Exit Wounds. Episode 15: APOLIGEPIC

Forgive me friends for I have sinned, it has been 5 months since my last ablution. Something should have been done about this a long time ago, before it became a little tardy, then awkwardly delayed, then obscenely late and now offensively overdue. But it hasn’t so this is where we are.

I’d also like to apologise for the SMS.ac automated letter. It’s a crap and confusing service from what I can tell. Bebo shall suffice.

OK, by now I should have compiled my tales abroad in Thailand and Lao, and my mad cap fortnight with Patty ‘n’ Nick Goannas, my loony Lunar New Year recon mission to the Mekong with Em, Chemical Johnny ‘n’ Clair ‘BigHair’ Baxterdetentioncentre to rendezvous with my guy on the inside K-wah. But a fatal mistake (in a literary sense) was made on my part; I didn’t take notes as I went and consequently all my attempts at reliving the events on paper lack any of the necessary immediacy that travel stories demand. If completed it’ll appear on the blog.

I have been delaying any other correspondence until the completion of the aforementioned episode, but now five months later, the guilt of silence is getting to me. Better to say anything, rather than nothing at all… right? So I’ve canned that episode and let my mind roam, the result is seven-thousand words of reflective ramblings. My only advice in dealing with the volume is this a) don’t read it. B) print it out, it’s a lot less daunting that way.

To begin with I’ve had writers block. Not a stonewall on my psyche, rather a constant stream of distractions. One being a great girlfriend, two being social demands, three a decent workload (still only 24 hours a week teaching, but many more writing material for friend’s websites.) The fourth reason is a string of good literature. Here are the three time-thieves that you should punish the pages of.

The Dragons Journey – Duy Long Nguyen.
An amazing biography of a Vietnamese child who grew up through this countries most horrific phase. A street fighter, gang leader, smuggler. Escaped on a boat, found lodging in Australia. Then triumphed amid the gang boom in Cabramatta and ended up best mate at masseur to the Brisbane Bronco’s, Elle Macpherson, the cast of the Matrix and Rupert Murdoch.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera.
I generally don’t trust men to act morally or indeed respectfully in the face of hormones, and I absolutely don’t trust women under the combined influence of emotions and hormones (horemotions?). The Unbearable Lightness of Being is overwhelming, as works of genius’ are. Every chapter takes a cheese grater to your heart, mind and soul and leaves you traumatised and bleeding, admiring the bloody brilliant and ugly revelation of
your inner workings.

Finally,
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson.
One course I studied in my final year at Uni was the Philosophy and History of Modern Science. It astounded me to see the leaps and bounds human history took during the renaissance. It threw aside my prior conception that human knowledge has been a gradual and consistent development, and that instead it soars and falls like the stockmarket. Newton, Harvey, Einstein, Darwin, DaVinci, Copernicus, all these men shattered our blinkered understanding of the Universe, but it took me
22 years and a credit point filler subject for me to finally grasp just how revolutionary their thinking was, and even then I found myself stumbling around in the darkness with only a thin beam of torchlight for understanding, glimpsing small portions of brilliance, but never the whole picture. Bryson has found the light switch and illuminated it all, giving scope and perspective to the universe, with his rare knack for explaining the works of genius to the layperson. Finally I now know just incomprehensibly big and small infinite is, and we can all take
comfort in the fact that despite the undertone of understanding our science teachers attempted to project, they were all well out of their depth. We can never comprehend just how massive and complex the universe is. Our brain is unfathomably inadequate for that task, and even your brain is too inconceivably complex for you to understand. So relax, life isn’t meant to make sense.

So on that note, lets delve into something a little more comprehensible, (but only a little). Saigon in the year of the cock. Easter passed without so much as a single egg, I didn’t even know until my parents called. There’s absolutely no mention of it here, and thus no Easter Eggs for sale. But it is a little impractical to hide chocky eggs around the place, given that they would melt on the spot in this baking hot pre-wet season weather.
It’s hot.
It’s damn hot.
I sweat sitting down.
I sweat when I eat.
I sweat having a shower.
I sweat in my sleep so much, I wake up dehydrated.

It’s an oppressive overwhelming heat that makes your head pound and your vision vibrate. When walking, you wade through the air like your entering the surf. It’s April the hottest month and the humidity is rapidly building. By the weeks end the colossal cumulonimbus should be here, to finally bring the monsoons after five months without a drop. This is definitely not hangover weather. This is the type of weather that demands the quiet, cool sanctuary of home.

