Joy

Apparently I haven't done a very good job selling visiting Vietnam to people.  I guess I've written about too many near death experiences and tough times.  I believe I'm safe saying that nearly all the tough times written about in this blog have been created by non-Vietnamese, so that's something.  I thought about this and spent all of last week making a list of things I really love about Vietnam.

The Force Field

If you've watched any of my videos on Vimeo, or read certain portions of this blog, then you know that traffic can be insane.  Traffic is most insane at rush hour, just like in any major city.  However, unlike many major cities, people don't necessarily use crosswalks when crossing the street.  This means they simply wade into the river of buses, cars and motorbikes trusting that the vehicles will avoid them as they cross.  There is a certain philosophy of street crossing which states "DO NOT STOP."  You cross in a steady and predictable way and you will reach the opposite side of the street unharmed.  In order to make yourself more visible to the vehicles, you hold up your hand, or your hat, or a rag.  We call this the The Force Field.  It's as if we believe that by holding up a hand, we are creating some kind of impenetrable barrier between us and the buses, cars and motorbikes.  It's not uncommon to see a tiny, hunched over lady, who is barely taller than the handlebars of a bike holding up a wrinkled hand to generate The Force Field to protect a much younger woman walking with or carrying a small child.  One of the most beautiful things about The Force Field is that it is used almost exclusively to protect a person who is crossing with you.  You walk arm in arm with one person creating The Force Field while traffic approaches on their side, then the other person takes over when traffic changes direction.

Street Vendors*

We didn't know when we moved to Thao Dien (District 2 to the uninitiated) that we would be dealing with street vendors like we do. You see our house, as well as everyone else's house is made from brick and concrete beams.  There is no insulation, so things happening on the street might as well be happening inside your house.  The first morning in our new house back in 2010, we were awakened by a woman riding a bicycle shouting "BANH MI HEEEEY!" every five seconds as she rode up and down every street in the neighborhood.  Next it was the"MAAAAAAAI BAHN - MAAAAAAI BAHN...." call of the recycling ladies.  Then the "Hai Choo, Bang Gia" guy, which eventually learned means "Two Kinds of Cake."  Soon we learned to discern between the call of the Banh Mi lady, the recycling lady, the rat catcher, the vegetable seller, the ice cream lady, the non-ice cream dessert lady, the cake seller and the broom seller.  All either call or have a megaphone strapped to their bicycle or motorbike that repeats a recording as they pass through our neighborhood.  Some come more often than others.  When I returned to the states I found that I missed the call of the morning street vendors.  It was all too clean, too quiet.  Everything felt way too remote.

While on vacation in the US, I watched my father shred mail in the paper shredder and tear this and that up in case someone decided to go through their trash.  They do not have their trash picked up, mind you, but take it to the dump themselves. So in order for someone to actually acquire their personal information, a thief would have to sift through an enormous dumpster inside a guarded lot filled with identical blue garbage bags and somehow find theirs.

Here, strangers sift through our trash every day.  And it would be strange if they didn't.  They aren't looking for personal information, however, just things that can be reused, resold or recycled. In America this would be viewed as disgusting at least and an invasion of privacy at worst.  Here it's enterprise.  I like that.

A local magazine for expats called The Word wrote a wonderful piece about the Recycling Ladies that you can read here. It's on page 65.

*I'm certain I've gotten every single Vietnamese word in this section wrong.  I don't pretend to know any Vietnamese at all and have just written the way it sounds here.  So relax, haters.  I know all of this is horribly wrong.

Multiculturalism

It's not just that we live in Vietnam, so we are surrounded by Vietnamese people.  We are, but it's so much bigger than that.  Everywhere we go, we find ourselves surrounded by people from other countries.  For example, I ride bikes with a group of guys.  Depending on the day, I ride with guys from England, France, Germany, Japan, Lebanon, Korea, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand.  For most of them, Vietnam is not the only foreign country they've lived in.  For most, Vietnam is their second or third stop since they left their country of origin.  And that's just the people I ride bikes with.  We have friends from Spain, Norway, Kenya and loads of other places I can't think of right this minute.  It's a wonderful mixture of cultures and ethnicities. And because the expat community in HCM is fairly small (about 20,000 people) you know most everyone, or you know someone that knows someone.  We are very diverse, but are also very connected which makes the whole experience feel more special.

