by the mormon state? really? are they drinking 3.2% beer in celebration tonight?
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
etchings of Hà Nội and Hội An
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:
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
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
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Temple of Literature, Ha Noi, ca. 11th CenturyTuesday, May 8, 2007
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.
--------------------------------------
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."
--------------------------------------
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
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:
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.
[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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