In an attempt to escape the heat, noise and pollution Natasha and I tried to get lost in the countryside for a weekend. Destination; Bao Loc. A small town situated in the high plateau, a vast tea growing area, with rolling hills and cool crisp air. Our Vietnamese is good enough now for us to navigate and negotiate most survival situations, so everything was done through local methods. So into a twelve-seat bus twenty of us climbed picking up people along the way. At every stop (not technically a stop, the bus merely slows down and potential travelers must run along side the moving bus and jump in, the new
additions stared in disbelief at the white people on the bus, then a cackle of comments and laughter would erupt.)

Vietnamese roads are one of the world’s most dangerous, with between twenty and forty people a day killed and an unknown number hurt. I’ve been over the level of anarchy that exists on these roads before, but it probably can’t be said enough. Every minute reveals a new chance at the afterlife, weaving into oncoming traffic, erratic and heavy braking, arm waving, yelling ad screaming and relentless horns. But I accepted death a long time ago after my fourth or fifth near death experience on these roads. Since then I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come within a hairs breadth of death, my heart rarely skips a
beat anymore. Clip mirrors with an on coming bike at 50km/h, lock up the wheels threading through a bunch of bikes at an intersection. No shock, no shakes. Thus, I managed to get a good hour and a half sleep on the bus. (I’ll probably get shell-shock for a 30th birthday present thanks to Nam)

At Bao Loc the bus slows to a brisk walking pace, and we climb over the seats and people jump out the door, our bags are thrown after us. The eyes of the town lock onto us and from that point on we are perpetually stared at. We ask around for a quiet, clean, cheap hotel and are directed to an area nearby. The selection is minimal and poor, but we accept one hotel.

It must be said that Vietnamese have an immense tolerance for pollution, of all types, and it seems as though they actually crave audio and visual pollution. Coffee shops and eateries face onto the highway, where brain jarring truck horns blast and buses rumble by in clouds of choking thick black smoke. They could just as easily face them away from the road to the beautiful mountains behind them, but alas, no. Our hotel is no exception and the girl downstairs has the television at maximum volume, resonating through he entire hotel. I shake my head in misery and frustration as I attempt to sleep. An hour later, we leave. We search around and find a place on a quieter road, and finally get some shut-eye. We rise early on Sunday, check out, leave our bags at the desk and take another bus to an even smaller nearby town, Du Linh. There according to rumour great day-hikes into the hills can be made. In Du Linh we immediately attract astonished and suspicious stares . As we ask some of the locals where to go hiking, we attract a crowd of five deep around us, all of them curious but visibly cautious. Our requests are met with confusion.
Translation-
ME- “We want to walk in the countryside.”

Mr. Perpendicular Teeth - “This is a small town, there is nowhere to walk.”

ME - “Yes, I know. We want to walk in the countryside.”

Mr.PT- “No. No walking. Only mountains. Nothing to see.”

ME - “Yes, Yes, I know. I like mountains. I WANT MOUNTAINS.”

Mr.PT- “No. No. You want to go to the tourist waterfall.”

ME - “No I don’t. I want to walk in the mountains. Where is a good place to walk?”

Mr.PT- “Nowhere. Nothing to see.”

Despite our capable language we were talking nonsense to them. The idea of walking, for the sake of walking, without a set destination is nothing short of insanity in the minds of locals. Naturalism is yet to make inroads here. Forests represent wood. Mountains equate to farmland and quarries. Nature isn’t something to admire, its only beauty can be found in the colour of the money it can be converted into.

Finally after reaching a stalemate on the topic of hiking we accept their advice and ride to the waterfall. Of course there is a 50c admission fee and the mildly pleasant waterfall is surrounded by atrociously tacky cement statues of elephants and tigers and wait for it…….. Native American Indians. Go figure? We quickly escape from there and wander downstream, finding an ancient behemoth fig-tree, with massive snaking roots melting into one another, and weaving into
the forest behind it. Suddenly a feeling of elation and satisfaction came over me, and we lay down on the large flattened boulders and took in the serenity of the scene; the majesty of the tree and the vibrancy of the local kids fishing nearby. They broke our serenity by attempting to say hello. We replied in turn but with pleasantries exhausted they revealed their true desire. Arms out, hands up turned, “Gimme. Gimme. Mun E. Gimme”

And thus we were reminded of the fact that you’re never a local in Nam as long as your skin is white. You’re just a gateway to unimaginable wealth. But those little rascals receive nothing from me, they’re not desperate, they’re just trying to test our gullibility. I laugh. They scowl. Our time up, we leave, make our way back to Bao Loc, collect our bags and flag down a passing mini-bus, which in an uncharacteristic show of consideration, stops for us. We pile in, and must sit on small plastic seats a hold onto the door. Vomit bags are passed around and the carnival of terror begins again.

