Stupid Power

a Stupid Power is a useless ability or behavior that one possesses that could, potentially, under the right circumstances, at the last minute, under great duress, defeat Evil and Save The Day. like being Invisible when no one is looking.

though my Stupid Power in grad school used to be the Procrastinater, it was so powerful (or rather, grad school so sucked the lifeforce from me) that my passion and work ethic deteriorated to such an extent that i quit grad school (see previous blog). i suppose it did defeat the Evils of OverEducation & Social Ineptitude and save my days from Toxic Academic Personalities and Intellectual Ennui and return my love of books to me. and anyways, i mean how much bigger could my brain get, right Uyen?

this morning as i blearily roused from the sofabed to the sounds of my niece getting ready for pre-school and dragged myself into the jack-and-jill so uuubiquitous in tract homes, i had a flash of intuition about my stupid power. unfortunately i gave up coffee earlier this year and so hadn't yet made my post-Viet Nam secret morning cup of joe to get me through. i forgot it somewhere between puzzling out making the sofabed and weo, now as i enjoy a double shot of G7 (apparently the coffee of ASEAN heads of state).

so in the spirit of viewer driven content and democractic principles upon which this nation-state was founded based on philosophy and land stolen from the indigenous peoples, i'm willing to take constructive suggestions on the nature of my Stupid Power. comment away.

i already know what my darling eee-eht-eoo spouse is going to say, and no, saying eye-KAY-ah and UUU-bik-kweh-tus does not constitute a stupid power, nhé! yu top rai hia! TAO YÊU MÀY!

my favorite things

an ongoing compilation of things that are like golden warmth suffusing my innards. i started this list while in san d after my ba ngoai had a second stroke in may to eke out a small corner for rainbows.

rainbows remind me of my childhood in honolulu. the lush fragrance of verdant foliage, the kelly green and vermillion squished tree frogs on asphalt, vivid hued kapiolani after the rains. the rainbows on the mainland are so pastel and faded in comparison.

manzanita tree "mountain driftwood"
wildfire-propagated native shrub to the Western chaparral region being nothinged by the langoliers of sherbert sub-/urban simulacra, sprinklers and palm tree imports in a neverending story about the failure of the imagination . the Pallid Manzanita is a federally protected endangered species that grows in Oakland and is usually uprooted willy nilly by to protect the Hills property values. my burl of manzanita from fifth grade camp in Cuyamaca and an egg-shaped rock from ong ba ngoai's house on Auburn are the remnants of my childhood mementos after my stepdad's accidental shed explosion and thievery by psycho ex.

barn swallows
take a walk through a meadow during champagne & strawberry-hued dusk of a golden summer through an aerial ballet of swallows flitting, roll and court catastrophe on a trackless roller coaster of agile grace.

miniature donkeys
my favoritist stuffed animal was a melancholy white & red jack that i chose from my mother's mysteriously procured bag of stuffed animals one easter, though sorely tempted by the teddy bear, because i thought no one else would love him and so rescued the donkey from neglect. he unfortunately was donkey-napped by the aforementioned thief. though i have loved horses ever since i used to gallop along playing Unicorn on the playground, and read every Chincoteague book, i am won over by the canny perserverance of the humble donkey. and wouldn't a small herd of jack & jennet be just the way to keep the acreage trim?



pygmy elephants

melancholia 45 rpm

treading foggy liminal space
returning to the land of the living
from dwelling in the valley of death's shadow
emerging, blinkblinking at the intense luminescence of life--
eyes shaded against the glare
shielding those who would fall into their shadowed chasm.

going about the rhythm of living
like a flintknapped needle
dropped in mid-song
tracing the worn spiral grooves on a vintage record
muffled and hollow echoing of remembered voices
revolving inwards
dis-syncopated

vinamese booklist

i was asked recently to assemble a list of VN books for a young brother incarcerated and hungry for knowledge. so this is the partially annotated list i generated with the help of tuyen and loan who *actually* read the books during grad school. i am in awe of their big brains.

