Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Vietnam
I really don’t think it’s fair to judge a country when I’ve only visited one city—and that only for 3 full days. But that’s all the time I had for Vietnam…Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon. Some of you may remember ‘the fall of Saigon,’ April 30, 1975, the day the north Vietnamese rolled their tanks through the gates of Reunification Palace (obviously this is the new name, just as HCMC is the new name) and the Communists succeeded in ‘liberating’ the south. The Vietnam War is constantly painted as a war against foreign aggressors, but the fighting was happening before the US got involved and continued after as well.
Cu Chi Tunnels
We went on a trip to see the Cu Chi Tunnels, about two hours outside of Saigon. The Tunnels were used by the Vietcong so that they couldn’t be detected. The tunnels were very small, making it difficult for the ‘foreign-sized’ Americans to fit into them when they were discovered. Lim, our tour guide, had fought with the South Vietnamese army, then worked for the US after he was injured. I was seated next to him on the bus, so learned that two of his brothers left for the US right before the fall of Saigon and another went in the early 1990s after he was out of a reeducation camp (he’d been an officer). He also has a brother in Canada.
It was strange to hear this man speak of the ‘liberation’ of the south and the glory of the Vietcong when he himself had been fighting against it. Did he believe what he was saying? How did he reconcile himself to his past and his current job? Clearly, to keep the job, he had no choice but to follow the government line. But I wish I could have asked him more about this apparent paradox.
In the video before the tunnel tours, the picture was of a happy, peaceful, picnic-ing people who couldn’t understand why the Americans wanted to kill them. School girls and women took up arms against the foreigners and were treated with glory in the narration. The term “American-killing hero” was repeated countless times. I realized then the complications in a war like Vietnam, where typical non-combatants (children and women) fight, making them the enemy and, technically, targetable.
[An earlier visit to the Ho Chi Minh Museum showed pictures with captions like: “Guerilla girl forced at gun point the American pilot to put his hand up surrender” (insert punctuation so that the meaning is: girl makes pilot surrender). Or: “Responding to President Ho Chi Minh’s appeal Vietnamese women shoot down the American plane.” Or: “All citizens take part in defense of the motherland” against “American aggressors.”
A further sidenote from the HCM Museum: a picture of African slaves with caption: “Selling and buying slaves was one of the barbarous ways of exploitation acted by colonialists.” Under a picture of a lynching: “Death sentence carried out under lynch model—a savage trick to kill the Black applied by racial discrimination clique in first decades of the 20th century.” Both these photos had little to do with the subject matter, other than the fact that Uncle Ho had been in the US in late 1912 for few months.]
The tunnel tour ended in a surreal/tacky way. For a dollar a bullet, you could shoot a gun. There was a snack shop, so people bought ice cream cones. Two Canadian guys seemed the most excited about the gun-shooting thing (though I thought it was us Americans who were supposed to be all gun-happy) and one mentioned that in Cambodia, you can use an AK47, throw a hand grenade or even use a rocket launcher. It was disturbing.
We had met an American couple (teaching in Bangkok, Peter and Erin) at a restaurant the night before and had plans to get together that night for the woman’s birthday. They had gone on the same tour, but had a different guide, who was extremely anti-American and hostile, warning that “fat assed Americans” had gotten stuck in the tunnels last week. They mentioned some spoken word poetry by Jello Biafra (formerly of the Dead Presidents band) that the gun-ice cream bit of the tour reminded them of:
“Vietnam never happened! Vietnam never happened amusement park has pulled over our eyes with fun for the entire family. Thrill to Buddhist priest who set themselves on fire at noon. Be a part of the action at Kent state where you can show those demonstrators who's boss in our revolving Dirty Harry go-round. Then on to the defense industry kick back bumper cars go ahead blow-em up we'll just replace them at 20 times the price." ... "Our peace with honor roller coaster will destroy you in order to save you. The kids they'll love our petting zoo where you can feed overpriced McDonalds land cookies to our pen full of children deformed by Agent Orange."... "Vietman never happened."
War Remnants Museum
After leaving the tunnels, we went to the War Remnants Museum. The first exhibit we saw was of photographs taken by journalists who had been killed in the war. I was immediately reminded of Dan Eldon, a young journalist who was killed in Somalia and whose journals touched me deeply (his mother was from Cedar Rapids and he’d spend summers at Camp Wapsie, though he was raised in Kenya…he’s the kind of guy I could see myself marrying).
