pig on a scooter, pen and marker on graph paper, doodle and
photos © 2009-2010 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
This is my seventh visit to Vietnam. Seven trips, back and forth across the great expanse. If I added up all the hours spent on just one leg of the trip—San Francisco to Hong Kong and back—it would be 182 hours in the sky. Over one week on just these seven trips.
That’s a lot of time to spend in a vehicle that I liken to an empty toilet paper tube with wings. A lot of time spent sitting, eating, and sleeping in the company of strangers. As someone who doesn’t necessarily enjoy being in such close proximity to people I don’t know who sniffle, snore, and sweat, it is noteworthy, then, that I can muster the mental fortitude to make the slog again and again. The reason I do it, the reason anyone does it, of course, is for what waits on the other side.
My first trip to Vietnam, I wandered the streets of Saigon, lost but unafraid, except perhaps any time I stepped off a curb and into the onslaught of motorbikes, which parted and flowed around me as if I were a boulder in a rushing river. That and my second trip were spent solely in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, which is a sensual feast and assault all at once.
The roads are clogged with motor scooters, and not just one person per scooter but entire families and small businesses transported on two small tires. There are rickshaws, bicycles, small cars, SUVs, tourist vans with sleeping Japanese or Koreans, and the ubiquitous container trucks, what we call semis, reminding us that this place is being rebuilt before our very eyes.
But traffic and congestion you can see in any big city in the world, and Saigon holds not a candle to many of the largest. Still, where else can you witness the harmony of millions of people and their wheels in synchronous motion, as if this is something they’ve practiced all their lives—driving motorbikes loaded down with baskets, glass panes, multigenerational families, televisions—and are now performing in the symphony of daily life.
There is a Zen quality to the way traffic flows in Vietnam. School girls dressed in white Áo Dàis, the traditional attire for women, stroll in pairs down a busy thoroughfare, impervious to the crazy tourist vans and containers that roar by, spewing their black exhaust. I peer at the chatting girls with both fear and admiration. How do they manage to stay so calm when I am reciting Hail Mary’s and praying that I will return home in one piece?
As I have traveled from Saigon to the Mekong Delta, through the center part of the country in Da Nang and Hoi An, then north to Hanoi and Halong Bay, I’ve seen more than I can ever recall. A naked man walking along the cement divider on a narrow and packed two-lane highway. Cows grazing in the grassy medium. Women bent harvesting rice. Raised graves that look like small cottages. Buddhist statues as tall as skyscrapers.
On my morning commute to work, colleagues on the shuttle bus doze off or talk to one another. Not me. I keep my eyes glued to the passing scenery. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen a bus pass so close that I could touch it or the tangle of rivers we seem to always cross, or the row of shops that sell marble statues in the likeness of any spiritual figure—Buddhas, goddesses, Jesus and Mary—I am still drawn in as if seeing it all for the first time.
On my last trip I went in a minivan from Hanoi to Halong Bay. I’m now accustomed to seeing animals transported on the backs of scooters. Chickens in cages or ducks with their bills and legs tied with twine for the trip. But I had never seen an adult pig, five or six hundred pounds of pink jello-y flesh, roped onto a motorbike. As the young man carrying the pig passed our van and I stared with mouth open, he seemed nonchalant, so at ease bumping along the dirt road with his jiggling sow in tow.
There is no way, really, to describe how exotic, how absolutely delectable Vietnam is to my senses. Roads are torn up, rice paddy fields relocated, new business parks and high rises rise overnight. It is a country in transition, moving to claim its place among economic powerhouses. I am in the midst of it, working with government, industry, and education to prepare for what is to come.
On one of my early trips, I walked with two Vietnamese colleagues down an alley near the coffee house where we’d just been. I looked up at the tangle of communications and electrical cables, signs of growth unplanned. Before us motorbikes surged six rows thick, mixed with taxis, cars, and bicycles. I turned to my friend and said, “I hope Vietnam never changes. I hope I can always see this,” and I motioned with my hand at the chaos before us. She looked me in the eye and said, “Ah, Roma, I hope very much that my country does change. I hope we someday have roads to fit the cars, safe roads and infrastructure for all the people who live here.”