Feeling Alive

There's a two things that happen whenever you leave the house.  First, if you're on a motorbike, you're taking a risk.  You put yourself in actual danger getting from Point A to Point B, which seems to give everything more significance than it would normally have.  It's easy to forget because we are so used to it.  Like if you had to jump out of an airplane to get to work every day, you probably wouldn't think much about it, but others would be amazed.  This makes those videos I posted on Vimeo much more fun.  There is very little in any of them where I thought, "what I'm doing right now is crazy.  I am in danger." But then when I went back and watched the final cuts of the videos, I see  how nuts it actually is.  It's all about perception.

Second, everyone else is also on a motorbike, so you're close to them.  People On Motorbikes is a community in Vietnam, waging an unspoken war with cars, trucks and buses.  Before we moved to Vietnam, I had never been physically touched by a stranger in another vehicle. Here it happens all the time.  We will be sitting at a stop light and a total stranger will grab my arm and turn it over to look at my tattoos.  They smile, or give the thumbs up or ask me where I'm from.  We have a five second friendly interaction, then the light turns green and they're gone.  At first I thought it was weird.  Now I've come to enjoy it.  This close proximity also creates friendlier drivers.  You would probably think twice about giving the finger to the asshole driver next to you if at the next light that driver could reach over and punch you in the face, right?

Yesterday I rode my bike with a friend.  There is a stretch coming back into town where we try to go as fast as possible.  I was a little faster yesterday for one reason or another, so I stopped at the turn off for a minute to wait for him.  I was beat.  It was hot, so I was breathing hard and pouring sweat.  I must have looked like I was about to keel over. A woman walked past me on the street side, rather than on the sidewalk. She was dressed in all black with a conical hat and face mask on.  As she passed she reached out and squeezed my hand.  I looked up at her and she smiled with her eyes, then walked on.  I have no idea why she did it, but it made me feel less tired.


I have more, but you're probably tired of me going on and on.  I'll write some more this week.  This really is a great place to live.

Ode To My Family

The other day I was writing in my journal, like I do and I wrote something about a girl seeing her father cry. This brought up a memory of the first time I saw my father cry.  I won't go into details about that, but the thing that resonated with me is that when he had this moment of vulnerability he was lying on the couch.

This is the only memory I have of my father ever lying on a couch.

It got me thinking about the fathers I've known in my life, and across the spectrum, all those fathers had chairs.  A special chair, one that is clearly HIS.  You can walk into any house with a father and within ten seconds spot where Dad sits when Dad is relaxing.  Generally speaking it's the chair that appears out of place in the room.  Or it's the one that looks like it's been sat in an excessive amount.  A modern day throne for a modern day castle.

My Dad's chair has gone through a number of iterations, mainly increasing in size as I've gotten older.  First it was a chair that was one of a pair.  It wasn't a particularly attractive chair, a kind of green-gold velvet with a low back.  It rocked, so he would lean it as far back as it would go while he watched television.  I always found it odd that he rarely used the ottoman that went with it.  Ottomans are not especially popular in my family for some reason.  Sometimes I would sit in it, but it was clear that Dad's chair was to immediately vacated when Dad entered the room, often with a plate of cheese and crackers and a glass of iced tea. Now that he's retired, the chair is enormous -a Brown Monster.  It's a chair you can get lost in, and in fact, he has been known to get lost in it from time to time.  The new chair induces a narcoleptic response that is difficult to describe.  We'll be sitting in our chairs having a pleasant conversation, me, my brother and my father and we'll address him only to find him unconscious in his chair*.  I suppose these are the pleasures that come with retirement.

*My brother tells a story about one time when he visited my parents and my mother made lunch.  Afterwards, my brother retired to the Brown Monster to watch television or read a magazine or something.  The next thing he knew, my mother was shaking him so he could come eat dinner.  He'd just taken an unintentional five hour nap.  "I wasn't even tired when I sat down..." he told me later, "that chair does something to you."

And as I thought of that, I rewound my mind to earlier days.  My Dad's Dad had a chair as well.  When I was really little it was a leather chair with a low back and a seldom-used ottoman, not unlike the one my father sat in years before he got the Brown Monster he has now.  I only carry faded memories of that chair - it was tan and worn.  What I do remember is the chair that replaced it.  A large, blue, velvety La-Z-Boy.  He smoked a pipe, keeping them and the associated accouterments in an adjacent side table.  There are very few smells in the world that I find more comforting than Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco smoke.  I clearly remember the smell of that chair, and the sour stink of his "reserve" pipes held in the drawer of that side table.  The drawer was difficult to open.  It was easier to pull the handle and slide the entire table than to ease the drawer open to examine the old pipes.  We always bothered my grandfather to tell us why he no longer used certain pipes -ones that we found to be significantly more interesting than his standard straight pipe.  He would tell us that this one was too heavy and hurt his teeth, or that one didn't sit right in his shirt pocket causing the tobacco to dump out when he bent over.  There was a lot to think about when selecting the ideal pipe.