Our original intent was a quiet and relaxing weekend away, instead we were shaken, shell-shocked, offended ripped-off, lied to, frustrated, and generally uncomfortable. However now, the once gritty, shitty, city seems all the more tolerable, and I’m glad to be back. So there’s the proof, a change is as good as a holiday.

Ressons Rearned.

A year passed by and I suppose it is expected that I should have distilled some understanding from my experiences. Well strangely enough, some of my prior conceptions were upheld, others demolished, and new ones formed. If you’re in a philosophical/epistemological
mood, take some time now to wander though it all with me, if not, skip straight to the end. You can get back to looking at p0rn quicker this way.

Resson Rearned 1: Ivory Towers are Lonely Places.

A concept confirmed was this. “Money won’t make you happy, but being poor sucks.” At the end of the day, as long as you can support yourself and loved ones with all necessities, health, food, and a feeling of future security, you will achieve a basal level of happiness, beyond that it’s up to your own level of optimism. With more money there is little significant increase in your level of happiness. This aint just me talking either, researchers the world over are find the same results. The traps to unhappy wealth are these;

1. Keeping up with the Jones, Nguyens, or Chins.
2. The temptation that the grass is always greener on the other side.
3. The ability to trust those who befriend you; is it you or the money, or you and the money, or just you. We’d all like to suspect that it is the latter, but that belief is also a product of living rich, given that we’ve never fallen on hard times (and I mean fallen, no money, no food, no abode, no family, nothing!) and been able to test these beliefs. An overwhelming proportion of ‘associates’ would not be there if you didn’t have that cash. This is a sad statement mainly affects those whose wealth is disproportionately larger than their associates. If you and your crew are in the same boat, then this barely applies… I guess. The Vietn@mese gubberment’s standard poverty line was recently raised from $15US a month to $20US a month, still less than a dollar a day. Beyond that and things are apparently rosy. Now an average factory worker’s salary is around $30-40US a month (a little over a dollar a day). Now compare that to me, who earns that in two hours. (My weekly wage is an annual income for many families.)
Now you can see the massive contrast that stands between locals and foreigners and now you can understand the lengths to which they will go to obtain some of that wealth. These pressures are only exacerbated by the metropolis, with its conspicuous economic elite. The Sheraton towers, sheltering tinted Benz’s and their patrons, allowing them to browse through the Bulgari watches and Prada shoes in air-conditioned peace. It rubs the wealth gap in the faces of those in the streets, and fuels envy and hunger. The city is enormous, impersonal and unsympathetic. The sheer volume of people promotes anonymity, and if your anonymous your chances of getting away with a crime are vastly increased, and if your victim is a stranger then your conscience is easier to quell. Combine this with the oppressive April heat and the term ‘rat race’ feels very apt. Every new bead of sweat is a drop of gelignite.

After being befriended countless times only to discover it’s to separate me from my money, one can become quite suspicious and guarded. I stay open to offerings of friendship despite time and time again being disappointed. Go for a coffee with the security guard at the school, only to be dragged into a wife selling scam. Just last night a friend and I accepted an invitation to share a table with some guys at the beer hall, we were told we were friends all night, then the refuse to pay the bill and follow us back to our house, obviously to loot it. It is money that in fact isolates foreigners from local society. There have been cases where I have met fantastic people who despite the wealth gap never held ulterior motives. Friendliness and honesty survives here, but given the conditions it’s not surprising that it clings desperately like a lichen on a rock rather than in the conspicuous abundance of Oz.
It seems to be nothing more than a survival strategy. Completely understandable, and arguably an inevitable scenario for all us given the right environmental pressures. If I can make an analogy at this point I’d ask you to imagine you’re in a room with Bill Gates, The Sultan of Brunei and Rupert Murdoch. Now tell me how you could interact in a purely open manner and not brown nose (even on a subconscious level) for some of their fortune. If Bill starts hitting on your girlfriend would you tell him to ‘FUCK-OFF!’ on the spot or would you bite your tongue and tolerate the insult?
I now also understand how so many filthy rich hollywooders divorce, fight, and live in such magnificent misery then kill themselves. They are lonely souls.

