Vietnam

If at dawn you walk the streets of Nha Trang, Vietnam, you may see blocks of ice being hauled by modified bicycles, bound for paying customers. In looking at this you may remember your grandfather, who mangled his legs as a kid in the 1920s when he got drug behind an ice truck (if I remember the story correctly, he was trying to nab some free ice). His injuries were severe enough that when later he tried to join the military during World War II, he was refused.

Also, you may recall a footnote in David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas, in which he details how ice made its way to Panama in the mid-1800s. It’s fascinating:

The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by ships from Sitka, from what was then knows as Russian America.

Finally, in looking at this scene—particularly if you notice the dripping—you may consider ice as symbolic of the human condition. The ice does in a matter of hours what your body will do in a matter of decades. What begins as defined blocks commences a change of state from the moment it is released into the world. The race is on.

The scene conveys a sense of urgency, speaks to the value of time, mirrors things about yourself. You stand and watch the ice drip till the driver returns. Then you walk on toward the beach, stretching your own block of flesh and spirit further into space and time, feeling it drip. And as you settle into the sand to watch a blazing sunrise, this is what you hope: that you will have more value than even the best cargo from Boston or Sitka, and that one day when you finally die all the way, you’ll be nothing like the wasted puddle on asphalt.

In the photograph above, a young Vietnamese woman prays in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Saigon, built by the French in the late 1800s. In her face we glimpse something about prayer. And in the lines below, excerpted from a poem entitled "Six Recognitions of the Lord" by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, we also glimpse something of prayer:

I know a lot of fancy words.
I tear them from my heart and my tongue.
Then I pray.

 

Paul Tournier (1898-1986), a Swiss physician who wrote books with titles such as The Whole Person in a Broken World, once said that "no one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person."

I don’t know what was going on in the minds of these two young girls in a village outside Bac Ha, Vietnam, but in the few minutes I watched them I did have a pretty good idea of this: their lives were fuller for their friendship. 

Here’s a definition of travel that I like (and just made up):  “to move in such a way that your life intersects with other lives and is shaped by the encounter.”  For me, a vital component of relationships formed on the road is the goodbye, nicely demonstrated in this photograph from Vietnam.  Chau and her friend have just spent part of the day with me in Hoi An.  As the river ferry that will take them home pulls away from the dock, they wave goodbye.   It’s a small and ordinary thing, yes, but imagine a world in which nobody ever said goodbye.

Recently, while chatting online with a friend in Shanghai named Michelle, I was reminded of something I’d nearly forgotten.  I had first met Michelle in Kathmandu, and two months later we met again in India.  Michelle recalled the morning in Rishikesh when she and her traveling partner checked out of the hotel to catch a bus to Delhi.  The night before, knowing they would be leaving in the morning, I had asked that they wake me before setting off so that we could say goodbye.  But because for two days I had had a blazing fever and sore throat, Michelle decided they’d slip away quietly from their adjacent room so that I could rest.  When I awoke and discovered their vacant room, however, I rushed to the receptionist -- he said they had left 10 minutes earlier -- and then, mostly clothed and in flip-flops, tore off down the small street paralleling the Ganges.  Michelle remembered the surprise and happiness she felt when she saw me wheezing and disheveled, having finally caught up with them to say goodbye.

(Incidentally, I remembered something else I'd almost forgotten: two days later, while on a night bus to Pushkar and enveloped by cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes, I was so weak that when I tried to ask someone to tell the driver I needed to go immediately to the hospital, I couldn’t lift my head to speak, nor move my mouth to say the words.  In all my travels, this was the only night in which I thought I might be dead by morning, and it's partly attributable, I think, to that sprint along the Ganges.)

Perhaps “goodbye” isn’t worth dying for, but a life void of the custom would be missing something.  And I’m not the only one who thinks this; so does the young character Pi Patel in Yann Martel’s backpacker favorite Life of Pi.  Along with a tiger named Richard Parker, Pi is lost at sea for several months, and when finally he and the tiger come ashore the tiger ups and walks away, never to return.  And Pi says:

I was weeping because Richard Parker had left me so unceremoniously.  What a terrible thing it is to botch a farewell.