When my grandfather died in 1991, the Blue Chair and side table appeared in our living room.  For years afterward whenever I opened the drawer of the side table, which had long been cleared of pipes, there was still the tiniest whiff of stale smoke.   In the few months after he died I would bury my face in the Blue Chair and travel back in time.

My Mother's Dad was an eccentric.  I think if he had been born 80 years later he would have lived under the yoke of "diagnosis."  It's never been confirmed that he was mildly autistic or had Asperger Syndrome, and it's better that way.  He was what I would describe as pleasantly anti-social, a tinkerer -a closet genius.  It was clear from a young age that my grandfather and I would not have a normal relationship.  He didn't appear to have time for children,  which was odd because he'd had three of his own.  People were not his thing; he preferred the company of automobiles.  It was generally good practice to let him do his thing and do your best to stay out of his way.

And he had a chair too.  His chair reflected his singular nature.  It wasn't an overstuffed La-Z-Boy "Dad Chair."  It was a collapsible chaise lounge (emphasis on collapsible) that looked like it had been rescued off the deck of a derelict cruise ship.  It's wood was worn from what appeared to be weather, but was likely worn from use.  It creaked ominously when it was burdened with so much as falling wisp of pine straw.  Most strange was when my grandfather wanted to sit down, he had to assemble the chair.  To my child's eyes, it had about 12,000 moving parts that had to be painstakingly adjusted.  The chair was a chaos of bolts, wing-nuts, pinch points and splinters all draped with a flimsy piece of green fabric with red and white stripes.  It seemed  it took about 30 minutes of grunting, sweating and adjusting to get the chair to a place where it could be enjoyed as a chair.  Then another few minutes of actually positioning your body in the chair in a way that it would not injure you.  Once the proper position was attained, it was best to refrain from moving.  Once he was done "relaxing" he would then have to spend another 20 minutes breaking the chair down and returning it to it's place in the garage.  You see, once the chair was assembled for sitting it could not even be MOVED to a new location.  So if you needed to, say, back the car out to go to the grocery store, you had to wait for the chair to be disassembled and returned to storage before leaving.  It was best to let him know that you intended to leave the house via vehicle before he left to "relax."  Even at the tender age of eight I could tell that this was unusual.

I was warned from the time I was old enough to stand that I was, under no circumstances, to sit in the chair. It was best if I didn't touch, or even approach the chair.  It might as well have been an electric fence.  And what was especially odd to me was that in order to occupy the chair, my grandfather had to retire to their driveway, behind the car port.

As soon as I remembered this chair, I texted my brother in Florida to see if he remembered it.  Here's how the exchange went:

Me:  Here's a random question.  Do you remember that old chaise lounge Gramps used to assemble and lie on in their driveway?
Him:  Yep. It would pinch the fuck out of you.
Me:  I feel like we weren't allowed to touch it.  That it was somehow dangerous.  Why would anyone sit in a chair that pinches the fuck out of you?
Him:  Only if you moved wrong.

I then called him on Skype and we talked for over an hour -brought together by the chairs our grandfathers relaxed in.

The Blue Chair and the Collapsible Chaise Lounge are both enjoying their own retirements in my parent's basement.  It's impossible to look at them and not think of the men who occupied them.  Each is special in that it perfectly reflects the nature of the man who occupied it for the majority of its life.  You can't throw things like that away.

With You

Sometimes super amazing things happen and I'm too lazy to write.  I think about the post and I'm all "Damn, I need to write about that.... right after I lay on the couch and watch this nine hour Hillbilly Handfishin'* marathon."  Sure it's only nine in the morning, but who knows when it'll be on again!  I'm sure that Hillbilly Handfishin' has a massive Asian following too -right up there with Discovery Channel's destruction lineup**.  I didn't actually know it was possible to write Vietnamese subtitles for the things that Skipper and Trent say while they're neck deep in muddy river water with their hand in a hole.  I feel that the subtlety of meaning and insouciance is lost once it's converted to subtitles.