Resson Rearned 2: Vision is Relative to Hunger.

Humans are notoriously shortsighted when it comes to planning for the future. Our governments rarely envisage goals and schemes that exceed their 3 – 4 year terms. Certain businesses hold decade long plans, insurance companies are an obvious example so too are mining companies. But by and large most human goals rarely exceed a year or two at most, yet even these meager figures are huge in comparison to the time spans in which business is conducted here.
My reasoning for this is; V!etnam has been on a geopolitical knife edge for centuries, defending it’s fertile soils from China, Japan, France and America, the latter being the most famous, but also the most destructive. It was unique insofar that it was a civil war that gained international attention, by being misconstrued as a figurative domino in a global power system, subsequently turning the small but tenacious squabbling into a playground for superpowers. The result was a country bombed back to the stone age, poisoned for centuries, the ascension of leaders competent with swords but not pens, a paranoid pol!ce state where neighbours betray neighbours to avoid persecution and desperate, desperate famine. In short, thinking long term is a luxury for the wealthy and well fed, and for the poor it’s lunacy. ‘Today is the only day you can plan for.’
The hungry don’t stay hungry for long and so now given access to the global market V!etnam is developing at a feverish pace, its GPD growth rate giving China a run for its money. Dizzying amounts of wealth are beginning to emerge amongst the elite, and one could imagine that this might transpire to long term thinking, but it doesn’t, at least not yet. For we are for the most part moulded in our childhood years by our parents and their thinking, at it is this effect that maintains the status quo, and will continue to do so for decades.
So how does this manifest in practical terms?
Well in day to day interactions it means, ‘return business’ (a staple of Western business thinking) is ignored. Small and big business alike will blatantly lie to your face to separate you from your money. This is familiar enough treatment from faceless corporations (Hello Telstra, NAB) but in the service industry such as restaurants and hairdressers, café’s, masseurs, or hotels, it can be surprising. The few business’ that do put the customer first do a roaring trade, but mainly with foreigners at inflated prices. The exception to the rule are the dr*g dealers. They take care of their customers and operate on smiles and honesty. “Don’t worry, you no have money today, I give you now. You pay me later. No problem.” Such trust! Although the promise of a knife in the face also reinforces this. It should also be said that what is true for HCMC is not true for the rest of V!etnam. This big city breeds cold hearts. But these are rare, and so for the most part you rarely return to the same business twice because they shortcut your requests, then short change you afterwards. Amazingly in some places the service gets worse the more you come back, because you become more familiar with appropriate prices and the rip-off margin is reduced. Surprisingly it doesn’t dawn on the staff and owners that they can make ten times as much off you in just one month of repeat business than they can from a single one-off rip-off. But so what, these are just daily frustrations, easily accepted given the prices of things, give me three bucks a day and watch how much I smile about it!

What is more disturbing is how V!etnam as a whole treats its natural resources. The cultural preoccupation with money is blinding. Sell, Sell, Sell. They’re selling it all. Slashing their forests. Damning every river. Killing every animal. Emptying their seas. Using every chemical and pumping the refuse straight back into the waterways. There are few environmental standards, and non-existent enforcement. They even import unwanted asbestos in absurdly large amounts (1000’s of tones a week) to re-use in any number of ways. Plastic bags line the highways, building up into shallow blue & white fields either side of townships (Undoubtedly aided by the fact that VN imports general rubbish too, a majority of which comes from that beautiful and clean part of the world, Scandinavia). This is saddening to see and frightening when you realise that this doesn’t represent a problem in the social conscience. Conversations about pollution, conservation, and the future of Vietnam’s environment draws blank faces from my students, adults and children alike, reflecting the common saying here, “everyone’s problem is no-one’s problem”.

I hold grave doubts that any measure of compromise can be found between money and nature, and in twenty years time I fail to see how this country’s land could be anything but toxic.