It was then that I realized how unfair of me it was to want Vietnam to remain the same, as if it were a curiosity put here for my own pleasure. The people of any country should be able to determine their own destiny. And especially Vietnam, ravaged by war and poverty, a legacy of imperialism.
I’ve come around to embracing the change that is inevitable. These days I simply observe everything I can, take it in as if I were a recorder. Ten years from now, I vow to come back and see how different it is.
ybonesy, I love this post. It’s alive, reflective, looking both forward and back. I wasn’t expecting the ending. It made me think about why we don’t want things to change, why we want them to stay the same in any venue. But it’s especially impactful to read the perspective from an outsider, then someone who lives in the country you are visiting.
Last night after dinner, we were driving through downtown Minneapolis by the new Twins stadium, a behemoth structure in the middle of downtown next to 100-year-old buildings that have been there since Minneapolis became a city. Minneapolis is notorious for tearing down its historical buildings (St. Paul is much better at preservation).
So we were commenting on how we should get downtown and photograph some of the older buildings next to the new Twins stadium. They won’t be there for long as people develop the area for fans, to make a quick buck, to cash in on the traffic to an area that used to be a giant parking lot next to the bus station and a few homeless shelters.
Your post reminds me of how much we wanted to preserve what was, knowing that change was inevitable. I think that’s what writers and artists long to do — document, preserve, capture — it’s the way we think. And there is nostalgia for what was. We see the change coming.
I’m looking forward to your check-in’s from Vietnam. I always miss you when you travel. But your visits are rich and alive and infuse your art and your writing with new insights. Have a good trip.
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very nice. thanks for the imagery. with big roads and such they will learn to forget on how to merge–like here in the US.
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Thanks for the comments, taxiing for takeoff–more later.
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Safe travels, ybonesy. We’ll be right here.
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ybonesy,
Happily (knowing you’re currently taxiing) the new rule says they can’t keep you on the tarmac more than three hours. I’m thinking about you now, in the air, next to all those strangers.
Check in soon!
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yb, loved the post and the remark about not wanting Vietnam to change. I look around the city in which I live. When I arrived for college in January 1971, the city stopped at about 95th Street. Now it runs out into the high 200’s…254th Street, maybe more. The farm land between the new airport and the central city has disappeared, replace by car dealerships and hotels and restaurants. The vast nothingness of the area between Platte City and St. Joseph has virtually disappeared. And to what good end? None that I can think of. I don’t mind change if their is a purpose other than unbridled capitalism.
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Love this post. The change question is a toughie. I certainly see where your friend is coming from, but you also. There is the innate desire to preserve in us, I think, especially Americans who have seen so much change that wasn’t for a better quality of life.
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I like how you phrase that, anhinga, that innate desire to preserve.
Well, after about a 45-minute delay on the tarmac (Teri 😉 ), the plane took off from SFO to Hong Kong. It was not the best of flights. A thirty-something couple behind us had two very sick children. They had something that to my mother’s ears sounded like a a respiratory virus that was quick becoming a croup. Of course, given my experience of croup quickly turning to pneumonia and resulting in my emergency tracheotomy, I felt like telling this couple that they were endangering their children by traveling with them while so sick. I turned to say something to the dad, and he, in defense, barked, “We’re doing GREAT!” I think he thought I was worried about my health, which really wasn’t my concern at all. Oy.
Anyway, the sick children wailed most of the trip. I watched a corny movie with Jennifer Aniston and some actor whose name I don’t know, and I slept for maybe three hours. But I did change my traveler profile so now I’m served Vegetarian Asian instead of the normal fare, and so the food was kind of tasty.
Glad to be in my hotel, on the verge of hitting the sack. It’s almost midnight, and work starts tomorrow.
Great to be able to read your comments upon arrival. QM, you guys should go photograph those old buildings near the new stadium. Documenting old buildings is especially important, I think.
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yb,
Glad you’ve made it…hard to believe how far away you are right now. I’ll look forward to photos. Enjoy all that authentic Vietnamese food!
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I know, isn’t that bizarre, Teri? Like time travel.