• Gangster we are all looking for by Le thi Diem Thuy. fiction. refugee. plotless poignant vignettes kinda like House on Mango Street or Wild Bully Burgers

• Before the Revolution: Vietnamese Peasants under the French by Nguyen Vinh Long b/c i hate the french and think all viet people should reconsider their francophilia. i never think of salt or tires the same way after reading this.

• Watermark: Vietnamese American Prose & poetry edited by Monique Truong

• Dream Shattered: Vietnamese gangs in America by Patrick Du Phuoc Long a counselor's social/cultural take on why kids join gangs

• Even the women must fight: memories of war from north vietnam by Karen Turner

• Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (memoirs from a VC)

• Novel Without A Name by ThuHuong Duong contemporary Vietnam writer, unromantic gritty look at war, got her censored

• Diary of Dr. Dang Thuy Tram will be publish in English in 2007, the "Anne Frank" of Viet Nam, entire vietnamese text is here

out of print but really great anti-war writing from the 1970s. well worth it if you can find it.

• We Promise One Another: Poems from an Asian War. 1971. comp. Jacqueline Chagnon & George Luce written by Vinamese folks from all sides during the war and translated into English by Chris Jenkins and chị Tuyết. her woodblock print on the dedication page is tattooed on my back.
  

• Lotus in a Sea of Fire by Thich Nhat Hanh buddhist opposition to the war

• Women and revolution in vietnam by Arlene Eisen

• Women of vietnam by Arlene Eisen Bergman these two books are almost interchangeable.
  

• Reflections from Captivity by Phan Bội Châu, Hồ Chí Minh, edited Tran Khanh Tuyet, Christopher Jenkins poetry from two famous anti-colonizer patriots
  

my disclaimer is that i havent read any of the below but they sound good:

• From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath edited by Philip Mahoney American & Vinamese i assume
  

• Viet Nam: Borderless histories edited by Nhung Tuyet Tran prolly more academicky, non nation-state look at VN history, prolly inspired by the geo-body analysis of Thongchai Winichakul in Siam Mapped
  

• Vietnam an illustrated history by Shelton Woods

• Voices of Vietnamese Boat People oral historys

• People's History of the Vietnam war by Jonathon Neale (Howard Zinn follower, member of ISO, typical white hippy Left take on VN war)

• The Lotus Unleashed: The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam, 1964-1966 by Robert Topmiller looks at the nonaligned third force, buddhist self-immolation against VN war

• Patriots: the Vietnam War remembered from all sides by Christian Appy

• Radical origins of the Vietnamese revolution

• Communist Road to Power in Vietnam

• Four Hours in My Lai my lai massacre

• Vietnamese women at war: fighting for Ho Chi Minh & the revolution by Sandra Taylor

• A country, not a war: Vietnam impressions by Harold Turner, travel writing

tonite the dream ends

by the mormon state? really? are they drinking 3.2% beer in celebration tonight?

etchings of Hà Nội and Hội An

Rain on Lo River

Trần Nguyên Hiếu

artist whose artwork my siblings and i discovered in the piles of original-prints-for-sale at the Museum of Fine Arts gift shop. he is one of the only artists in VN to employ the aesthetic and method of etching. we all loved it, dropped down most of our spending money (in dollars!) and got prints. according to his artist statement:

In this works, cold and desultory lines alone, like strands of hair, when knit together become a refine and velvety carpet woven into a poetic, profound and harmonious image. The hands of the etching-artist are the meticulous hands of a jeweller in work which would stifle vibrant artistic feelings. Nevertheless, the ancient streets of Hanoi and Hoi An and the age-old trees in the countryside of Tran Nguyen Hieu have brought us to an aesthetic ecstasy and to an everlasting dissolution.

i'm not sure about the dissolution or ecstasy part--though in his naked lady/japan erotica series (warning NSFW!) certainly i believe the O-word may be apropos. but in his architectural city-/land-scapes, i think what captured my eye is the (post)modern obsession with capturing details photographically, the asymmetric/skewed perspectives (without being all picasso), element of timeless nostalgia/historic weightiness, the juxtaposition of ghostly negative images with a suspended present, the multiplicity of historic/cultural moments that comprise the timeless present and the alienating indifference of the etching method in gothic gangrenous washes from generations of monsoons and humidity.