The U.S. Coast Guard would be appalled, but drinking while adrift is a daily scene off the coast of Nha Trang, Vietnam. The "floating bar" is part of a popular all-day boat trip to outlying islands and it works like this: Shortly after lunch, a crewmember swims maybe 100 feet away from the boat with several bottles of (very cheap) Vietnamese wine. He is followed by a small horde of travelers, all of whom are hungry for this novel mix of alcohol and the sea. Within a matter of minutes the bottles run dry, plastic cups are gathered, and everyone hauls themselves back onto the boat so that we might chug toward the next destination (I think it was snorkeling).  While the floating bar says little about Vietnamese culture, it says a lot about Vietnamese entrepreneurial skills.

There are at least as many reasons that people drink as there are nationalities in this picture.  In “Pray Without Ceasing,” one of Wendell Berry’s characters is said to have “stood, letting the whisky seek its level in him, and felt himself slowly come into purpose; now he had his anger full and clear.”  Another character, this one in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, explains:

But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine.  I understood why men become drunkards.  For the way it worked on me was – not at all that it blotted out these sorrows – but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and reverend for feeling them.

As the people in this photo leapt from the ship to the sea to swim to the Vietnamese sailor with spirits, I don’t think anyone was doing so with the intent of being great and reverend, or to feel their anger full and clear.  Maybe the Vietnamese guy in the very top of the photo said it best.  Swimming back to the core of the group for a refill, he saw me still on the boat and yelled, “Joel jump, its so fun!”

And so, tucking my camera away, I jumped.

I’ll always be grateful to a hotel receptionist named Chau, who one day offered to get me out of Hoi An and into the homes of people in the surrounding countryside.  From the back of her motorbike I watched the landscape whiz by as she drove us several miles to the west.  We passed rice and corn fields, a kid on the back of a water buffalo, trucks that threatened to flatten us.  We passed a phalanx of teenage girls who, in their conical hats and white ao dais, sat atop their bicycles with such perfect poise that one wondered if bicycling were a form of ballet.

Among the places Chau took me was the home of a friend, where we had lunch and then rested through the worst of the midday heat.  As I lay with my eyes closed on a mat in one corner, digesting my meal and listening to the sounds of Vietnamese bouncing off the concrete floor, I appreciated the unintelligibleness of it all.  Because I couldn’t understand the words, I could focus exclusively on what was beyond them: friendship.  Here were people relaxed and enlivened by one another.  There was nothing formal about the interaction, no sign of pretense, no austerity in how they laughed or even reclined.  They were completely comfortable together.

The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing 167 years before two of Chau's friends rested on a bed, one with her feet propped up on the other's legs, had this to say about friendship:

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.  Before him, I may think aloud.  I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thoughts, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

Got milk?  This calf in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta does.  But there are times and places where milk isn’t so easy to come by.  Chris Hedges, in his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, relates one such story.

The setting is Goražde, a predominately Muslim town in Bosnia, and the time is the early 1990s, when the Bosnian Serb army has put Goražde firmly under siege.  Most ethnic Serbs have fled town, but a few, including the family of Rosa Sorak, have decided to remain.

It was a decision Rosa and her husband would come to regret, not least because they would lose two sons, one in a car accident and one at the hands of the Bosnian (Muslim) police, who took the son and presumably killed him.  This second son left behind a pregnant wife.  When several months later she gave birth—in the midst of continued Bosnian Serb shelling, increasing harassment from Muslim neighbors, and a food shortage—another tragedy threatened the family, for the new mother was unable to nurse.  “Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves,” Hedges writes.  After five days of tea, the baby “began to fade.”

Enter Fadil Fejzić, an illiterate Muslim neighbor who milked his cow at night to avoid being killed by Serbian snipers.

Rosa told Hedges: “On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door.  It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots.  He handed up half a liter of milk.  He came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that.  Other families on the street began to insult him.  They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die.  He never said a word.  He refused our money.  He came for 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia.”

