An Open Letter to Vietnam

Patti and I had a thrilling 2-month adventure in Veitnam, chronicled previously in this section. This was the re-cap, written once we were safely back home, staring at each other and wondering if the whole thing was just a beautiful and fantastic dream…

Dear Vietnam—

How are you? We are fine.

Just wanted to drop a quick note to say thanks again for the funky time this winter. Your patience and hospitality were quite beyond reason and we won’t soon forget it. I also hope it goes without saying that if Patti and I can ever return the favors, you need only send us a Whatsapp and we will hook you up immediately. Please.

Not that we have any idea why you’d want to come here. The US is being managed by ninnies and twits currently and is wound pretty taut in general. There are a lot of rules we don’t think you’d like. NO TURN ON RED, for instance. Also NO PARKING, NO SMOKING and RESTROOMS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY. Some of the very cornerstones of your entire culture are prohibited in writing here. Dogs and chickens don’t generally hang out together. You have to wait 20 minutes after you eat to go swimming! It’s lame.

Plus it’s hard to find a decent ca phe sua da…

I think we mentioned more than once when we were over there: Vietnam was a dirty word when Patti and I were growing up. There was nothing positive attached to the notion of Vi-et-nam, rather just a lot of death and dishonor, crutches and addiction and abandonment and suicide. Ruined lives—a deeply scarred generation which we did not discuss at the dinner table. And that was just on our side! Your side stoically absorbed far worse, with all the Agent Orange & napalm and rubbled cities and three million dead.

Yet you were so kind to us. We constantly wondered whether that was difficult or awkward. Then again, you did win...

You are, in fact, the only country ever to have beaten the United States at war—even if it was 50 years ago. Maybe that balances some of the other stuff that needn’t be dwelt upon. It’s not a commonly-held American view that we lost in Vietnam. The history book line here is that we just kind of quit. And although the Vietnamese people I talked with about it weren’t the ones to bring it up initially, it was always clear once the discussion was open that they felt like you guys won the fuck out of that shit. And of course that’s true enough.

It must be great to live in a country where you’re stoked to fly the flag. Our flag has some regrettable associations attached to it at the moment and a lot of us don’t favor raising it. But in your country, the flag is everywhere. The flag and the Party flag.

I hope no one thought we were spies! We were constantly asking so many questions and buying so many hammer & sickle refrigerator magnets and speaking the language with such conspicuous fluency—I wonder if anyone mistook us for intelligence…

Well, not exactly fluent. And not particularly intelligent, OK. But we did study in a classroom with Huong & Lizzy and were eventually able to read a menu and ask people their ages in Vietnamese. Of all the countries’ languages I personally have slaughtered, Vietnamese was the one I was expected to speak the least and for which I was rewarded the most when I did.  Please pass an extra hi-five off to all of your enthusiastic representatives who just lost their minds when we pronounced Rau Muong Xao Thit Bo correctly. It really felt great to have our modest efforts validated.

Oh hey before I forget, can I ask a favor? Can you run a deed search on Dai Dao Tam Ky Pho Do Toa Thanh tay ninh? When unpacking all our hammer & sickle coffee mugs, we discovered a certificate that seems to indicate we bought a temple in Phuoc Long. It actually kind of looks like we might have purchased an entire religion—but we can’t be certain, you know— because of influency.

Whereas we don’t really wish to own a faith in Southeast Asia, we sure admire how you guys rationalize with religion. You use all the best parts—the rad altars and huge brass gongs and 200’ Buddhas. You got the baddest iconography and accessories. But you don’t mess around with the shitty parts. You don’t appear to be brought down by all the exclusivity and duplicity and merchandising. You don’t have Christianity.

Although of course you do. More of your people are Christian than Buddhist! But I guess it doesn’t seem as toxic when science fiction ideology like Christianity isn’t CONTROLLING YOUR SUPREME COURT. Here in America, we have a faith-based government despite the fact that it’s outlawed in our constitution. But Patti and I really enjoyed your more secular approach to spirituality— worshipping horses, luck and ancestry rather than a smarmy white martyr who secretly tells some people to skin other people alive.

