Disclaimer: what follows was composed somewhat hastily and in a little cloud of general frustration, and I have little time for editing or revision. Thus, any remarks that paint Vietnam or any of its inhabitants in a less than favorable light ought rightly to be brushed off as unfair, exaggerated, mean-spirited inventions. I will get back to more sincere, committed insults as time permits.
I'm sitting on the roof of my hotel in Nha Trang beneath a little wooden canopy. This hotel boasts an envious sea view, but you wouldn't know it from here, today. This is where one comes to enjoy brochure-green seas and all of the related activities, but I wouldn't know much about that either. The rain has been ceaseless, and demonstrates no symptoms of slowing. The rain is a non-particulate, undifferentiated curtain of cold water falling a few feet in front of me, and the face of my laptop must be wiped off every thirty seconds or so. But these are my favorite sorts of days; I relish having nothing in front of me, and a decent excuse to just sit and stare and think. I abhor schedules and secretly court cancellations. Sure, I can feign disappointment and say things like "Oh that's too bad. I was really looking forward to seeing those Koreans perform at the Central Library" and so on, but I'm happiest when I'm just left alone. So I invent a new superhero named Br-ion Atoms. He bravely returns from the present to the Summer of Sixty-Nine to deliver us from the evil machinations of the budding rocker whose namesake he shares. I also form an impromptu Irish cover band called Zeprechaun, who specialize in waltzing sea shanty renderings of Zeppelin tunes. Several minutes later we disbanded; shoulda known we'd never get far.
I made some effort to read from Artaud's Heliogabalus; it is at moments amusing in its exaggerated profanity and repeated accusations of royal buggery, but overall an incomprehensible and unreadable piece of shit. It occurred to me that I might know something more about decent literature than those fuckheads who crafted reviews for the New York Times sixty years ago and that my backpack maybe ought to be relieved of all the tedious French prose weighing it down. I then gobbled up Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280; it was so refreshingly good it made me feel delirious and thankful that I was not born in France.
So I find little tarp-covered stalls at which I can sit around and sample the local cuisine; the food in Vietnam, and particularly throughout Hanoi, has been almost consistently exquisite. The best meals are spicy, noodle-driven affairs featuring spoonfuls of fish sauce and some unidentifiable meat, served on sidewalks throughout the city. When eating street food, you dine at little plastic children's tables hanging from curbs, a grown man balancing on tiny blue plastic seats originally intended to accompany the Easy-Bake Ovens of five-year olds. The rain comes up over your ankles, you sniff your bowl and wonder about the origin of those nebulous sinewy things floating in the broth and about all those recommended vaccinations that you somehow couldn't find time for.
The Vietnamese are omnivorous in the truest and most complete sense of the term; they eat anything and everything. If it crawls, wiggles, patters, swims, scurries, gallops, or otherwise demonstrates motility, they will happily kill it and make it taste great. I am a rather adventurous sampler of cuisines, but there are limits; I fear canines might view me unfavorably after detecting a bit of their own material in my breath or pheromonal emissions. Vegetarians would be immediately shit-shocked and appalled by this place and likely fly home immediately.
Now with respect to being hassled by locals hawking their wares, Nha Trang is the worst in Vietnam. Any sort of direct eye contact, however brief, is interpreted as a signal that you wish to purchase something. So every few feet one is bombarded with offers of postcards, marijuana, motorbike rides, island trips, chewing gum, handicrafts, and so on. After enduring "Hello, you want buy something?" for the five-hundredth time in a single afternoon, I feel like replying "Yes: I wish to purchase a cloak of invisibility, so that I may walk your streets unmolested". Or maybe we could convert a couple of these rickshaws into makeshift Pope-mobiles.
I have overheard a number of tourists, primarily those of the Euro-liberal variety, discussing at length the general disposition of the Vietnamese. It is the same sort of mawkish fawning over a people that one reads in guidebooks: the Vietnamese are so kind, so trusting and trustworthy; their little hearts are just spilling over with love, and so on. To my mind, these sorts of bogus generalizations are as poorly conceived as those of a more derogatory variety. In short, there are assholes everywhere, and try as you might you will not locate an ethnicity on earth fortunate enough to have evolved a gene that effectively works to produce asshole-free offspring.