BTW, I wanted to make one more comment before bed: One of the books I picked up for the plane ride was the 2009 Best American Essays edited by Mary Oliver. I enjoyed reading the essays in the book. A good one by Patricia Hampl on the power of description and detail. And a good one by Barry Lopez on the power of prayer and a vision of the Virgin Mary.
Reading the essays reminded me how much I enjoy the essay form. This post was written in the essay spirit, although I wrote it in 20 minutes sitting in the SFO airport during a layover. I have several posts that are what I tend to think of as the starter dough for a solid essay. This post is one of them. I’d like to delve much more deeply into the form.
Here is a quote from Mary Oliver’s introduction:
“We speak a good deal these days of the loss of community, and many of us feel that we have lost therefore something very precious. Essays can move us back into this not-quite-lost realm. Tacking a hundred subjects, in a hundred different styles, they are like letters from a stranger that you cannot bear to throw away. They haunt you; they strengthen you.”
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yb, I agree with Teri. Hard to believe how far away you are at this moment. I always try to imagine you there with my mind’s eye, but through the lens of photographs and doodles and posts you’ve written about Vietnam the last three years.
I’m so glad you made it safely. Sorry for the sick children on the flight. I feel for them. Have a good rest and settle in. Will look forward to your check-in’s when you’re able. Be safe.
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yb, have you talked with your business associates in Vietnam about where they see their country going with all the increased prosperity. Do they visualize vast cities filled with tall buildings and cars and motorcycles? Do they see efforts to preserve the culture of the country and at the same time “modernizing” things? Do they have a vision of where Vietnam will be in five or ten or twenty years? It would be interesting to know what they want from life and what prices they are willing to pay? Questions I’m not sure Americans have ever considered on a large scale.
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The Mary Oliver quote struck a chord with me. I was reading Anna Deavere Smith’s book, Talk to Me: Listening Between the Lines. She quotes someone who quotes Morris Wright (memoirist/photographer/teacher) as saying something like, “People today are more and more into communications and less and less into communication.” I thought that was very profound.
We have all of these devices (cell phones, handheld computers, etc) and all these communication websites (Twitter, Flicker, blogs, & probably some I don’t even know about). We use them as communication tools, but do we really communicate with someone. Maybe that’s the beginning of an essay for me;)
Hope your travels are safe and filled with lots of wonder. Safe journeys there and home.
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Just checking in briefly before going to bed. I’m pretty exhausted tonight, but the good news is that I didn’t have any jetlag today. Amazing how the body can adjust so quickly, although I don’t want to push it.
Mary Oliver is a wise soul, isn’t she? You can read her wisdom in her poems.
More later on your other comment, when I’m not so pooped. 8)
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yb, I wonder if some our nostalgia for a simpler time doesn’t come from our own experiences of a simpler life when material thing didn’t matter that much? I wonder what today’s children will look back on with strong feelings about the “perfection” of their childhoods. Is it something that most people do, i.e. look back with longing at a simpler time?
Also, we have seen what obsession with material things and the mentality to buy-buy-buy has done to America. Maybe some of our concerns for other countries is not to deny them their growth and prosperity but to wave a red flag and say, “Please don’t make the same mistakes we did.” I don’t know, but have been thinking a lot about you and your travels. Hope all is going well.
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All is going great, Bob. I just came from a short visit with painter Pham Luc. One of my colleagues wanted to meet him. It was such a joy to see him!
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ybonesy, great to hear from you. And I’m so excited you got to visit with artist Pham Luc again. Can’t wait to hear about it. Inspiring! Thinking about you hours and hours away on the other side of the world.
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Great post. I love it when bloggers let us see into their thinking process.
Change is not always good, but it is necessary. And you are totally right about the people of any given place being the ones who should be responsible for determining the direction in which their homeland will change, or not. If only those in power could see that.
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Back home from Vietnam. Jim says this time passed a lot faster than other times, and it did for me, too. The first ten days were a whirlwind, then a couple more and it was time to go.
Trip home was uneventful. I got a good night’s sleep before leaving, which helped since I only slept a bit on the long flight. Watched three movies, and then slept a bit more in the SFO airport and on the leg from SFO to ABQ. I’m feel pretty awake now. Jim had a nice pork roast dinner waiting. Now a bath, then bed by 8p or 9p, depending on how long I can stay up.
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