V!etname$e have been moulded by the eons to be fiercely independent and disregard any other nation telling them how to do things (history would say that they have had more than their fair share) and now that they are having their day in the sun, they sure as hell aren’t going to listen to the finger shaking of the industrialised nations who for centuries now have been growing fat off fucking the world on a truly unholy scale.

I could be wrong about the future, in fact I hope I’m wrong. Most of the 3rd world (2/3rds of the world) is busy selling their resources to the 1st world, well under their true value to obtain immediate wealth. Yet there are people in all these places, working exhaustively against the current of popular opinion or probability getting people to rethink how things are being done. Their successes are small, almost negligible but success builds on success and we owe all our forests, coral reefs, national parks and treasures to these people, because without them our parents would have cashed it all in a long time ago, for woodchips and Kingswoods. It should not go without notice that our generation is also offered this same temptation. (Not the Kingswoods - duuh!)

Ressons Rearned 3: The W@r Didn’t End in ‘75

I know your encyclopedia will tell you that the V!etnam war ended in 1975. That is wrong. Firstly there have been many wars in V!etnam, and so here it’s referred to as the American-V!etnam war, as appose to the French-V!etnam war, or the Japan – V!etnam war or the Cambodian – V!etnam War, or the China – V!etnam wars.
Now with that clear let me wash away some other misnomers. 1975 represents the year that America left V!etnam, NOT the end of the fighting. As planes flew from Danang, mothers threw their babies at the planes in a desperate attempt to see their precious loved ones avoid the retribution to come. In Saigon the wealthiest US allies and the few remaining reporters were air-lifted out of the presidential palace minutes before C0mmuni$t tanks breached the fence surrounding the Pres!dential Palace. On the map, the South had fallen, in reality however, the fall was only just beginning. The conquering was not an explosive one. It simply assumed power and set about sniffing out all allied collaborators. Special pol!ce extracted information from citizens, forcing them to divulge information on all collaborators. Those that knew nothing were forced to lie. Soon fear and suspicion engulfed society. Neighbour betrayed neighbour, and those who fought with the allies, or were intellectuals, or merely artists, were sent off to a three month stint in re-education camps. Three months really meant four to eight years and re-education really meant hard-labour, brainwashing, malnutrition, torture, and disease. This was a war of attrition.
Those who returned from the camps saw a world transformed. The 80’s saw massive levels of poverty and starvation, this triggered the mass exodus during this time. Countless boatloads of V!etname$e spent their secret savings of gold on nighttime escape missions on tiny fishing boats, most never making it to the open sea, let alone to foreign shores. Under the bows of the modern freight ships and tourist vessels lay an unknown number of boats and bones of these desperate escape missions, as recent as the 90’s.
If caught, and not killed on the spot, escapees were sent to re-education camps. My cherub faced, perpetually smiling Vietnamese tutor was one of these. He spent 6 months in a camp, slaving away in a quarry. The intellectuals and Southern ArmE members fared worse. If they returned, they were stripped of their citizenship and denied ownership of anything. They became cyclo drivers by and large, ferrying people and goods across town in their peddle-powered ‘rickshaws’. They do not own these cyclo’s, merely rent them from gangs. They live, work and sleep in their cyclo’s. They have no home, or certificate of citizenship. It is illegal for them to be alive! They are fourth world people, they do not appear on the population census and have no rights. Prior to the fall of the South, many held positions of privilege and power; dentists, doctors, dam engineers, pilots, most are now dead, but a few live on. Their faces wrinkled to a think crinkled leather, deep set, bloodshot eyes, rake thin legs, bowed backs, every rib on display and the tell-tale re-education camp tattoo, a string of numbers along their forearm.

Only in the 1990’s did V!etnam’s fortune change, with trade embargo’s lifted and a more open gubberment attitude to outside investment. The self-sufficient C0mmuni$t dream was doomed with soil saturated in Agent Orange, incinerated by napalm and peppered with land mines. The scorched Earth tactics that Roman armEs exacted upon their enemies proved just as efficient and devastating almost two eons later. Most of the mines are gone, the burnt earth turned green again, but the Agent Orange still lingers deep beneath the soil, every year seeping a little lower. But even now tall trees like Eucalypts send their tap roots down in search of water and touch a molecule of Agent Orange. The result, defoliation in days and death within a week. Whole ecosystems have collapsed taking 100,000’s of species with them, rendering them emaciated and fragile. Once again Vietnam slides along a razors edge, imitating that oh-so-famous slug in Apocalypse now.