though we all bought the "warmer" digestable HN cityscape prints, i find the more conceptual pieces intriguing. like the Lo River print above of a fishing village on the a vast river, the dual perspective of off-center bird's-eye-view and the vertical rain is disconcerting, vertiginous enough that it's hard to find one's ground. on a cognitive, visual processing level, i float above the scene. there's a melancholy tone to it and it puts me in mind of the vinamese fisherfolk moored in the Gulf off of Biloxi lost to the ocean's swells during Hurricane Katrina.

we did not see any prints that were this vivid in color (and somehow it doesn't seem right), this is a contemporary snapshot of a street and in the borders around it (click on the photo for enlargement), you can see the faint etchings of historical memory that haunt this lane.





O Quan Chuong Street

Văn Miếu elephant

Temple of Literature, Ha Noi, ca. 11th Century

Hà Nội musings

viei have decided to eschew the linear chronicle of my travels in favor of my usual expansive contextual soliloquys (and this blog is gonna remain a monologue until someone decides to post an engaging comment.) as with the female perspective on sex, it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.

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Mornings in Hà Nội were a gradual circadian arousal to the urban chorus of roadrunner motorbirds chirping "meep meep" as they zipped along and the incessant trilling of construction. the sun rises earlier in the East, i swear. i was unreasonably up at 4 or 5am every day in VN, drowsily conscious of the ombre saturation at the apex of the kelly green curtains.

traffic in VN is dominated by the moped. it is the primary vehicle for the family sedan, jimmyrigged commercial transport, crisscrossing the city weaving with an unwritten ethos of humanism--perhaps its the lack of insurance underwriting that impels everyone to avoid an accident. the right-of-way seems to be determined by who is boldest. as US road rules hold, wherein one drives on the right-hand side of the road, turning left is very much like playing chicken into oncoming traffic. little vehicles, mopeds have to accomodate the larger ones. etiquette is that everyone honks to let others know that they are approaching. road rage (as in exiting your vehicle with psychopathic intent) doesn't seem to exist in VN no matter how crazy the traffic, no matter how many times you get cut off.

i had forgotten how thrilling the density and organized chaos is for a pedestrian. or perhaps i've just gotten older and bây giờ biết sợ learned a healthy dose of self-preservation as i later told our youngest aunty when she recounted my crazy SG xe mấy adventures to Uyên. nowadays, i wouldn't deliberately ride the wrong way with a fierce grin into thick traffic on Hoàng Văn Thủ--the busy artery entering SG--in order to drift to the right side of the street (which is the quickest tactic to get oriented to your desired direction rather than trying to merge into traffic going opposite to the way you want, drift over to the center and pull a U-Turn when there are no medians and therefore you expose both flanks to collision. it's better to see potential danger/opportunities approaching); nor drunkenly scale buildings with exposed live electrical wires anymore. i've mellowed. crossing a busy street, i found myself clinging to my companions as we crossed the street with a feigned nonchalance and a hop & sigh to safety.

after my first taxi ride, i remembered that i should never look forward into traffic to witness all the heart palpitating gasp near-misses, but to detach and look sideways, breathing deeply, beyond the teeming mass of mopeds a breath away, to the cityscape. it was fair to assume we wouldn't crash into a building. Hoàng's video game-derived strategy was to cheer on the taxi driver like a real life version of ViNa Grand Theft Auto "yeah, just hit her. runover the old lady."

back 2 nam | day 1

begin at the beginning
the first time i went home to Việt Nam--for though i was born in honolulu, for diaspora vinamese, no matter where you scattered on this earth, VN is our mecca, our magnetic orientation, when you go, you đi về, go home, anything else is ungrammatical, inconceivable--it was the new millenium and the 30th anniversary of the fall/liberation of Sài Gòn--depending on your perspective.