This was just a few days after the four contractors had been killed in Iraq, their bodies dragged through the street and mutilated. When I heard that, I immediately thought of the same thing happening to soldiers in Somalia in the early 1990s. Then, there on the wall, was a photo of a Vietcong solider being dragged behind a tank, 1966.
There was a picture of the Chinese Nung tribe, under the command of US Special Forces, hanging a Vietcong soldier upside down until he confessed that he’d fired into a church where refugees were seeking shelter (here, images of Rwanda, but also thoughts of how confessions coerced under physical torture are often untrue). Another photo showed US Allies interrogating a boy, pretending to shoot his father in the distance so that he will talk about local communist acts.
The images of one war tend to fade and blend into those images of any other war: bodies in the street, pooled blood, anguish on faces, warplanes, guns toted. It could have been countless wars—the same horror and tragedy. I remembered how I had once said—as a young, naïve, ambitious girl—that I wanted to end war everywhere, forever. I recently came upon the University for Peace, a UN sponsored university, where I am considering going to get a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights (one year, in Costa Rica).
A quote on the wall: “A war in which so many died for illusions, foolish causes, and mad dreams.”
We nearly left at this point, not realizing that there were two other exhibit halls. Now it became clear why this had been formerly called the War Crimes Museum. There were pictures of landmine victims, massacres, Agent Orange statistics, and most unsettling, two conjoined babies and a deformed third in a large jar with yellow liquid. The final hall had photos of anti-war demonstrations from around the world.
I was left wondering: will there be a museum like this in Iraq in 30 years? What would it take to mobilize Americans against the war in Iraq like they were for the Vietnam War?
Road Rules
In a city with 7 million people, there are 3 million motorbikes. I was impressed by the feats accomplished on a moto: carrying TVs, computers, mirrors taller than me, daring to carry newborn babies. The women often wore long gloves that came up to their biceps—protection from the sun. They had surgical-type face masks, but with decorations, to protect from the sun and smog.
In Cambodia, bikes were also popular, but the number couldn’t compare to HCMC. I think the difference is that there just isn’t as much disposable income in Cambodia yet. Those that managed to have a bike would squeeze their family of five on one!
In both countries, but especially Cambodia, women would wrap scarves over their faces. I couldn’t help but think of the Muslim niqab—where only the eyes are visible. The purpose here was practical, again protecting from dust and sun.
Traffic in Vietnam flowed on the right, like the US, though this wasn’t immediately clear to me. I kept getting confused and having to think about walking into our garage at home to realize that the steering wheel in US cars is on the left. (Am I right on that?!) In Cambodia, half the cars had steering wheels on the left, half on the right, and they drove on the…right…I think. (I just consulted this list to make sure!)
Cyclos
Keith and I had dinner with two of my Yale friends (Thanh-Tam and Marta) who happened to be visiting Vietnam at the same time we were there. It was good to see them, after losing touch for two years! They recommended a young, cute cyclo driver that had taken them around the day before (cyclos are bicycles with a little seat in the front of it, to carry passengers). Phoung and another driver took Keith and I to the Chinese Market the next day, stopping at a temple or two on the way. The trip was about 40 minutes. When we arrived, they said they could wait for us and take us back. We didn’t know how long we’d be and didn’t want to have to pay them for the whole day, so we said we’d just find our own way back.
We asked how much we should pay and Phoung said to pay what we wanted….which is annoying. We didn’t really know, though thought that TT and Marta had said something about 50000 dong. So that’s what we said…Phoung told us that wasn’t really enough, that they wanted 100,000 each. Now, if you’re gonna say we can pay what we want, why are you gonna then demand four times that amount?!?! We ended up giving them 50,000 each, double what we’d planned (that’s about $3.50 each). I was worried that we’d ripped them off, but was somehow simultaneously worried that we were being had. (I wasn’t worried about a few extra dollars that meant a lot more to them than to me, but I hate being a sucker…when you travel though, you kind of have to learn that you’re gonna get taken for a ride sometimes and just grin and bear it. There’s little use to getting an anxious or mad about it). My fears were allayed, however, when other cyclos started following us around, offering us rides back from where we came. Their starting price? 40,000.