What the guidebooks do not tell you is that as a Westerner you are essentially viewed as a kind of bipedal ATM. It is assumed that you are in possession of an unlimited wellspring of money and it must somehow be wrested from you. Once the bill has been paid in full, observe closely as that classic guidebook smile fades abruptly to a featureless complacency. And this fact adds to the difficulty of gauging the sincerity of most persons. Perhaps a better means of measuring their disposition might be to observe how the Vietnamese treat one another, as opposed to their treatment of tourists; they treat each other like shit, barking orders, reprimanding, cursing, and then of course turn back to your table with an immediately reconstituted smile. Their own interactions are punctuated with a terseness and rudeness that they assume is concealed from those that do not speak the language, but the meaning is all the same painfully apparent.
The rain in Nha Trang mellows a bit and we elect to go drinking and dancing at some lame-ass seaside complex. I accidentally shit my pants (I'm told some do this intentionally) while chatting up some hot French couple and was forced to pitch my soiled drawers into the waste can. This did not prevent me from staying to take in the performance of some third-rate cover band that butchered a number of our national treasures. Here we absorbed Kathryn, in whose company we would spend the next several days. I cut my bare feet on some glass and left in the wake of my enviable ass-shaking an irregular pattern of bloody hoof-prints by which I could be easily traced from the dance floor to my hotel room.
Kathryn phones us early in the morning and we agree to spend the day at a local spa. She arrives at our hotel an hour late. We spend the day drinking and confessing in the mud and mineral baths; in no time at all we are old friends. Kathryn is intelligent and drinks like a hobo and generally a uniquely impressive person. We all feel more affluent than we actually are and eight hours later we retire to a bar near our hotel, and the little group acquires a fourth appendage, Travis. Together we book an island-hopping boat tour departing the following morning and then say goodnight.
To my surprise, our two additions not only remember our reservation but arrive early in the morning. The sun comes out and the shuttle takes us out to port where along with some twenty-five others we board Mama Linh's boat and set off to explore the bay's islands. As usual, they are a mixed bunch: obnoxious jockstrap Australians who board the ship pre-inebriated, Spanish hippie-types replete with the obligatory piercings and phony-ass tribal tattoos, painfully beautiful Dutch girls, and so on. The vacationing Vietnamese men are the worst; the do not swim or demonstrate a willingness to participate in any fashion, they sit in neat button-up shirts and stare all day like expressionless chain-smoking peeping toms. The western tact of not staring directly at persons for uncomfortable lengths of time has been wholly lost on some Vietnamese; they apply their eyes lasciviously to the women and correspondingly with contempt to the men, with less reservation than they would grant a garden of statues.
Following a few beers we drop anchor off the coast of an island that features a little coral reef and enjoy some twenty-foot dives from the roof of the boat. I make some brief attempt to snorkel but cannot get the hang of breathing exclusively through my mouth; I panic and swallow liberal amounts of saltwater. A few minutes later the boat rolls out into the bay to accommodate the exit of another vessel, and the group is swept some hundred meters away by an ocean current. We are left without explanation to tread water for some thirty minutes; I am gripped by fear but held afloat by a kind of organic pragmatism, as it is just imprudent to freak out with one hundred feet of water beneath you.
After lunch and a thoroughly ridiculous performance by the crew, who apparently double as the house band, our next stop is to what the Vietnamese consider an aquarium. It is an appalling little aquatic Guantanamo that ought to be shut down immediately; majestic sea turtles flop about in dingy tanks of a size unfit to accommodate a few goldfish, other plus-size sea critters, most with a body mass exceeding my own, treading green water, doing nothing and staring through the unclean glass as blankly as the Vietnamese who put them there. It is a sad joke of a place by any civilized standard and certainly has no place in the itinerary of drunken island-hoppers. We complain mildly and then push off to mid-ocean.
