The Mystery of Vietnam

It is low season and Vietnam is packed. My Japanese picture-spoilers from Cambodia made the jump here too, together with a quarter of the population of China and practically all of Australia. Everywhere you go, camera bearing crowds surround you, yet the locals insist that this is nothing. Same goes for the heat. Any water we consume finds an immediate way out through the forehead, down the nose, dripping from the ear lobe, and running from armpit to waist, from breast to belly, from inner thigh to the ground, giving the impression that we are carrying our own rain cloud. But the guide assures us that next month it will get "crazy hot." Really?

Vietnam is a nation of welcoming beautiful people. They are happy that we are here. They want more of us. And apparently we are listening, because we keep coming. One would expect, however, that they might welcome the world, but only tolerate Americans. One would be wrong.

After the many years of war, the heavy casualties, and the enduring effects, the Vietnamese welcome Americans with open arms, a big smile, and with English as their second language. Not French, the language of their prior colonial invaders. Not Russian, of their communist friends. Not Chinese, of their active neighbors in trade of past and present days. Nopes. Every uniformed school kid can't way to say "hello, were are you from?" and if you answer USA, they've hit the jackpot and hellos multiply from all their friends; every young person mumbles a few basic words of English; and everyone immediately translates their crazy currency to dollars so that you (whether you are American or Chinese) can understand how much the several thousand Dong they've quoted you will deplete your budget.

Something important is missing for me, and that's the written word. Yes, there are thousands of American written novels about Vietnam, from our point of view, of course. And yes, we continue to write them even when other wars would seem to take precedence. In Vietnamese bookstores, however, you find only relatively few titles on the war, half of which are dedicated to the cult of Ho Chi Mihn, the two classics of the area (Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Graham Greene's The Quiet American) and miscellaneous contemporary fiction that has nothing to do with Vietnam. When looking in Hanoi bookstores, I only found two authors that may remotely fit the bill, a Vu Trong Phung, author of a colonial era book rediscovered in the last five years, Dumb Luck, and a new author, Thuan, who has published two books, both in French, both not yet translated to English, and both involving Vietnamese in France.

But of the contemporary fictional narrative that brings a country to life way better than any travel guide can, there is nothing. The country is busy getting itself up and rushing towards prosperity. Everyone is out on their motorbikes at all hours of day or night. Perhaps there isn't time to write. Perhaps there is, but it has yet to be translated. This country doesn't have a 'farang' in love with it to make it come alive with (of all things) murder mysteries like John Burdett does to Thailand, Colin Cotterill to Laos, and others to Cambodia. Why not? Perhaps it's time this mystery also gets solved. After all, and as much as it continues to keep an interesting balance between past and future, Vietnam doesn't seem to seriously miss anything else.

Hoi An, day and night

Hoi An

And more Hoi An (there can never be enough...)

Hue

More amazing Hue

Hue and the flame trees

rice paddies and rivers

Laos - Part 2

Beautiful Poverty

As far as discoveries go, regardless of how there’s nothing left to discover, we all like to feel like Columbus (or Marco Polo here) and pontificate as if no one, ever, has set foot before wherever we happen to be today. Me too. So bear with me.

In that spirit, I was enchanted on the road from Pakse to the Si Phan Don, with the setting sun, and the red earth, and the dwellings on stilts, the ladies in sihns (colorful traditional skirts), the kids riding adult motorcycles, the trees, the hammocks, the cocks (as in the husbands of hens) that crossed the road and the pigs that stayed in their troths. So pretty.

Later in Don Kohne I took fabulous sunset pictures from my floating house in the Mekong. The palm trees against a glorious setting sun. The river. The blue sky. Notice the next picture, rice fields and water after a rain…

Sunset view from my room.

Next picture, rice fields and water...

Heck, I’d have to give up my life and figure out which NGO of the probably thousands operating in South East Asia I want to join. What would be my cause? There are many worthwhile ones to choose from. Children, women, land mines, education, environment…? In this remote (to us) beauty, best instincts come to the surface and even the more rat-race committed of stiffs may consider tossing the suit, donning a sarong and joining the mission.