We ended up walking back, wandering the city without a map, intuiting which way we’d come from. We ended up by the river—not the most direct path—but made it back to our hotel area eventually. Along the way, we stopped at a typical restaurant, with low plastic lawn chairs sitting on the sidewalk. Life here is certainly lived in the streets. A favorite pastime seems to be watching people walk by from the chairs. Many restaurants have short tables, so that when adults sit on the stools, their knees are higher than their waist and they look like they’re sitting in a kindergarten classroom. Storefronts lead back into living rooms. There isn’t much separation between public and private spheres. The architecture reminded me of San Francisco quite a bit, with a few colorful buildings here and there and narrow houses in connected rows (taxes were determined by the width of the house, so that it was economically smarter to make skinny, long houses).
By the time we got back, we were tired and hungry…and in need of an ATM. We were prime targets for a cyclo driver who had cheerfully greeted us that morning: an offer to take us to an ATM, both of us on one cyclo, for 15000 dong ($1US). I was not in the mood to traipse about, looking for an ATM and figured it was only a buck. Keith climbed in and I balanced on his lap as our cyclo driver pushed out into traffic. We were told, “People in Saigon are happy, people in the north are not.” We thought we’d give the driver 20,000, since he’d taken the both of us…when we handed it out to him, he laughed and said, no, no, no, fifty thousand, not fifteen! I believe that this was all a ploy, completely intentional, a way to mislead us to agree to go with him and then extract money under the guise of a communication misunderstanding. We aren’t the kind of travelers to yell and argue—we paid and then complained about it to ourselves. We didn’t take anymore cyclos after that.
Odds and Ends
*Considering the country’s Communist, I was surprised to see so much game-playing going on (the Communist image goes: lots of concrete and metal, huge buildings with no aesthetically-pleasing architecture…unhappy workers, toiling, never smiling…the sky is gray, matching the surroundings and the mood.) There was a hacky-sack type game, played with what looked like a badminton shuttle, called dakou. Jumping rope, dominoes, bingo. I watched one card game under way and determined that it was Revolution. There was another street-side game that I couldn’t liken to any game I knew.
*Funeral procession outside of our hostel at 7:15 am. A white van-hearse pulls up and stops right under our second story balcony. Inside, a gold-gilded coffin. Behind, a band playing, with a baton twirler even. People are throwing paper money, a platter with a photo and candles is carried forth and placed between two huge floral wreaths. Traffic continues to whiz by. Then, all of a sudden, the band is breaking up, the women are settling into jump seats on either side of the coffin. The band leader (in a white uniform, with blue stripes down the sides, a hate and whistle), puts the wreaths on the top of the van and it pulls out. A big greyhound type bus ahead carries more mourners. It’s over, all of a sudden, and we’re not really sure what we just saw (or even if we had dreamt it).
*Vietnamese food if fabulous. I’d only ever heard of pho before, but there is much, much more! Sometimes the meals ordered would turn out to just be a plate of meat. Maybe we were supposed to be ordering rice to eat with it, but how were we to know?
*I’m sitting in a restaurant my first day in Saigon, before Keith has arrived. People come in and out, selling photocopied books, Zippos, postcards. My back is to the door, but out of the corner of my eye, I see a woman coming into the restaurant, crawling on all fours. I’m always unsure what to do in situations like this—I tend to ignore, but then feel an awful sense of guilt (by ignoring, dehumanizing). This woman has wooden clog-type sandals on her hands and her legs don’t look like they work below her knees. She is selling postcards and, because I need postcards, I look. A pack of 10 is $1, she tells me (US dollars are used here as well as dong, but not as commonly as they will be in Cambodia). Her English is surprisingly good and she was very nice. As I’m looking through the options, a man at a nearby table says he doesn’t want any postcards, but tries to hand her money. She refuses, saying that she is working, not begging. That confirmed my decision to buy from her. (Later, in Cambodia, I would see a sign on a street stall that said, ‘I quit begging and started working.’ Such a statement makes me more compelled to buy.) I determined later that I could have bought the same postcards for a little less than half of what I paid, but I didn’t mind paying the extra to help the woman.
