Postcard hustlers: 10 for the price of 1

Here are the little faces of pretty big personalities. They earn a living not by getting education in the schools but by selling postcards on the streets -- actually, in the mountains. They follow tourists everywhere, trying to sell packs of 10 postcards (daily life shots, sceneries, landscapes, etc. of VN) for outrageous amounts of money. And the tourists usually pay them because when you convert Vietnamese Dong into USD, it doesn't amount to much. These particular little people live, and work, around the touristy areas of Mui Ne (near Phan Thiet, VN) and its sand dunes -- especially the Red and White Sand Dunes. When the jeep dropped me off and I started my hike, these kids were right on my heels, chattering away in English (pretty decent English, too) and in Vietnamese, trying to sell postcards and they will not be stopped, dissuaded, ignored, or advised. They will keep on until you succumb into buying something (at which point they will all gather around you like bees) or until you hop back onto the jeep or bus that brought you around. I was here for only a short while and by the end of the day, I felt as if I owed these children something more than just a pack of postcards.

They were cheerful, helpful, and annoyingly persistent. One child asked me to buy something and in the effort to brush him off (I was exceedingly rude and irritated by this point, and shamefully, I could not contain my inhumane disregard for their livelihood, which was based upon their ability to behave as needy and desperate as they could), I said off-handedly, I'll think about it when I come back down. Little did I know this meant I had committed myself b/c that was, in his estimation, essentially a solid promise on my part.

Silly of me to be thinking about this, but it was not so easy for me at that time to behave like the tourist -- I resisted the urge to be the Viet Kieu from America who comes waving money in their faces, buying little knick knacks as souvenirs, and regaling them with stories about the American dream, life in the U.S. I also did not want to be the brusque, arrogant, self-centered Viet Kieu who behaved as if she were disgusted to touch their hands and buy their foods and hear their stories. At that point, I was just very tired and desperate to be left alone to simmer in the heat of Mui Ne.

On the way down from the hike, I was shamed and guilted into recognizing the error of my ways -- or at least, recognized the needless worrying. I wasn't going to see them again, and if my buying into their game of feed the starving children from Vietnam, I wasn't the firs and certainly wouldn't be the last. We had a great conversation on the way down, and they were very friendly and helpful. They showed me where to stop and rest and where to stop to get fresh water, and even showed me some great local sights.

I went home with 40 postcards purchased from three different kids. Instead of sending them home to friends and family, I've kept them all.

Mung Sinh Nhat Cau Tam

April 13th was the birthday of Cau Tam, my mother's youngest brother. At 18, he enlisted in the southern vietnamese army and was MIA since the early 1970s -- I want to say it was either 1973 or 1974. He was stationed near Nha Trang, and was ill the day my grandmother came to see him, which was the last time anyone in our family saw him alive. He'd enlisted after arguing with my grandfather, and had only been in the army for a little while. Ong Ngoai was a discipliined and difficult sort of man who could not tolerate Cau Tam's teenage, laissez-faire attitude, and like any 18 year old, Cau Tam couldn't stand being told to do something with his life.

After Ba Ngoai visited him, the campsite was bombed, they infirmary was scattered, he disappeared. His body was never found, and his name never appeared on any lists of the dead. We don't know whether he disappeared over the Cambodia border or maybe died in some field or on some road or... Grandma stil carries hope that we'll find him one day, or perhaps receive word, finally, that he is buried somewhere in Vietnam.

Happy birthday, Cau Tam.

Hom qua la ngay sinh nhat cua Cau Tam. Neu Cau Tam con o day, minh se chuc mung cau tam duoc them mot tuoi. Mung ngay ay cau ra doi...

Photo by Melissa Ma.

Motorbike Haiku in Vietnam: unJammed

The recent traffic congestions from the East Bay into SF have triggered certain memories of my stay in Vietnam. The culture of transportation (van hoa di chuyen) in most areas of Vietnam boasts several millions of motorbikes in a city the size of Saigon. Owning a motorbike or a vespa is necessary, and some folks have multiple bikes like they do cars, and since each of the 8 million inhabitants of Saigon and the surrounding provinces owns a bike, well, you have about 8 million motorbikes -- excluding the landrovers and SUVs (there are enough automobiles that I'm amazed that they are able to actually drive on the streets), taxis, and buses. (By the way, the 10 months that I was in VN, I saw 1 hummer.)

The swarm of motorbikes during traffic jams is incredible. The staggering vision of bodies metallic and flesh squeezing into the tiny intersections plays itself over and over. As I peer down into the streets from the tall buildings, I can't help but wonder how these drivers remain upright on their motorbikes. One inattentive, accidental kick from someone stopping too quickly at the back of the line will knock over another motorist who is caught unawares, and dominoes fall. It is absolutely stunning.

What you see here are views of the road taken by yours truly -- mostly on a whim -- just b/c it felt so important to capture the essence of being a part of the masses and not quite.

Saigon: motorbikes
jammed at stoplights, exhaust fumes
scattering insects

The haiku describes my imagination of what it feels like to look at the hundreds of motorbikes zoom away. But in fact, in reality, once the stoplight turns green, the droves of bikes move as a unit gushing forward like a dam. And because these are all individual motorbikes, the effect is much more breath-taking and more insect-like than if you were looking at "xe bon banh," the automobiles.