I guess your people just generally seem calmer. And happier. We’ve been back at home for a couple of weeks now, and it’s been startling to note just how high strung a lot of Americans are. I don’t think it’s that they’re working any harder. The influencer economy was invented here and there are lots of people humping that. We absolutely observed Vietnamese people working very hard, although there was certainly a fair amount of hardly working on-display as well. The capacity for the average Vietnamese person to fall asleep while smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk or riding on the back of a motorcycle is enviable. Your people seem to be able to catch a nap at any moment—not only because they’re tired and uninhibited but also because they’re usually already barefoot, which helps. Americans don’t sleep in public without their shoes on unless they are heavily sedated on alcohol & drugs, which is a different kind of sleep altogether.

A lot of those hard-sleeping Americans don’t have a bed to sleep in at home because they don’t got no home. They are literally home-less, which is how they are referred to by the people who do have a home with a bed. While most Vietnamese public sleeping appears to be recreational, it also doesn’t seem like you have persons who are home-less. I don’t know if it’s the Party who’s making sure no one has to sleep in the park or whether it’s the family or what. In America, what used to be known as the family has kind of changed to the tax bracket. A fairly small number of people have formed a family of sorts that is concerned with gathering all the money. And then all the rest of the families have to fight over smaller and smaller pieces of what money is left over. The people with the very smallest pieces of the shrinking money end up in the homeless tribe and they sleep outside. We are famously and fabulously wealthy here in the US, but there are few guarantees for our people.

In Vietnam, it doesn’t seem like too many people have a ton. But it also doesn’t look like anyone has nothing. There’s enough: a roof and some noodles. Tea and smokes. Dignity, purpose, community. In the end, how much more do you really need?

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Patti and I have both decided that when we grow up we want to be old Vietnamese ladies. It’s going to be hard for her and practically impossible for me, but it’s good to have goals. If I were able to somehow become an ancient Vietnamese woman, I would ride my bicycle against traffic dressed in a conical and mis-matched patterns. I’d wear plaid with paisley, I wouldn’t even give a damn. I’d squat deeply and attend to my work shelling peas or folding paper lanterns or quartering a raw chicken with an enormous metal cleaver on a low stump in the middle of the sidewalk. A lot of my teeth would not be in my head anymore and I’d smile broadly when someone bought some of my rice or wished me a happy new year. I might even extend my left hand palm down toward an American walking out of a coffee shop in Da Nang on the afternoon of Super Bowl Sunday, just lightly brushing his fingertips as I rode by in a gesture of dizzying grace. I’d be an old Vietnamese woman—I could do anything I pleased! Foreigners might try and take my picture and some of them would. I wouldn’t care one way or the other. I’d say cheese if they had their camera phones ready, but I certainly wouldn’t hang around posing if they didn’t. I’d just pedal away smiling.

When Patti and I were there visiting, we were conflicted about taking pictures of people just going about their everyday lives— even when we found their everyday lives to be incredibly fascinating. But it’s true that toward the end of our two-month visit we were a little less shy than we’d been at the beginning. Eventually we had quite a little competition going to see who could take the most photographs of people sleeping at their jobs. Butchers, barbers, docents, drivers—it didn’t matter. By the time we got to Hanoi, if they were sleeping at work, we were pretty indiscreetly taking their picture. We never would have done that in week 2.

Still, there were tons of photos I wanted badly to take but that I resolutely decided against. Sometimes you just have to leave the phone in your pocket and dig a moment. I did find that if I detailed the untaken photographs later in my journal, I’d remember them better—if not as well as I would have had I just taken the damned picture like every other honkey tourist.