Rosa went on to tell Hedges that while she could never forgive her son’s Muslim murderers, neither could she be silent when her fellow Serbs spoke only disparagingly of Muslims.  She and her family were the recipients of one Muslim's courageous act of love, and her granddaughter was alive because of it.  This story needed telling too.

After Rosa's story concludes, Hedges locates Fejzić, who is living a hard life even after the war.  Hedges concludes with a reflection of his own:

The small acts of decency by people such as [Fejzić] ripple outwards like concentric circles.  These acts, unrecognized at the time, make it impossible to condemn, legally or morally, an entire people.  They serve as reminders that we all have a will of our own, a will that is independent of the state or the nationalist cause.  Most important, once the war is over, these people make it hard to brand an entire nation or an entire people as guilty.

For a short New York Times editorial about Bosnia today, click on "Bosnia Unraveling" (Feb 22, 2009)

There are at least a couple things about this photograph that would suggest it is not taken in, say, Miami.  First, the woman is wearing her clothes into the sea.  Second, she is playing with water in much the same way a three-year-old would.

I mean neither of these observations in a negative way.  Like many other Vietnamese women, she wants to protect her skin from the sun.   As for the playful splashing, I silently cheered her ability to delight in such a simple thing.  What beauty!

The woman and her husband, both from the port city of Haiphong, were on a daytrip to Cat Ba Island to celebrate their one-year wedding anniversary.  Her love, I couldn’t help but notice, was directed not only toward her husband but also toward life itself—part of what her husband found attractive about her, I suspect.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, there is a dialogue between two characters about the “meaning of life.”  In it, the one character offers this astute observation:

“I’ve always thought that, before anything else, people should learn to love life in this world.”

”To love life more than the meaning of life?”

”Yes, that’s right. That’s the way it should be—love should come before logic, just as you said.  Only then will man be able to understand the meaning of life.”

I haven't had much time to post the past few days and won't for a few days still (I'm spending the week exploring the Panama Canal).  But perhaps in busy periods like this I'll start a tradition of posting a humorous photo with little commentary.  (Speaking of which, I wish I had taken a picture of diners at the Coca-Cola Cafe here in Panama City last night -- almost everyone was drinking Pepsi.)

As for the photo above, I took it while visiting a string of villages outside the Vietnamese town of Hoi An in July 2007.  This woman thought I might be interested in some Wall Street Whisky.  I surely wasn't, especially in such midday heat.  But looking at the photo now I think she'd do a booming business if her shop was located in lower Manhattan rather than rural Vietnam.  Wall Street could no doubt use a sip these days.

The picture above, taken in 2007, shows a typical home several miles outside Hoi An, a town near the coast of central Vietnam.  The words below also come from Vietnam, though they were written three years earlier—and also several hundred miles away—during my first visit to the country.  At the time I was on the edge of the semi-remote town of Dien Bien Phu, where I had fallen in love with a rickety old bridge near the intersection of two dirt roads.  For a second day in a row I had come to sit and watch the bridge—and the stream of life that crossed it on bicycles, on motorbike, and on foot—from the table of a humble café.   I was two and a half months into a fourteen-month overland journey from Beijing to Istanbul:

I was beginning to see how much “home” would be a theme in the journey still ahead of me.  I had come to Asia with the theory that one should invest more time in building bridges than walls, and that’s what I planned to write about.  But with each passing month—that is, with more time spent in watching ordinary life and realizing how extraordinary this thing we call ordinary really is—I began to think a lot about home as well.  The idea of it as primarily a physical structure or as a place within national borders began to thoroughly dissolve.  In its place was emerging the idea of home as a gift—something too large to be constrained by borders, too spiritual to be only physical, and too untamed for one to claim to own as he might a piece of property.  Home was this bridge at Dien Bien Phu, the moon that shone above it at night, the dust kicked up by motorbikes while I drank Coca Cola.  None of this was ownable; it was all something that had to be received, just as one holds outstretched hands to receive a gift on Christmas.

For the articulate thoughts of another traveler on home (she goes by the name "Sol"), click HERE.