I really don’t think it’s fair to judge a country when I’ve only visited one city—and that only for 3 full days. But that’s all the time I had for Vietnam…Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon. Some of you may remember ‘the fall of Saigon,’ April 30, 1975, the day the north Vietnamese rolled their tanks through the gates of Reunification Palace (obviously this is the new name, just as HCMC is the new name) and the Communists succeeded in ‘liberating’ the south. The Vietnam War is constantly painted as a war against foreign aggressors, but the fighting was happening before the US got involved and continued after as well.
Cu Chi Tunnels
We went on a trip to see the Cu Chi Tunnels, about two hours outside of Saigon. The Tunnels were used by the Vietcong so that they couldn’t be detected. The tunnels were very small, making it difficult for the ‘foreign-sized’ Americans to fit into them when they were discovered. Lim, our tour guide, had fought with the South Vietnamese army, then worked for the US after he was injured. I was seated next to him on the bus, so learned that two of his brothers left for the US right before the fall of Saigon and another went in the early 1990s after he was out of a reeducation camp (he’d been an officer). He also has a brother in Canada.
It was strange to hear this man speak of the ‘liberation’ of the south and the glory of the Vietcong when he himself had been fighting against it. Did he believe what he was saying? How did he reconcile himself to his past and his current job? Clearly, to keep the job, he had no choice but to follow the government line. But I wish I could have asked him more about this apparent paradox.
In the video before the tunnel tours, the picture was of a happy, peaceful, picnic-ing people who couldn’t understand why the Americans wanted to kill them. School girls and women took up arms against the foreigners and were treated with glory in the narration. The term “American-killing hero” was repeated countless times. I realized then the complications in a war like Vietnam, where typical non-combatants (children and women) fight, making them the enemy and, technically, targetable.
[An earlier visit to the Ho Chi Minh Museum showed pictures with captions like: “Guerilla girl forced at gun point the American pilot to put his hand up surrender” (insert punctuation so that the meaning is: girl makes pilot surrender). Or: “Responding to President Ho Chi Minh’s appeal Vietnamese women shoot down the American plane.” Or: “All citizens take part in defense of the motherland” against “American aggressors.”
A further sidenote from the HCM Museum: a picture of African slaves with caption: “Selling and buying slaves was one of the barbarous ways of exploitation acted by colonialists.” Under a picture of a lynching: “Death sentence carried out under lynch model—a savage trick to kill the Black applied by racial discrimination clique in first decades of the 20th century.” Both these photos had little to do with the subject matter, other than the fact that Uncle Ho had been in the US in late 1912 for few months.]
The tunnel tour ended in a surreal/tacky way. For a dollar a bullet, you could shoot a gun. There was a snack shop, so people bought ice cream cones. Two Canadian guys seemed the most excited about the gun-shooting thing (though I thought it was us Americans who were supposed to be all gun-happy) and one mentioned that in Cambodia, you can use an AK47, throw a hand grenade or even use a rocket launcher. It was disturbing.
We had met an American couple (teaching in Bangkok, Peter and Erin) at a restaurant the night before and had plans to get together that night for the woman’s birthday. They had gone on the same tour, but had a different guide, who was extremely anti-American and hostile, warning that “fat assed Americans” had gotten stuck in the tunnels last week. They mentioned some spoken word poetry by Jello Biafra (formerly of the Dead Presidents band) that the gun-ice cream bit of the tour reminded them of:
“Vietnam never happened! Vietnam never happened amusement park has pulled over our eyes with fun for the entire family. Thrill to Buddhist priest who set themselves on fire at noon. Be a part of the action at Kent state where you can show those demonstrators who's boss in our revolving Dirty Harry go-round. Then on to the defense industry kick back bumper cars go ahead blow-em up we'll just replace them at 20 times the price." ... "Our peace with honor roller coaster will destroy you in order to save you. The kids they'll love our petting zoo where you can feed overpriced McDonalds land cookies to our pen full of children deformed by Agent Orange."... "Vietman never happened."
War Remnants Museum
After leaving the tunnels, we went to the War Remnants Museum. The first exhibit we saw was of photographs taken by journalists who had been killed in the war. I was immediately reminded of Dan Eldon, a young journalist who was killed in Somalia and whose journals touched me deeply (his mother was from Cedar Rapids and he’d spend summers at Camp Wapsie, though he was raised in Kenya…he’s the kind of guy I could see myself marrying).