Ressons Rearned 4: ‘V!etnam isn’t a W@r, it’s a Country.’

This is a statement first uttered by that bastion of Australian journalism, John Pilger. He said that during the war, and since then a lot has changed, and so the truth of that statement has only been magnified. When I first arrived here I had a war-eye. Searching for the evidence of conflict. It jumped out at me as I landed at the airport. Derelict cement bunkers, pitted with bullet holes, overgrown with weeds, mould and lichens. It leapt out at me again inside the airport, where giant red flags with yellow stars, hammers, and sickles hung above Kaleshnikov clad guards in their forest green uniforms. In the street it followed me, and begged me for money, hobbling on deformed stumps. Filthy incomplete skeletons with skin, hollow bloodshot, jaundiced eyes, and arms outstretched, hands upturned. Such misery, such suffering.
I sat on my first day in a bar sweating into a beer, watching a rake of a man with no legs, and a piece of dirty cardboard bound to his waist with string, drag his legless torso across a busy road. It took him almost 10 minutes, none of the drivers slowed down or stopped to give him a chance.
There was just cold indifference.
At that point I knew this country would take some getting used to.

I was cautious at first, concerned that a great deal of unvented misery and anger was lying in wait under the tongues of those I spoke to. I chose my words carefully ‘Don’t ask about their parents, don’t ask about c0mmuni$t rule or indeed anything that might revive painful memories. Ask about the future.’ And I did, and it was welcomed by those who I met, but as the weeks turned into months, the bubbly conversations about expectations of economic development began to grate on me. I wanted grit and shit! I crafted classroom conversations towards the topics of history and conflict, but my students (both teenagers and adults) yielded nothing. How could this be?

In the Middle-East bloodfueds are eons old, in Eurasia hostilities live for centuries. In the East, Japan and China, Japan and Korea. Africa; Ghana, French Guinea, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan. Musl!m, Kurd, C@tholic, J3w, Pr0destant. The world over hate, injustice and a sense of self permeates through the generations. So why has it disappeared from the social conscience within a generation?

The explanations came to light many months.

One effect is the lingering teachings of Bu))ha, which while being threadbare are still woven into the mental fabric. The old lady’s story from Mui Ne illuminated me. After surviving the slaughter of her village at the hands of US forces, and the inhumane treatment by her captors, and their subsequent abandonment of her. When asked why she wasn’t angry she responded “How does getting angry help me get over it any quicker?” Wisdom in the fact that forgiveness is not for the benefit of the forgiven but for the forgiver.

The second factor was offered to me by an old man from Dalat. He told of the bra!nwashing that took place in schools. They were the focus of H0 Ch! M!nh’s plan. Children were fed pr0pag@ndha, and told to identify traitors to the great C0mmuni$t machine. Especially if their parents were traitors. To reveal them to the authorities was to bring them salvation from greater punishment, and so the fear and paranoia of the 70’s and 80’s infected family bonds. Soon parents weren’t talking to their children, denying their past and watching their histories fade.
So the personal stories were lost, and the past escaped scrutiny, yet the physical reminders remained; the craters, the Kaleshnikovs, the cripples, the c0mmunism. Surely this stirred the memories and prevented their sedimentation.
And so a third element came to light; age distribution.
A great many men and women died during and after the w@r. I won’t say how many because mere figures don’t do it justice. I will simply say more than the entire present population of Australia. This skewed the average age towards the youth. For the last ten years, the economy has been snowballing and so now the rate of births and survival of offspring is skyrocketing. Ten years ago the average in Nam was 34, now it’s 25.5. A vast majority of the population know nothing of the w@r. It’s no more than a historical watermark, and locals are tired of the attention it receives. V!etnam is an old country full of young people, desperately trying to shed their historical baggage and modernise, they know nothing of tanks and tunnels, they crave cars and mobile phones, nightclubs and American University degrees.

A new litmus test on society will take place this weekend, as the city prepares for the 30th anniversary of the fall of Sa!gon. The yellow starred-red flags hanging from every house are compulsory by military force. The streets are lined in pr0pagandha billboards. Posters of H0 Ch! M!nh are mushrooming on every vertical surface.
In a curious nexus in time the monsoons are brewing. Finally after five months without so much as a drop the immense cumulonimbus towers are approaching, steaming up from the forests towards Cambodia, bringing with them half a years rain. Rain so thick and heavy that it can be hard to stand up in, here to wash away all the shit and grit that has caked every surface and filled every crevice.
But that hasn’t happened yet, and so the air hangs hot and heavy; the atmosphere is electric and people are tense, exhausted from the smoldering heat.
Will it be a celebration of c0mmunism or a commemoration of the point where tyranny, terror and starvation began in the South.