By now the group is sufficiently drunk to begin negotiations, to graduate from eavesdropping to interjection. I naturally fall into the orbit of big-breasted, bikinied European women and make some effort to enchant them with vaulting tales of my accomplishments in Hollywood, but of course carefully trivializing the more impressive associations so as to augment their overall effect; it rarely fails to produce the intended result. So we all get a little drunker and spend some time playing around with our respective infatuations. We drop anchor in open water and a little floating bar is then established a good thirty meters from the ship. The bar and its attendant are anchored via a sturdy rope. We dive in with our little flotation-donuts and are immediately swept out by a current several times stronger than the one alluded to previously. It is an alarming thing, so strong that you can feel the water swishing through your toes, same as you'd feel it if those toes were dipped in a rough stream. A minute later we watch the boat recede to a small point as we are swept out several hundred meters, and a general worry washes over us all.
A Brit abandons his life-saver and begins paddling furiously and futilely toward the safety of the boat, yelling "bloody hell" and so on; in doing so, he inadvertently punches me in the face and I draw blood. And nothing better compliments being stranded in an open-ocean current in the South China Sea like an open wound. So I then liberate myself from the life-donut and attempt to swim exclusively with my right arm, as my left is concerned with keeping my wine above water like some unclean Olympic Torch. People are justifiably beginning to panic; they understand that the tour operators are drunk, and that we all look alike to them. We form a long human chain and tether ourselves to the bartender, and after some difficulty are slowly pulled in.
The remainder of the evening is just as you'd expect; a marathon exercise in unwholesomeness. And I'll spare you the tautologies; I wish I had the discipline to spare myself. Anyway, there are several scenes missing; three little shadow people somehow manifested under my beach chair around two A.M., attempting to make off with my wallet. To my mind, the attempted robbery had all the symptoms of being sanctioned by the bar, as I vaguely recall a few staff members standing under the light, laughing. I chase them down and decide that the Vietnamese may be trusted about as far as I can throw them, which, for the record, is roughly three feet. They are a tiny people, and don't cost the biceps too much. I also remember dragging a woman up five flights of stairs. There are other little splices which I recall lucidly, but cannot mention; it would be in poor taste to make public the nightly humiliations of others, but with respect to self- embarrassment, my insouciance is clearly without much limit. Or maybe it is a kind of covert self-aggrandizement. Either way, it beats watching television.
The next day is spent entirely in bed, without leaving the hotel room. I am not a capable poet, but all the same I offer the following as a little distillation of the day's thoughts:
Let us see just what sort of day we are dealing with
Let us sift through last night's wreckage, separate the good from the bad
As if there were any good
Let us determine just what it is that has occurred here
Bring in teams of forensic scientists to separate the real from the imaginary
Lord knows what sort of damage has been done
I'm pretty sure there is a broken window somewhere
And I don't know where that cut came from
Let's get showered and attempt to straighten this thing out
There are holes in my record of things
And one in the door
And most of the evening is on the cutting-room floor
Maybe there's someone I can call
Let us figure out what time it is
Let us scurry about in search of evidence, and then hide it
I would like to reschedule this disaster
We should probably open a window
But keep the blinds drawn
Let us secure our wallet and passport
And make for the train come dawn
So I sit on the balcony of my hotel in Dalat and feel absolutely no sense of foreignness. I feel disbursed and distributed and like I might be anywhere; you come from nothingness abruptly into somethingness, and if you're lucky you're able to give this some thought before the cycle is completed. Some will insist that a nowhere is still somewhere, and that neant to which one returns ought to yield some personal existential comfort, solely on the basis of its familiarity; these folks do not fathom the difficult lessons and truths of biology. The nothingness from which we come and to which we return is pure and barren and must not be categorically confused with any notions of persistence or presence. But it is remarkable the degree to which we tirelessly endeavor to reveal such universally despicable truths.
The city is shrouded in a little diaphanous fog and I think, "I am on the other side of the world", and wonder why I detect no immediate impression of disconnection. I then correct myself by thinking, "other than what?" I do not have a side of the world; I have stopped taking sides. I have several large boxes of books in a storage locker in northern California. You move around enough, your parents die, and the once-fixed idea of home begins to dissolve. But I will sever transmission before it turns sentimental.
Saigon
11/09/07
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