Here are a few that got away:

* Security guard sitting cross-legged on a red resin stool sewing on a button while wearing the shirt— Saigon

* Cows (w/ shepherd) on the freeway— Hoa Lu

* One-eyed motorbike driver— Hanoi  (more like a half-eye because the good one was pretty fucked up)

* Old woman dragging a pallet of flattened cardboard down the middle of a busy street— Hanoi

* Blind literally leading the blind— DaLat

* Old man on a country road wringing the necks of geese (two at a time, one in each hand)— Krong Ana

* Crazy one-man motorbike band— Hoi An

* Shopkeep spraying down the display rack of bags of potato chips with a garden hose— Ninh Binh

* Our cave trek guide Hui standing up on his pedals singing I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith. We’d been told from the first hour of orientation at Oxalis that Hui had a lovely voice and would occasionally offer a song for the right group of spelunkers. In fact, the boss told me privately he’d comp our entire expedition if Hui DIDN’T sing. So we were riding back to headquarters after a bicycle tour of the village on the last day—literally 20 minutes from the end of the 3-day adventure. And Hui still hadn’t sung, despite my asking more than once. I rode up alongside him and mentioned it again, and he asked me if I knew of the band Aerosmith. I just nodded. He then began to sing this ballad I’d never heard at the top of his voice with his eyes closed and his head tipped back, filling the whole valley with his earnest voice, these lyrics that he probably didn’t fully understand because of the abstractions of art language. It was one of my favorite moments of the entire 2-month experience and I don’t have a photograph of it. But it’s a very resonant and special memory— Tan Hoa

* The Mythical 5-top (five people riding on a motorbike)— Da Nang and also Lam Ha

* “Here’s Mr Sack”— Dong Phu

* Elderly husband picking up his elderly wife after work on the motorbike. She climbs on the back of the bike with the wooden yolk of mango cakes still balanced across her shoulders and off they go. An incredible fete of strength and balance— Hoi An

* Some of the most impressive rats and roaches I’ve ever seen. There weren’t actually that many of them, which is surprising—because Vietnam has lots of stuff on which rats and roaches thrive, like filth and humidity. It was more about the sheer size of them, as if they had eaten the competition and were merely defending territory— Hanoi, Da Nang, DaLat

* Hitch-hiking monk—Da Nang

Another of my favorite unphotographed moments of the trip was in Dong Hoi on the Saturday before we hit the caves. We were walking around killing an hour before the van picked us up and we saw an elderly couple PUSHING A CAR. You just don’t see this type of thing very often in your country because there aren’t that many cars to begin with—and most of them aren’t 10 years old. Yet, here was this SUV being pushed. By old people no less! It was the moment we’d been waiting for—a chance to heroically give back to a people who had welcomed us so warmly. We spazzed out and about tripped over each other scrambling to reach the black Hyundai, arriving just in time to help push it the last couple of feet out of a driveway. Not really into what you’d call a parking spot, even in Vietnam. But at least out of the path of traffic. And the old folks just went INSANE. They acted like we’d made them Emperor and Empress, they were just so tickled. And then Patti laid a Chuc Mung Nam Moi on them which drove them madder still. I bet they’re still talking about it—we’re folk heroes there down in ol’ Dong Hoi! (I don’t have a picture of that, either, but I’ll never forget the look on the old man’s face when he looked up and saw who was helping push the car. He was certainly in the war. I resisted the urge to also gift him a Fruit Cocktail scratch ticket for their altar).

Those two old folks didn’t look familiar. Maybe if they’d run out of gas when they were younger I’d have recognized them. Because a lot of people I met or even just saw in Vietnam reminded me of people I know or know of here at home. You know how that is. Sometimes it was an actual physical resemblance and other times it was just how they held their cigarette or that they walked on their toes or something subtle like that. I wish I had photos of the Vietnamese doppelgangers of:

·  Tony Kesslau

·  Alex Wiley

·  Hunter Thompson

·  Adam Lent

·  Danelle Ryan (actually Patti did get a photo of her)

·  Peter Lorre

·  James Brown

·  Jason Wells

·  Robert Blake (the actor not the musician)

·  Marty Waychoff

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I know you didn’t ask, but I hope it’s OK if I offer a couple of points of constructive criticism. If you’re even still reading, that is. I didn’t expect this to be such a long letter, but once I got going I was just swept up in all these great memories I wanted to share with you because they’re part of our experience. Without these observations I would not have the clues necessary to make sweeping statements about your whole culture based on a brief visit or construct limiting stereotypes to share on Facebook. So thank you for indulging me. 

