Saturday, March 05, 2005

Goodbye, Saigon 

So. I'm back from Vietnam, a tad browner, with new hair, glasses and pyjamas, and lungs blackened from the smog of Saigon. A little more confident in my ability to brave third-world toilets and trains. A little surer of my "roots", rid of that inherited Viet Kieu scorn for the motherland, the self-deception of displacement trauma.

I'm feeling some reverse culture shock in this country of whiteness, quiet and actual road laws! Already nostalgic for the wind in my hair on the back of a motorbike, the scent of slow-drip brewed coffee drunk while watching the peopled night, the mountains guarding quivering paddies. Hue's tranquil Perfume River, the sage and sweet Montagnard children in Sapa, the vibrant Mekong river life of my mother's childhood summers. The human pace of cyclos and the colour of markets. The flocks of white-robed, long-haired girls riding home from school on bikes.

Yet glad to be home, glad escape the sordid rich-poor politics, the uneasiness in the presence of a yellow-starred red flag or a uniform of any sort, the suffocating unsaid and unsayable in family relations. The southern heat and the northern damp. The nagging guilt before beggars and old-eyed children hawking knicknacks. The shame of hearing Viet Kieu complaining how backward Vietnam is compared to their new homes, as if dollars and English gave them instant superiority.

It has been educational. Not so much in the capital-C Culture sense, for my knowledge of Vietnamese history and lore is still sadly lacking, despite an overload of temples, palaces, mausoleums and such. But I've seen how people live, in leaf-roofed huts, on boats, in 2m-wide five-storied houses with DVD players but no hot water. And I've seen that the habits we anglified Viets despise in our fobby brethren - lack of respect for public hygiene and laws, a sort of me-first-and-screw-the-rest attitude - are a social phenomenon, born of life under an authoritarian government that turns a blind eye on petty misdemeanors. Why stop for pedestrians when no one else does? Why refrain from smoking in enclosed carriages when the authorities themselves do the same? I've also learnt that there is no sharp distinction between the evil "real" Viet Cong and the "innocent" people: a senior Saigon bureaucrat, quietly-spoken and handsome, graciously entertained my mum and I at his house; the jovial distant relative who hosted us in Hanoi had been in the infantry; my own great-aunt has contacts in the Cong An police corps.

From my old distorted, one-dimensional perspective of Vietnam gleaned from half-understood conversations, war movies and Year 9 history, I have this new version of the ancestral homeland: layered, complicated, ugly in many ways and beautiful in others. I still have a long way to go before understanding this heritage, but I'm glad to have made a start.

As promised, I have a 100-page+ dead-tree journal (Moleskine, ahem) of the actual trip, mostly of the "I did this...and this...ate that..." pedigree. In time I'll post it on a separate blog once I type it up. I need to figure out how to upload my 500+ photos without breaking the internet.

# posted at 12:19 am

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