*I kid.  Not about the marathons, but the Hillbilly Handfishin' marathon. Oh sure, it's on here, but I've never watched it on purpose.  I had to look up Skipper and Trent's names on Wikipedia -it also took me three tries to figure out how to spell Hillbilly.  Even a minimally employed Tatveg has to have standards.  There's a certain point below which I will not sink.  Well...not so far.

**Seriously people.  Can someone tell me what the difference is between Rampage, Destroyed in Seconds, What Happened Next? and Seconds From Disaster?  They're the same show.  Reyna and I have taken to yelling, "and then it was destroyed in seconds!!" at each other randomly.  I'm going to write a strongly worded letter to Discovery asking them to replace all those shows with Mythbusters and Locked Up Abroad.  Who's with me?

This is really a roundabout way to say that I've kept everyone waiting for a fairly monumental moment in my Vietnamese life.  Specifically that I'm now the excessively proud owner of this:

Incredibly I didn't have to venture into the fiery pits of Mount Doom to get it either.  I didn't steal it out from under the nose of a snoozing taxi driver at the witching hour either.  I bought it at Metro.  It was all rather underwhelming to be honest.  Reyna and I were shopping -well let's rephrase that -Reyna was shopping and accomplishing something constructive.  I was wandering around looking at all the silly shit they sell at Metro. 

You can't buy peanut oil there, but they do have 37 different types of rice cooker and a faux leather replacement seat with "Gucci" tooling for your motorbike -not a seat cover, mind you, an entire seat.  There are times there when you think to yourself, "Someone honestly thought they could make money manufacturing that thing.  And worse, they SOLD IT TO SOMEONE ELSE who thought it was something worth selling in one of the largest retailers in Asia.  It totally reminds me of this.  

That clip reminds me of this blog too, come to think of it...

Anyway we were wandering through Metro.  Reyna was hunting for something -I don't know what but it was apparently in the vicinity of the "Auto Parts" section.  The Auto Parts section is markedly different from the same section at, say, Walmart because they don't sell things like touch up paint and motor oil.  Nope.  They sell helmets and half-finger gloves and whole bunch of other things you would never associate with driving.  It was then that my eye fell on our friend.

Time stood still.

"There it is!"  I screeched.

We stood and stared.  We gaped.  I think Reyna was as surprised to see it as I was.  Moments later I was holding it in my hand.  This particular Hennessy Cannon was not in the best shape.  It's clear plastic housing was cracked and had been reassembled using packing tape.  It was like holding an abandoned puppy at the animal shelter, and with trembling hands I turned to Reyna and said, "I'm buying this."  To this day I have no qualms about spending $5 on a hunk of plastic that will never actually be used for it's intended purpose.

And what might that be, you ask?  It's an air freshener.  Kind of a let down after all the hypothesizing I'd done for the last two years.  And I learned some things that day.  That the cannon does not utilize the iconic Hennessy bottle.  It's a clever knock-off known as Napoleon, which probably explains why I could never find one on the Internets.  A Hennessy air freshener does exist, but not in cannon form.  It's a much classier looking clear plastic "piece" that holds the Hennessy bottle at almost the exact same angle.  I did manage to learn that much, what I didn't learn is if the Hennessy air freshener smells like Hennessy.  I couldn't bring myself to a.) spend six additional dollars on my little obsession; or b.) actually open it and smell it in my own home.  I don't think people who like Hennessy want their home to smell like it.

*I told you it was classier...

I think one of the stranger lessons of this whole episode was that it had never occurred to me until that moment that the Hennessy Cannon is something that can be purchased in a store.  Consequently it had never occurred to me to shop for one.  I'd always just looked for them in passing cars.  The idea of having a Hennessy Cannon of my very own was one that was as the Vietnamese spoken by the taxi drivers who own its brothers (and sisters I guess -I tend to think of a cannon as being unarguably male...).  I never thought of it as something that could be owned, more like something you encountered -like the Mona Lisa or the Hope Diamond, only with a shorter line.

So now it sits in our house.  In some ways it's like a time bomb, because I live in fear that it will be jostled off a table and crack open.  Then we'll be stuck with an Asian interpretation of whatever a 17th century French emperor's cognac smelled like.  And I don't think anyone wants that.  I don't think it's a coincidence that every car I've ever seen containing a Henny Cannon has it's windows rolled down.  If it broke, I would be left without my very own (and very first) cannon air freshener, and stuck with a weird smelling house.

In some ways I feel like we can move away from Vietnam.  I don't particularly want to, but at least if we do leave, I will not go to my grave wondering about the origins of the Hennessy Cannon.  Turns out they sell them at the store.  Who would have thought?