That said, one thing we do have here in the US that I think you might really like is called Rock and Roll. It’s a super good time! And even though I’m aware that you clearly know how to have a super incredible good time without rock music, I do also think you might be missing out. Other than ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain’, I don’t think I heard a single song of rock music in two months. Don’t misunderstand me: those are two great songs. We heard (and enjoyed) both more than once, incredibly. But there’s a ton more killer rock music songs, like ‘Kick Out the Jams,’ ‘Here Comes Sickness’ and ‘Somebody Get Me a Doctor’ (by Van Halen). These are just three examples.

I’d be happy to send you some records. I still have some stamps left from that post office across the street from Han Market in Da Nang where I also could have purchased laundry detergent or an open bottle of Suntori Whisky. (By the way, I still haven’t received the postcard I always send to myself from abroad. I mailed it from the Central Post Office at Buu dien Trung tam 1 in Hanoi at 5:06 on March 4. Maybe you could check on it if you have a sec? If you don’t know anyone at that office, no big whoop. Thank you!)

The only other feedback I have is a bit more delicate to broach and probably harder still for you to actually do anything about. Plus I’m sure you’ve heard it before. But dude you need to wash your butt. You have a beautiful country, however the condition it’s in is heartbreaking. Your air is some of the dirtiest in the world and your waterways are worse. Even so, it was the straight-up litter that was hardest for us to get past. I know you’re a developing country with an emerging middle class and that people are just trying to do the basic things and that there isn’t sufficient infrastructure and that plastic washes up on your coastlines from China and all the rest of it. I heard all the arguments. Not from your people as much as from westerners trying to rationalize what a mess the place is. I also understand it’s not a uniquely Vietnamese issue and a lot of Southeast Asia is the same. But there are at least partial solutions. And at some point, something’s gotta give.

This is coming from a dangerously hung-up, over-evolved wastestream-ogling eco pansy from the Pacific Northwest who would sooner carry a .5-liter plastic bottle in his hand every day until his death than just drop it on the ground. But there has to be some middle ground between that extreme and just DROPPING IT ON THE GROUND without even considering any concievable alternative. It starts with education. We used to have a litter problem here in the US before an Indian cried (he was actually Italian) and eventually shit got cleaned up. Seriously, all it took was one PSA (plus also then several decades of harsh corrective regulation and legislative policy implementation). And some dirty businesses went broke—too bad/so sad. The point is shit got clean or at least less-dirty. It has to start with awareness and maybe some peer pressure. You don’t have to turn people against each other for there to be some shared expectation that we’re all going at least consider putting garbage in a can labeled garbage. Recycling and composting and eliminating single-use plastics and actually methodically re-structuring the chemical arrangement of air and water—of course that takes decades. But the cigarette butts alone are like a second skin over your entire country! If dudes just pocketed their butts and put them in a garbage can on the way home—that alone would make a huge difference. I for one actually love that old men still sit together at tables on the sidewalk smoking and spitting. But there’s some low-hanging trash that could be disappeared without too much effort. It doesn’t have to ruin anyone’s day.

Anyway, I hope you’ll think about it. I had to say something.

Again, I really am sorry this note got so long, Vi. It wasn’t my intention. Patti and I dig you a lot and we hope to meet again. But there are also so many places we haven’t been, like Vienna and Puerto Rico. We’d like to go to India, but it seems pretty intense—maybe Sri Lanka is a good compromise. Hell, we haven’t even been to Italy, let alone Greece! We need to get a move on and plan to. Still, it would be great to see you again some day…

Until then, we’ll keep you in our thoughts, fondly recalling you whenever stirring a ca fe sua.

Thanks again for everything. Don’t take any wooden dongs!

Jeff & Patti Braimes—Bellingham, WA