Except for the heat.

Yes, travel guides and personal memoirs do mention the heat. But do they really? It’s hot. It’s humid. Your clothes, however minimal, stick to you like a second skin you want to shed and can’t. The air sticks to you. The smells cling and linger. Hats do little. 280 SPF is useless. You start considering night-time-only NGO’s. But when the sun sets, after you’ve captured the beautiful sunset for friends and family who probably think you’d do as well in Hawaii, that’s when the next ‘except’ begins.

Except for the insects.

Notice I say insects. Not just mosquitoes, which can make you sick and make you scratch like a monkey, but all kinds of gnats of which the most prominent is a tiny moth-like creature attracted by the billion to the lights (particularly the one over your food) and, in the absence of light, to the lightest object around: you.

Noon starts looking better.

Except for the dirt.

Heat and insects, whether sufficiently described to ward off finicky travelers like myself, are part of the literature. Perhaps we fool ourselves (I fooled myself) that it was the pioneers of the East India Trading Company that really fell prey to the elements and us, tourists of the twenty-first century, would not. Feel free to go “duh” at my shock. The dirt, though, I haven’t seen described anywhere. Are guidebook writers not looking down? Do they expect it because the country is poor?

A blast from the past...

For the record, people here as as clean as you or I. They bathe, brush their teeth, sweep and keep home, restaurant and hotel clean. Other than that, there is rubbish anywhere you look. Plastic bottles, wrappers, papers and cans litter the areas around houses, the sides of all roads, boat landings, beaches and water in rice fields. Piles of it accumulate under the wobbly houses (leaning into each other like drunks at dawn) of Nakasong's port.

My point.

The Mekong flows past you with bubbles of a beige pus bobbing up and down, as oozing pimples about to explode. And you want me to set my ass in an inner tube and hope my sphincter holds?

No one has a clean record on cleanliness. At the time Europeans were ‘discovering’ the East, their chambermaids at home emptied the contents of the chamber pot out the window and onto the street. Much later, Don Draper and family, in an early episode of Mad Men, left the picnic ground by tossing into the grass the remains of their day. We have created feel good Earth Days to pick up trash from beaches and parks. And how many a college boy (or girl) would think the ground at Don Det and Don Khone an improvement on their dorm room?

I hear that tours of urban ghetto areas, dangerous, devoid of beauty and probably dirtier, are becoming a tourist trend. I see, however, a difference between the degrading slums around the megalopoli of the world, and those remote places in our planet endowed with this exuberant, beautiful poverty that inspires our senses, transports us in time and makes us want to be better than we are.

Another beautiful afternoon.

In pursuit of this beauty, some endure days sitting in cramped buses with the neighbor’s chicken napping in their lap and a pig squealing in their ear, rip new Nikes in rocky streams, and loose two pounds a day from the sauna effect of sleeping under a corrugated tin roof in 100 degree weather. If you did that for an afternoon in South Central, you probably deserve getting shot.

From the palm trees, to the river, to the dwellings and the fields, and the natives smiling sa bai di (hello!), to the ratty fishing nets that they throw so photogenically over the water, the Si Phan Don has beauty in spades. And the rubbish in the ground and on the surface of its life source breaks this little tidy old lady’s heart.

Transportation

We do care. But we talk about the environment only as a big thing, the kind that we go to governments with. That makes us rally about industry that pollutes. We are aware (or are we?) of how much trash as tourists we add to the mix (just think cruise ships). But is anyone looking at the ground beneath their feet? Why not, then, add to the list of NGOs a new battalion, a duster crop if you will, of mighty maid volunteers ready with broom, hose and recyclable trash bags, lending a hand and getting the world ready for tea?

Seriously.

Laos - Part 1

Colin Cotterill, a British expat based in Thailand, is the author of a mystery series that centers on Dr. Siri Paiboun, the seventy-two-year-old People’s Democratic Republic of Laos reluctant and unqualified one and only coroner. While the first book in the series (The Coroner’s Lunch) appeared in 2004, the time of the action is the 1970’s. Dr. Siri, with a friend in the politburo as old as himself, a cast of well-intentioned misfits, and a lot of ingenuity, sets to unravel the mysteries that the dead bring to him. It helps that he is directly in touch with the spirit world.