I suspect that for the majority, the youth, it will simply be an excuse to party and the political rhetoric will fall on deaf ears and ambivalent minds, and be washed away with the rest of the shit by the deafening downpour.





……….. as the plane taxied around, and we came along side those bunkers, a massive yellow graffiti peace sign came into view. I took it as a good omen. Now I see it was a story.


Ressons Rearned 5: Man Cannot Live on Bread Alone…. But if He Doesn’t Even Have Bread, Start With That.

It may seem that I’m drowning in a pool of pessimism, but fear not, my glass is always half-empty.. and in this heat will evaporate quickly enough.

I found an elixir to all this darkness early on. I began volunteering at a homeless school/orphanage. My head and hands were immediately put to use, and to my relief the work was not handing out rice and hugs. My task along with another volunteer was to develop a self-sustaining fundraising scheme. It took form in the shape of a promotion campaign in well-to-do café’s, whereby a small levy was attached to certain menu items. Customers who selected these items received a small ribbon to pin on their shirt and our school received a small but predictable flow of income. It placed me in a strange position, organising, meeting and negotiating with Saigon’s richest people, and minutes later playing hackysack with an eight year old orphan, choking on guilt and confusion as to why despite all the “that’s a great idea” and “our company would really like to help” dialogue, I had failed to close the deal on enough meetings to make the scheme viable. I then turned my hand to an area more familiar to me and started writing the new website. Finally I was successful at something and felt some satisfaction. It was a practical piece of input to improve the image, accessibility and transparency of the school, which meant more money in the kitty and more food in kid’s mouths.
For the small part I played, I received a soul saving view of S!agon. Alongside the 5-10 fulltime foreign volunteers, about a dozen or so people at the school are V!etname$e. They have sacrificed what meager incomes they have to help at the school. They are not experts, nor on a crusade. Some were middle aged and others my age. Year after year, while foreigners came and went, they forged on unceremoniously despite the cynicism and deception of the city, undaunted by the 4-5 million desperate souls in the slums and shanties throughout the city, despite the scant resources and the countless slammed doors in their faces. Beyond all this they smiled more than anyone else I’ve ever met in this city, almost incessantly in some cases, buoyed up by some internal force. Their continual good spirits and calm demeanor unsettled me after a while, as I generally view those characteristics to be the tell tale signs of a future psychotic split. All I could envisage was the mental fracture of one of my colleagues, his mind and smile snapping one afternoon under the overwhelming scale of the suffering and the neglible impact he has on it. All of it catalysed by yet another “We’d love to help, but we don’t donate to charities” response over the phone from a million dollar company, or yet more books stolen from the already depleted library by the poverty stricken neighbours. Yet it never happened (although time will tell).
What I did learn was that the ‘big picture’ is an overwhelming one and if you try to gauge your impact according to it, it will crush your spirit. Free yourself from the helplessness of a species eating itself out of house and home. All you have at your disposal is your hands, feet, eyes, ears, and voice. They set the boundaries of your universe and the impact you can have on it, and it is only inside that small bubble that you can directly affect people. It’s got nothing to do with saving the world, its about helping those you can, be it your mates, your mother or that guy in the gutter.
It’s arguable as to whether there is such a thing as a truly selfless act, and I won’t open that can of worms now, but even for the wholly selfish in this world it must be recognised that improving the lot of others in your bubble is a mutually beneficial act, for just as you can help them, they can harm you, and remember: the hungry don’t stay hungry for long.

*note: Ch!na’s unemployment rate is 9.8%. That’s a 130 million people. There isn’t an army in the world that could hold back that many people with nothing to lose.

Ressons rearned 6: Paths of Least Resistance.

Culture. When people take the piss out of someone (what a fucked up expression!) and say “A tub of yoghurts got more culture that him.” I think they’re touching on a greater truth, because humanity if viewed from a distance and from an evolutionary timescale seem to have a stunningly similar resemblance to those millions of microbes in that tub of yoghurt. That on its own is humbling, but it evolves to insult when we realise that we’re not even behaving beneficially.
After living in this mutating city I now burst into crazed laughter at the absolute absurdity of the situation.