The Importance of Being Nguyển
i was anxious jittery insomniac, by myself, on a southeast asian studies travel grant downing gin&tonics as fast as the stewardesses could bring them (hey, they were free and the quinine in tonic has anti-malarial properties and didnt induce psychosis like cipro, ya savvy) on my way to reunite with the family i had never met having left VN in the safest passage--in utero. relative strangers, strange relatives. in a fit of brooding energy, i had shorn all my hair and dyed it rambutan red a few weeks prior with the consequence that i (with my first world lanimoo milk growth proportions) was depressingly taken for korean or russian throughout my trip. mostly the former. sigh.

i had had a window seat so i could witness the ocean waters recede and the landmass swell along with my hushed tears. inexplicable to my seatmates neck bent to see around me who probably wondered why this drunken krean girl was crying during descent. fragments of inherited memories and wartime documentaries, the visual dissonance of steel wings over verdant tetris mosaic landscape bringing not burning death to my people, but me. and then being thrust in the middle of a story--disoriented, woolly and exhausted in the gritty urban cacophony cement grist of Sài Gòn and the urgent sticky hands of taxi drivers hustling for a fare and of family members trying to grasp my newly emerged reality of flesh and bone after 30 years of imagining me from womb to now. not my romanticized home of origin. not Sài Gòn. Sài Gòn where my younger aunties and uncles had relocated to start a third life, to seek refuge in urban anonymity, after escaping the re-education concentration camps where life was so harsh that bà nội in her drunken haze dulling the pain of losing another child, this one to war's aftermath, tried to rat-poison the family gruel rather than see them suffer a laborious death from commie education... but then, where pray tell is home to a nomad from a many times uprooted refugee family scarred by memory?

in Qui Nhơn, after a lifetime of not physiognomically belonging to my Phạm-ily, i found pieces of myself that didn't belong anywhere else for 30 years, lost in an interminable railway cloakroom without semblance, parts that i could now label and say, oh i have cô Cẩm's cheekbones, cô Dung was my baby twin, that's bà nội's eyes, lips, calves and feet, i'm not a water-buffalo, i have ông nội's face shape and nose, oh i must look like dad, and oh i'm not adopted. i'm normal. i belong. i belong to these people. in their faces, i see myself. my kin. flesh and blood. con ta, i am their child. i am Home. crying during descent.

there and back again--san francisco to hà nội
i guess you could say that was The Hobbit trip of solitude, daring & bumbling outside my comfortable known world while the second was the Fellowship trip of companionship and adventure and ale. it's a stretch, i know. literary allusions are so tricksy.
this second trip at the onset of april, was hurried and decided upon only two weeks prior. the new year had brought us many sorrows--my husband's bà ngoại passed in january; after lunar new year, my niece died at birth and within mere days both my bà ngoại & bà nội had heart attacks, and my uncle-in-law was having ptsd post-VN war flashbacks triggered by a near-death experience. not the most auspicious of beginnings to the journey-of-a-lifetime.
so i was accompanied with my best friend spouse by my side. and we were to meet up with my best friends siblings Hoàng & Uyên in Hà Nội who arrived the day before. T's parents were our farewell entourage at SFO. so vinamee. except, where was the bánh mỳ ổ?
the flight was sober. having just returned from San Diego, abruptly deciding to do this, i had not pondered & obsessed. i did cut my hair just prior but in a proper fashion. i was considerably less agitated with existential angst than seven years ago. i slept obediently when i was supposed to though free movies are like crack to an occasional self-induced insomniac former latch-key-kid-TV-junkie. i am reformed in my 30s; the defiance my dad cultivated in me at a mellow ebb. though i can still hock a mean loogie. travel pillow and eyemask are my 30s travel must nowadays rather than gin&tonics. boring.

we left Sơn bay Nội Bài (airport) instant nouveau riche millionaires with đồng heating our waist belts and Bác Hồ smiling benignly on capitalism and third world depreciation. Nội Bài is located in the countryside 35km outside of HN. The taxi drive into HN is one of startling contrasts to a first worlder--modern highway flanked by lush ricefields being plowed by water buffaloes and farmers wearing nón lá as it was since time immemorial. concrete multi-level houses replaces the wood nostalgia of yesteryear. as we draw closer to the capitol, the billboards increase both in size and density. my favorite by far was the ginormous HONDA DREAM moped billboard with the little cartoon vinamese riding a xe máy with the bubble caption "I love Việt Nam".

the journey into HN had a beginning and an end. it had a story of economic development, privatization of state-owned lands, growing wealth disparities, and then expanding urbanization, unfolding for the eye/mind to take in and to ease the timezone spanning traveller into a semblance of presence.

we quickly checked in the Red Hotel just outside the central city and then met my siblings at the Vietnam Airlines office to purchase the next legs of our trip to QN and SG. i was heartgladdened to see them, both eyes brighter and somehow fresher for their temporary respite from reality--my bro emancipated from his wife and recently immigrated in-laws, and my sister on recess from her grieving. After the DMV number ticket game and musical chairs, we had our million-đồng tickets with third world tên lót glitch. there are a lot of Nguyểns in VN. bureaucrats are bureacrats the worldover. trivial details matter.