On the eve of the Lunar New Year, Tet 2005, everyone drives to the river to see the fireworks. In the dark, standing on the roof of my cousin's house (nha cua anh Loc va Thao Trang), the feeling was just as this image portrays. We just finished watching the fireworks display, and now that everyone was riding home, it was a different sort of show. The
bright lights, the fast-moving bodies weaving through the dark air -- the rush, the exhilaration, all that movement of individual pieces of metal and sparks of energy and gas fumes converging together into this one image -- glimpsed by me, captured but lost.

The feeling of watching traffic is not unlike the image of this young woman stopped at the light. The sense of being her, parked in anticipation of moving forward towards something, someplace, someone -- that sense that stays with you as if you too are merging and joining with something larger even though you are a smaller part, an insignificant unit perhaps. It wasn't until I was in riding on one of those new-fangled motorbikes with my hair blown every which way that I recognized, and understood, this feeling. Perhaps it was b/c I didn't have four metal walls protecting me from the elements. My arms and legs were dangled out there without seatbelts or safety nets. Winding up and down the mountains in Dalat, I could essentially reach out with my arms and pluck a leaf or a flower or even touch another motorist -- and I did, too -- with nonchalance, as if yeah this was nothing new. I'm riding a motorbike like the rest of the Vietnamese population, actually doing something the locals are doing, being a part of something larger than me. Stuck in traffic or not, parked in a lot or soaring down a mountainside, it seemed like I was actually transported somewhere, scrambling without knowing the exact mechanisms of the thing, without knowing the exact directions of the place... but it felt right. It always would.

Tipping my hat...

I'm thrilled to discover that I've been visited by so many friends from different languages. Unfortunately, they're all hiding under hats b/c I don't speak their language. Men language for one. Spanish for another. Indonesian. German. Norwegian. I will be crushed if you folks drop by without at least tipping your hat in my direction... Chao! Ciao! Adieu! Adios! Twame naw! Auf Wiedersehen! Selamat jalan! Paalom!

Lotus Feet on her toes

Yesterday, I was reminded of how ghastly I look now that I've completely lost my tan thanks to the winter months. The cute red sleeveless chemisier from H&M does not look good with two pale, pale arms sticking out. That, my friends, is only one of a hundred other signs that I see everywhere reminding me of how utterly un-springlike I look. And it made me think how our definitions of beautiful have changed throughout time. My sister and I always joke that we would have been natural beauties and worshipped like goddesses if we'd been born several centuries earlier. Our "vices" now would have been virtues back then instead of being suctioned, yoga-ed and lifted away.

On our trip to Malaysia this past January, we visited Chinatown in Melacca, Malaysia, and Candis and I stopped by at a little shop that made bound feet shoes. The shop-owner is the last remaining shoemaker in the area for women with bound feet. They allowed us to browse around and take photographs. They even displayed some old black and white photos of old women who had their feet bound decades ago. Feet-binding begins at very young ages, and begins with a painful process of tightly wrapping the feet in fabric to reshape the bone structure. With each wrapping, the feet are tightened until they become so mis-shapened that they no longer look like feet and whenever the fabrics are unwrapped, the women experience excruciating pain. the toes and heels are so bent that they lay completely flat under the arch of the foot. The lack of support and the pain cause the women to walk very slowly, and have to be aided by maids everywhere they go. Thus, the Lotus Feet (Got Sen -- Lotus Heel). The walk, the attitude, the position, the state of being.

The tiny shoes that you see are handmade for adult women's feet that have been bound. They are exactly like doll's shoes. And these types of shoes came in all types and fashions, and many were made by the women who wore those shoes. It was the "in" thing -- to make your own shoes. And to bind your feet. Very a la mode.

The prettier and fancier the shoes, the more fashionable. The most beautiful shoes were the ones made of rich, gold fiber and exotic fabrics and colors. And very small. The smaller, the richer, the more elegant and high-class. Because only the poor, un-cultured, lower-class servants would keep their grotesquely big, flat feet unbound in order to shuffle around doing work. The hurried, hasty walk was the walk of those who must work, who were born into servitude, not of the ones that have purpose and meaning in life.

Back then, it wasn't just the pale faces or dark hair or the sensuous, swaying gait of a curvaceous body. It was how you actually achieved that affect -- all the tactics you would employ in order to permanently walk in that way, the way of the high-class ladies of culture.

We now look upon bound feet as a horrific practice of a culture and society that is too foreign and ancient for us to understand. In retrospect, feet binding seems like it was an oppressive practice, a practice (most probably) designed and imposed by chauvanistic, insecure, arrogant, sexist males living in a dominant, patriarchal society. But it can't be simplified by blaming the men who coveted those Lotus Feet or the ladies who were the Lotus Feet.

In Bound Feet and Western Dress, we read about traditions that give way from one culture to the next, from one decade to another, from one family to another. In all of this, we can look at how "beauty" was and is defined. In 2007, we no longer bind feet, but we starve ourselves. We burn our skins under UV rays. We laser beam our eyes. Staple stomachs, lift eyebrows, file chins, puncture cheeks, liposuction thighs and abdomens, and even insert gels and liquids into our breasts.

Looks like we're not just re-shaping the feet. This time, it's an extreme make-over.