400 metres from my house is a canal that feeds into the sea. It therefore rises and lowers in depth by about two metres a couple of times a day. At it’s deepest, and thus most diluted it is an opaque, dark, metal grey liquid with any number and variety of objects in it, usually plastic packaging. At low tide it’s at its worst. A black gruel of petrochemicals and carcinogens, a wreaking sewer for industry and residents, with a consistency akin to warm honey. I threw a stick in one day and it stood upright for a second and then slowly came to rest on the gruels surface. (As a side note it should be mentioned that in HCMC real-estate gets cheaper the closer you get to the water.) And so this is all doom and gloom I know, but get this, this is why I laugh (at least in a Sideshow Bob/Dr Strangelove kind of way).

Couples romance by it!
People take their partners there to hold hands and steal kisses under the smog obscured moonlight, where the sulphuric stench of the canal makes you gag.

People swim in it!
Young boys jump off bridges into it.
Fathers splash their children with it, while mothers look on and giggle at the sight.

People go fishing in it!
How the hell can a fish live in that! Eating it is a toxic depth-charge to your body.


So who or what receives the tenacious survivalist award in evolution? Human desire, human ignorance, or the fish!

The answer, none. The real winners are bacteria and viruses, and they remind you that thinking that we humans are at the top of the food chain has to be one of our greatest works of fiction to date. In the eighteen months I’ve been here, I’ve been sick more times than I have in the rest of my life.
Four or five viruses, at least ten colds, chickenpox, four bouts of powerful food poisoning, countless upset bellies and spontaneous dashes to the nearest toilet. Heat rashes, infected scratches, stinging eyes and wretched lungs.

So like the acidophilus in the Yoplait, it would seem that bacteria was again doing its up most to be beneficial, but in this case to Earth, by ridding you and I from it.

Ressons Rearned 7: You Discover the World, One Person at a Time.

Culture, society, people. These are just words we use for ideas. They don’t actually exist outside the realm of intellect. You can’t put any of the assumptions into practical use when interacting with people, because the ideas are generalisations and you are dealing with individuals, and if humans have but one standard it is that they have wildly different perceptions of the world. There is as the saying goes “more difference within groups of people than between groups of people.”

You could walk out into the streets of HCMC and ask 100 people about their lives and no story would be retold, let alone that of a transient white-boy like me.

Why is this important?
Well, it’s been a mantra of mine since I landed and it’s proved its worth. The language barrier, the class barrier, the ignorance barrier, the intolerance barrier, all these elements conspire to generate racism.
It emerges with disturbing regularity from the mouths of a majority of foreigners, usually in the form of sarcastic jokes about workplace incompetence and inefficiency, and it’s easy to get dragged along by it. And as soon as that happens, you start to believe in it, it makes every new person you meet a forgone conclusion, rather than an individual, meaning that you never get to see the friendship on offer behind the veil of social polit!cs.
Reminding myself of this has given me great friendships, with very personal experiences of Nam and shown me the awesome visions of life that are on offer here.

Where else in the world can I walk in a hungry city of 8 million in the middle of the night in some dark, dank alley and feel completely safe.
Where else can traffic be insanely chaotic and lawless, yet no road rage ensues, not even a shout.
Where else can a Gubberment guard with an AK, string up a hammock at his gate and take a post-lunch siesta.

Clearly there are some lessons we can learn regarding aggression and stress management, especially given that stress related illness is the West’s biggest killer.

OK so that’s it, everything worth remembering from a year and a half in Nam. Life is good. It is the perpetual suffering of the masses that reminds me that I have no real problems in life. V!etnam is not 3cstacy, it’s acid. Rough, raw, relentless, and all to real, but if you can learn to laugh… it’s a trip!

So just to recap, everything I’ve learnt is ultimately useless, which brings my current understanding of anything in life to just above sweet-fuck-all.

MY GLASS IS EMPTY.
I NEED A REFILL, PASS ME THE SCOTCH.
I’M MOVING TO THE COAST.

Fingers crossed, pockets pinched, coming home for Christmas.

MISS MY MATES

Sorry for the introduction, you may now return to your p0rn.
Stress Less.

MALfunctioning.