (plus I’m not brave enough to try snake).

Many of the local customs, like eating on the floor or lighting incense for the deceased, were already a part of my life, thanks to my parents. They also decorated our house with cultural ornaments, from paintings to statues to fans, which made it very difficult to buy souvenirs here, as most of the useless knick-knacks I came across are available in South Sacramento.

So I would call this discovery disappointing because it sort of defeats the purpose of coming here – emphasis on “sort of” because the country still holds enough of a unique lifestyle, history, and development for a good old-fashioned culture shock. But for tourists who can’t afford to come here, this could be a delight because all they have to do is spend some time in the Vietnamese community in their own towns. For America the implications are both good (as Viet Kieu add diversity to the country) and bad (as they insulate themselves from mainstream America).

(Aside: as I’m writing this, two chickens have just wandered into my room.)

Between the expected and the unexpected, there’s a third branch in my diagram. I noticed it in my first week in Saigon, when it came time to do laundry. The vast majority of people hand wash and hang dry their clothes, which makes perfect sense. It’s not as if I expected people to have washing machines, but I also hadn’t thought about the fact that my clothes, too, must be hand washed. So there are things that aren’t surprising, but that you don’t think about until their time comes.

And the time has come to say goodbye. Although I knew I would have to leave Vietnam, it hadn’t occurred to me that I would be leaving its people and traditions and way of life. Of course there’s plenty I won’t miss. I can’t wait to get away from Mr. Mosquito, away from the smog and the two types of weather, heat or rain. I won’t have to barter with merchants anymore, and they won’t follow me around every inch of their stores, trying to convince me to buy things I don’t want. I won’t be solicited on the street by errant peddlers who can’t possibly make a living with what they’re selling, or by poor children selling lottery tickets when they should be in school.

Usually I don’t miss anything or anyone because I know I’ll see them again. So the exceptions are things and people gone forever, separated either by time (hence my debilitating nostalgia) or, as I see now, distance. I still have a few hours until my flight back to America, but already I am missing this bustling city. I’ll miss the wind rushing past as I sit on the back of a motorbike. I’ll miss seeing a movie for $2 or staying in a beachfront hotel for $12. I’ll miss always having someone to tell me how to say or spell a word in Vietnamese. I’ll miss being called “Lien oi” and “Lien Lien” and “em.” And I’ll miss the people calling me by those names, people with whom I’ve spent almost every day for the past two months, people who hadn’t factored into the equation when I first planned my trip but who now sum up the entire summer. But I’m wrong about one thing: they’re not all gone forever because there’s no question that I’ll be back.

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.

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.