Second order of business: bún chả Hà Nội. it's just called bún chả while you are in HN. kinda like bún bò Huế. in Huế, i am told, it's just referred to as bún bò. duh. though i can normally eat only one or two pieces of deep fried anything before my gag reflex kicks in. i think i ate five. maybe more. somehow it was less greazy and the pork lighter. perhaps it was the freshness of locally raised morning slaughtered meat. yum.

though the imperial edict (Hoàng means emperor) was that the 4th & last day in HN shall be reserved for souvenir shopping, almost immediately, Hoàng and Uyên commenced haggling over lacquered chopstick sets. go figure. we got a good deal and a marble carved Đồng Sơn box. and then were suckers for having to drag them around all day. after admiring a sacred marvellous banyan tree, incongruously wedged between shops, within 30 seconds, my bro charms a street vendor into letting him borrow her yoke of fruit. pulls his vinamese abbey road stunt with the resulted in him having to buy the pineapples which tumbled from the baskets. mmm pineapples.

my sibs were creatures of habit and mindful of digestive constitution (we discussed our BMs alot) and so for the first two to three days, trung and i accompanied them to the same haunts. next in order, City View Cafe for our first delicious cà phê sữa đá (and even Trung who never drinks coffee enjoyed one every morning. metabolism runs different in VN) with a stunning panoramic view of Hồ Hoàn Kiếm, the heart of the city and watery home to the Golden Turtle who blessed VN with an Excalibur-like sword to deliver yet another liberatory victory against China in the 15th C. sense a historical theme and potential foreshadowing? yeah, keep in mind how iconic and sacred turtles are. they are one of the Tứ Linh/4 sacred animals--Rồng|dragon, Phương|phoenix, Rùa|turtle and Lân|unicorn. certainly not something you'd want o eat. but then boys will be boys.

i don't know if it was just the weather or the perpetual diesel fuelled smog over the city, but there were no sunsets or sunrises. just differentially lit grey.

in VN, palato-alveolar consonants identify a person's province (the general truism is that northerns have odd beginnings, centrallers have odd middles and southerners have odd ends. in a monosyllabic language that's the whole word in variation.) we ended the day with a seafood feast and giggly northern girl waitresses with sweet hummingbirdsong voices with their capitol-ist monopoly on being Northern that makes my ông bà ngoại's Nam Định dialect sound provincial--but then ông bà ngoại are rather proud of being country. overseas vinamese folks say the new HN accent is the coarse rural one from all those peasants who took power. bitter. its funny after growing up around southerners who fake a refined HN accent in elocution and our familial NĐ-QN mishmash, to hear the contemporary HN dialect and its soft and tinkly.

i could imagine how the West would get lulled into complacency by it and assume they could squash the spirit of a people who speak in the cadence of song, their cu li|coolies and congaïe*|con gái, le carte postale exotique du Indochine.

to them i say, Điện Biên Phủ suckah!


*anthro note: vinamese word for daughter or girl that the french corrupted to mean "a vietnamese concubine, mistress or wife". don't take my word for it, google that sh*t. my ông ngoại taught me the one word i needed to know--ghét with the most velar of fricatives that hocks a loogie.

the new digs

after two months, i've exercised my gemini nomad prerogative to choose a new blog vanity plate. just because. you can direct any questions to my lawyer Bob Loblaw.

and anyways brightbutdoesnotapplyherself was too long for a blog name. and you would curse me for it in your late night/drunken surfing. but dont think it didnt occur to me.

everythings here. i may have misremembered the exact timestamps and like any wordscrafter worth her nước mắm, i've edited the blogs some in the move. but then if you're reading this bloggage, you should already know how i feel about authenticity as a false Cartesian construct of the Nation-State. enlightenment schmenlightenment. the rest of the world was constructing the seven wonders, inventing science and healing arts while europe still enviously lumbered about in the Dark Ages and murdered millions of women healers as heretics during the Inquisition to compensate for their global impotence.

mind your own womb!