While in the Si Phan Don (also known as four thousand islands, an area of the Mekong on the southernmost end of Laos), with temperatures soaring upwards of 100 and humidity nearing 80%, the body wanted shade, air conditioning, horizontality and a book. I read the first two of Dr. Siri’s adventures and what a lovely intro he is to a country that doesn’t seem to have changed much since 1976. Poor as a rat (he and the country), smart as a whip (that would be just him), and with a mordant sense of humor (ditto), Dr. Siri is a hero for the seventies and our times. Through him I’ve learned about the Lao relationship with communism and animism, about how much one can do with barely nothing, and about the heat. “Hot, isn’t it?” seems to replace hello as a salutation, and that from people used to it.

Mr. Cotterill, who just turned sixty, published his first book in 2000 and has recently finished the draft of book number twenty something (he’s so prolific, it’s hard to count). Imagine the output if he hadn’t waited. In Laos, besides accounts of a war the U.S. never waged but which nonetheless killed, maimed or displaced hundreds of thousands of Lao, when it comes to any other type of writing, Mr. Cotterill is all there is. Every country should be this lucky.

If you have a minute, check out his site, or his books, even if you never plan to get lost this way. FYI, I get no royalties for the plug. Just glad to have ‘discovered’ a good one.

Notes on Angkor Wat

Exhibit 1

Early in the morning, crowds gather at the Angkor Wat enclosure, facing the temple, waiting for the sun to rise. Hundreds of people (it is low season), some of them deeply hung over from the night before on Pub Street, get out of bed very early, or never get in at all, to come witness this magic moment. The big photo op. As photo ops go, it is spectacular. See Exhibit 1.

It is customary to follow the process by walking through the compound snapping pictures, leaving no stone undigitized, with particular privilege given to the stone + pumpkin-robed monk combo, a sure candidate for the display wall. I was thusly occupied while I happened upon Exhibit 2 (note minuscule cross legged dude at the top opening of this structure) whose picture I took and who returned the favor by staring down in contempt.

Exhibit 2

My picture-taking offended his sense of the divine, which he of the lotus position experienced, while I of the iPhone did not. Probably from Fairfax, I thought. It makes one wonder how he would have handled my breakfast neighbor who dared declare that “all stones look the same to me.”

I suspect that Angkor Wat draws over two million visitors a year because everyone has put it on their bucket list—a concept I myself endorse, but which might require some rules, like including only places you’d actually like to see. This might cut the number of visitors. Probably not great for the Cambodian economy. But really good for an ancient city we are trampling to death.

Exhibit 3

When it comes to literature, the massive complex of Khmer structures owes a big deal of its popularity not so much to picture books (which get shoved in your face together with the Pol Pot genocide and the postcard sets by the numerous vendors,) or the growing crop of Angkor Wat based historical novels, but to a comic book – Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, particularly to its movie version with Angelina Jolie traipsing through Ta Phrom, the tree temple, see Exhibit 3, which is now in danger of getting further ruined in spite of all restoration efforts because of the excessive number of visitors it attracts due to its association with Hollywood royalty.

All of which to say that to get pictures like these:

You'll have to fight for position with crowds like these, including all my Japanese friends of the depopulated prefecture I've mentioned before.

One tiny recommendation. Skip the bike. Hire a tuk tuk. You may get to know a real Khmer, you’ll avoid sunstroke, and your legs will live to walk another day, for your second visit, or your third.

Because it’s that big. And it deserves repeated admiration from those who get a happy kick at the sight of the first stone, reassured by the knowledge that even the monks, see Exhibit last, pull out their iPhones and take a shot like the rest of us.