This was just a few days after the four contractors had been killed in Iraq, their bodies dragged through the street and mutilated. When I heard that, I immediately thought of the same thing happening to soldiers in Somalia in the early 1990s. Then, there on the wall, was a photo of a Vietcong solider being dragged behind a tank, 1966.
There was a picture of the Chinese Nung tribe, under the command of US Special Forces, hanging a Vietcong soldier upside down until he confessed that he’d fired into a church where refugees were seeking shelter (here, images of Rwanda, but also thoughts of how confessions coerced under physical torture are often untrue). Another photo showed US Allies interrogating a boy, pretending to shoot his father in the distance so that he will talk about local communist acts.
The images of one war tend to fade and blend into those images of any other war: bodies in the street, pooled blood, anguish on faces, warplanes, guns toted. It could have been countless wars—the same horror and tragedy. I remembered how I had once said—as a young, naïve, ambitious girl—that I wanted to end war everywhere, forever. I recently came upon the University for Peace, a UN sponsored university, where I am considering going to get a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights (one year, in Costa Rica).
A quote on the wall: “A war in which so many died for illusions, foolish causes, and mad dreams.”
We nearly left at this point, not realizing that there were two other exhibit halls. Now it became clear why this had been formerly called the War Crimes Museum. There were pictures of landmine victims, massacres, Agent Orange statistics, and most unsettling, two conjoined babies and a deformed third in a large jar with yellow liquid. The final hall had photos of anti-war demonstrations from around the world.
I was left wondering: will there be a museum like this in Iraq in 30 years? What would it take to mobilize Americans against the war in Iraq like they were for the Vietnam War?
Road Rules
In a city with 7 million people, there are 3 million motorbikes. I was impressed by the feats accomplished on a moto: carrying TVs, computers, mirrors taller than me, daring to carry newborn babies. The women often wore long gloves that came up to their biceps—protection from the sun. They had surgical-type face masks, but with decorations, to protect from the sun and smog.
In Cambodia, bikes were also popular, but the number couldn’t compare to HCMC. I think the difference is that there just isn’t as much disposable income in Cambodia yet. Those that managed to have a bike would squeeze their family of five on one!
In both countries, but especially Cambodia, women would wrap scarves over their faces. I couldn’t help but think of the Muslim niqab—where only the eyes are visible. The purpose here was practical, again protecting from dust and sun.
Traffic in Vietnam flowed on the right, like the US, though this wasn’t immediately clear to me. I kept getting confused and having to think about walking into our garage at home to realize that the steering wheel in US cars is on the left. (Am I right on that?!) In Cambodia, half the cars had steering wheels on the left, half on the right, and they drove on the…right…I think. (I just consulted this list to make sure!)
Cyclos
Keith and I had dinner with two of my Yale friends (Thanh-Tam and Marta) who happened to be visiting Vietnam at the same time we were there. It was good to see them, after losing touch for two years! They recommended a young, cute cyclo driver that had taken them around the day before (cyclos are bicycles with a little seat in the front of it, to carry passengers). Phoung and another driver took Keith and I to the Chinese Market the next day, stopping at a temple or two on the way. The trip was about 40 minutes. When we arrived, they said they could wait for us and take us back. We didn’t know how long we’d be and didn’t want to have to pay them for the whole day, so we said we’d just find our own way back.
We asked how much we should pay and Phoung said to pay what we wanted….which is annoying. We didn’t really know, though thought that TT and Marta had said something about 50000 dong. So that’s what we said…Phoung told us that wasn’t really enough, that they wanted 100,000 each. Now, if you’re gonna say we can pay what we want, why are you gonna then demand four times that amount?!?! We ended up giving them 50,000 each, double what we’d planned (that’s about $3.50 each). I was worried that we’d ripped them off, but was somehow simultaneously worried that we were being had. (I wasn’t worried about a few extra dollars that meant a lot more to them than to me, but I hate being a sucker…when you travel though, you kind of have to learn that you’re gonna get taken for a ride sometimes and just grin and bear it. There’s little use to getting an anxious or mad about it). My fears were allayed, however, when other cyclos started following us around, offering us rides back from where we came. Their starting price? 40,000.