[ed. i'm having mild guilt pangs about my nice friends who care about me and who probably read this insufferable blog to be nice to me, so let's just say this is all imaginary.]

[ed.#2 okayokay, the more girlfriends i talk to processing my feelings, the more remorseful i feel. so, i won't do like my junior high self and destroy my previous journal entries, so you will just have to categorize this one under "ooh, that is so all about her. obviously she gots some challenging emotions around this topic." but then isn't that the point of a blog?]

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

dear dear friends and acquaintances,

though i recognize that heterosexual union comes with a set of cultural assumptions, societal expectations, legal privileges, tax breaks, and baggage; and though i fully understood that vinamese matrimony comes with three explicitly defined goals*: 1) suy gia-securing familial alliance 2) tổ tiên-propitiating the ancestors and 3) nòi giống-propagating our people; though i knew those things from the outset of this connubial partnership, i am only recently made conscious that regardless of culture or society, the common obsessive genome is that of procreation. and as such, as newlyweds, my lifepartner and i are subject to a heightened level of interest in our breeding proclivities and sexual activities, and ergo, reproductive pressure. as if ye olde biological clock and expiration dates weren't enough.

imagine the scene--there we are engaged in random chitchat, polite, water-cooler variety conversation about work- or life-related exigencies and vagaries--nothing deep, nothing intensely personal, emotional or soul-baring--when abruptly, desultory, all tò mò incongruous intimate inundation:

"when are you having a baby?" or even worse, "are you pregnant yet?"

wince. shall i give you post-coital updates? what is it you *need* to know?

as referenced in a previous blog o'mine, vinamese family planning involves one's goddesses, one's ancestors, one's kin, and the government. and at this time, i would add one's health care providers. if you are one of those beings, i guess this means you know and are comfortable with the fact that i am not a virgin--lạy mẹ maria!--durrr, hmmm... that still does not incline me to discuss sexual matters with you.

if you are *not* affiliated with any of the aforementioned beings, please allow me to say, we appreciate the well-meaning sentiment/intention behind that suggestive sparkle in your eye, your quizzically cocked eyebrows, and your prurient interest and curiosity about our fertility and reproductive status. please be assured that when my womb/egg has selected insemination from among millions of my spouse's spermatozoa, and viably implants a fetus and placenta after the 8th week, you will be the eighth to know--after our gods, our ancestors, ourselves, our parents, our siblings, our kin whom number in the hundreds and our midwife --and that you will receive our glad tidings of conception in person or via phone, email or gossip as the case may be. we hope that knowing your place on the pecking order and manner of information dissemination alleviates your concern, anxiety and non-sequitur questions on our behalf.

until then, please--and we say this with patient affection albeit with a strained smile--please mind your own womb!

thank you in advance for refraining from compulsively banal interlocution and heterosexual attentiveness in/about my womb which reinforces a biologically reductive definition of femininity/matrimony and a societal obsession with managing the productiveness of women's wombs. in the spirit of mutual propriety, i promise not to ask you about: still being single or unmarried, your stagnating career, finishing your degree, the moribund gasps of your life dreams, your financial debt, your retirement plan, the state of your relationship with your parents, your weight gain, your impotence, your credit score, your spiritual disillusionment, or otherwise insensitive personal questions that may trigger feelings of pain, pressure, vulnerability, inadequacy, insecurity and/or failure.

it took eight years of commitment, 1.75 years of planning and only six months of wedded bliss to get to this point. we don't do anything in a hurry.

peace,
the newlyweds

this has been a public service announcement of the MYOB! civic benefit campaign.


*anthropological note: the primacy of romantic love as a singular cultural goal for wedlock being a bourgeois, individualistic, ideological invention of the Nation-State resulting in a 50% divorce rate and below 1 reproduction rate in the West.