Exhibit last

Reading in Cambodia

In 1975, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Pehn, capital of Cambodia, forcing the population to abandon town to work in rural communes. During their three years in power they basically bludgeoned to death a quarter of the country's population (2 out of 7 million). A genocide of this brutality and magnitude leaves painful scars that should come up, one way or another, in literature. Americans were introduced to this period mostly by Sydney Schanberg's personal recollection that was converted into the movie The Killing Fields, which in turn became the basis for Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, as close to a piece of writing as a movie can get. Survivors have written numerous first person accounts (First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung; When Broken Glass Floats, Charithy Him, etc.) Bios and studies of Pol Pot and several of his generals also abound.

These historical accounts, together with postcard sets of 10 at the price of US $1, are what street peddlers in Phnom Pehn, and curio shops in Siem Reap, push incessantly to the throngs of tourists who are keeping this poor country's economy alive. Sex tourists and the middle class have joined the strings of budget travelers who, for a few decades now, have chosen South East Asia for their leisurely sabbaticals pre-job, marriage, children and divorce, when they come back for the sex.

Siem Reap (stepping stone to Angkor Wat) seems to have more hotels than it has inhabitants. Even in low season, the influx is massive. I can picture a lonely person in Japan, perhaps he was ill, perhaps he didn't get the memo, wondering why all of a sudden his entire prefecture has emptied of people. Wonder no more. They are all here. Though the same phenomenon is probably occurring in towns in Poland, China, Australia, Russia, or The Netherlands and a couple suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri (the state, by the way, commonly used to represent Cambodia's land mass). Tourists of all budgets and from all over the world are perfect targets for regular offers of plastic wrapped books about 'killee fieds' and 'Cambodia geenocy,' while an army of tuk tuks waits in siege at every corner, hoping to transport you to the Irish Pub at the end of the block.

This is a country of contrasts, like so many others, that has adapted its traditional way of life to cater to the needs of the better to do farang (foreigner) with money to spend. And same as I'm happy that next to traditional Khmer cuisine (of which I am quite fond, actually) restaurants also offer iced lattes, nachos supreme, Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and occasional air conditioning, when it comes to reading I wanted something other than a war documentary. I wanted a novel.

Had I done any serious research before I left town, I would have known that the NYT best seller, In The Shadow of the Banyan, tells the fictionalized story of its author, Vaddey Ratner, a survivor of the above-mentioned regime. As a novel, it is a candidate for my reading pile. Serendipity, however, and the catchy title of Phnom Pehn Express brought me to a different and most enjoyable read.

Like most any other novels about the region, it has been written by a farang, Johan Smits. It's fast. It touches on all things I experienced in Phnom Pehn in a thirty-four hour stay: the heat; the smelly food; the crazy traffic with barely a street light (for show), inefficient traffic cops, tuk-tuks, a lot of dust and near suicidal motorcycles carrying up to four people and an assortment of cargo that may include a whole coop of live poultry, wall sized glass panes, any length of tubes, enough bricks for two houses, several full suitcases and infants sitting on the handle bars; the original Happy Pizza a few doors down from my hotel; the independence monument; the love of karaoke; the killing fields memorial; the noise pollution; the deep fried crickets.... There is also a mystery, told in the style of a comedy of errors (channeling Carl Hiaasen in Phnom Pehn) which is very fun to read.

Reading in the pool, Frangipani Villa, Siem Reap

If you are traveling or have traveled to Phnom Pehn recently, and want to be entertained and feel like an insider, this is as good as any summer beach read, perfect for a lazy afternoon poolside in Siem Reap. (I would only recommend that Mr. Smits get a good editor. Style-wise, John LeCarre, or Carl Hiaasen, he is not. A little fine tuning will go a long way.)

It was while at the pool that I found a recent article in the Phnom Pehn Post (click here if interested: Phnom Pehn Post - article re Cambodia and the novel) that answered a number of my questions about other good Cambodian fiction. Options will not take more than a shelf or two at your local B&N, but I would gladly prolong my stay to get through many of them, if only to continue enjoying the beauty and hospitality of this country.

This, by the way, is what you'll get from me in lieu of a proper blog. I won't tell you what I had for dinner (not the crickets) or what time I got up. Unless it fits to tell the story of a book.

Saigon traffic

Independence Monument

The Mekong meets the Tonle Sap

The Mekong, outside my hotel

Royal Palace, Saigon