We ended up walking back, wandering the city without a map, intuiting which way we’d come from. We ended up by the river—not the most direct path—but made it back to our hotel area eventually. Along the way, we stopped at a typical restaurant, with low plastic lawn chairs sitting on the sidewalk. Life here is certainly lived in the streets. A favorite pastime seems to be watching people walk by from the chairs. Many restaurants have short tables, so that when adults sit on the stools, their knees are higher than their waist and they look like they’re sitting in a kindergarten classroom. Storefronts lead back into living rooms. There isn’t much separation between public and private spheres. The architecture reminded me of San Francisco quite a bit, with a few colorful buildings here and there and narrow houses in connected rows (taxes were determined by the width of the house, so that it was economically smarter to make skinny, long houses).
By the time we got back, we were tired and hungry…and in need of an ATM. We were prime targets for a cyclo driver who had cheerfully greeted us that morning: an offer to take us to an ATM, both of us on one cyclo, for 15000 dong ($1US). I was not in the mood to traipse about, looking for an ATM and figured it was only a buck. Keith climbed in and I balanced on his lap as our cyclo driver pushed out into traffic. We were told, “People in Saigon are happy, people in the north are not.” We thought we’d give the driver 20,000, since he’d taken the both of us…when we handed it out to him, he laughed and said, no, no, no, fifty thousand, not fifteen! I believe that this was all a ploy, completely intentional, a way to mislead us to agree to go with him and then extract money under the guise of a communication misunderstanding. We aren’t the kind of travelers to yell and argue—we paid and then complained about it to ourselves. We didn’t take anymore cyclos after that.
Odds and Ends
*Considering the country’s Communist, I was surprised to see so much game-playing going on (the Communist image goes: lots of concrete and metal, huge buildings with no aesthetically-pleasing architecture…unhappy workers, toiling, never smiling…the sky is gray, matching the surroundings and the mood.) There was a hacky-sack type game, played with what looked like a badminton shuttle, called dakou. Jumping rope, dominoes, bingo. I watched one card game under way and determined that it was Revolution. There was another street-side game that I couldn’t liken to any game I knew.
*Funeral procession outside of our hostel at 7:15 am. A white van-hearse pulls up and stops right under our second story balcony. Inside, a gold-gilded coffin. Behind, a band playing, with a baton twirler even. People are throwing paper money, a platter with a photo and candles is carried forth and placed between two huge floral wreaths. Traffic continues to whiz by. Then, all of a sudden, the band is breaking up, the women are settling into jump seats on either side of the coffin. The band leader (in a white uniform, with blue stripes down the sides, a hate and whistle), puts the wreaths on the top of the van and it pulls out. A big greyhound type bus ahead carries more mourners. It’s over, all of a sudden, and we’re not really sure what we just saw (or even if we had dreamt it).
*Vietnamese food if fabulous. I’d only ever heard of pho before, but there is much, much more! Sometimes the meals ordered would turn out to just be a plate of meat. Maybe we were supposed to be ordering rice to eat with it, but how were we to know?
*I’m sitting in a restaurant my first day in Saigon, before Keith has arrived. People come in and out, selling photocopied books, Zippos, postcards. My back is to the door, but out of the corner of my eye, I see a woman coming into the restaurant, crawling on all fours. I’m always unsure what to do in situations like this—I tend to ignore, but then feel an awful sense of guilt (by ignoring, dehumanizing). This woman has wooden clog-type sandals on her hands and her legs don’t look like they work below her knees. She is selling postcards and, because I need postcards, I look. A pack of 10 is $1, she tells me (US dollars are used here as well as dong, but not as commonly as they will be in Cambodia). Her English is surprisingly good and she was very nice. As I’m looking through the options, a man at a nearby table says he doesn’t want any postcards, but tries to hand her money. She refuses, saying that she is working, not begging. That confirmed my decision to buy from her. (Later, in Cambodia, I would see a sign on a street stall that said, ‘I quit begging and started working.’ Such a statement makes me more compelled to buy.) I determined later that I could have bought the same postcards for a little less than half of what I paid, but I didn’t mind paying the extra to help the woman.
