20160608-09 Newark | Hong Kong | Tân Sơn Nhất (HCMC)

The recycled air has a steady scent of human flatulence, which cloaks any odor my own person may exude. Diet, drinking habits and dynamic posture are a loss on these transnational journeys that I’ve come to sort of get used to by virtue of working internationally, so my mind is really on my sister’s trip, which is her graduation gift to herself after medical school, and my brother who has never flown off the North American continent. After two decades of exploring different parts of our own continent, living in different time zones and intersecting in fractions at family holidays that were suggested rather than mandatory, this trip is a “getting to know the person you’ve become” adventure, even though I pitched it to them as a “get to know the country of your origins” vacation.
  
In the supermarket just before my flight, I get that tingling anxiety of encountering a known temporal deadline. I’m nervous of missing my flight for the entire day before lift off and my stomach wrenching isn’t mitigated by waiting in the airport for 4–6 hours before boarding. It’s not just that I’ve missed flights before. There’s something about anticipating something you might miss, although even if you don’t it’s discomforting. It’s an ambivalent apprehension of the inconvenience of missing the gate or making it just to be crammed for hours in physical discomfort. It must what any terminal patient feels once his death date is announced. 

This Boeing 777–800 is a bus. Only on international flights does one see so many people in a plane. At what point in the world’s population did airline companies realize that they could find, sell and fly almost 400 people from North America to Saigon? I mean, I’m sure that the Vietnam War, refugees, and improved political relationships between the two countries played a large part in that, as it is playing also in the predicate of this trip for me, but the sheer number of incidental desires to travel there, to travel at all, to have the infrastructure of travel, must too be a function of reproduction and lowered child mortality. 

Clouds verge on tangibility seen from above. Where terrestrial remarks of a day’s cloud condition refers to the level of sunniness and hotness, from above it refers to the cloud objects, types of clouds seen. The shadows cast onto the earth correspond to the size and shape of the cloud, just as one would expect but rarely experiences from the ground. If blanketing the view, the clouds become a textured material creating the air space in which you sit. If passing through a cloud, its obscurant density isolates you from the world. But I don’t see this, really, just the tiny monitor playing a wide variety of bad movies. 

Flying over Hong Kong, I’m struck by how contained the city is from the hills and forests of each island. How much is Macao and where Hong Kong begins or ends is unclear to me, but the entire area looks will designed, ordered, and livable. While allegedly very dense, the towering buildings have the human space between then that recall planned neighborhoods of Bogotá, wide boulevards and parks that tempted even Le Courbousier’s notion of spacious urban design, although most of his plans weren’t laid.

Phúc meets me at the airport. The crowds that form in familiar enthusiasm for travelers is something we’ve lost in the individuated society of America. There’s something transcendental about wondering out of an airport, sweaty and disheveled, wearily peering through a scenery of people held at bay by a railing that is surely more symbolic than fortified, trying to find that face you barely remember and then suddenly being ‘alright’ when your fading memory is jolted by the smiling grace of that person who’s come to collect you. That’s an international flight in a developing country. It’s categorically the opposite of catching an Uber.

Aline calls me from HCMC and asks about our hotel. I realize I have fumbled the dates and our check-in for today’s hotel isn’t for 12 more hours, which makes us roomless for the evening. My date of departure has lapsed into the second day of the trip — my first day abroad and I haven’t even slept!  Booking something and sending her the directions is no issue, with smartphones and internet, i.e. the world in which we live today, but! I realize this will become the tip of a crutch that will wield our relationship for the next two weeks. A polevault of moments in which I’ll try to frame the phrase, “Can you google that?” politely. 

By 1 am, Phúc is at Tân Sơn Nhất and drives me to drop off my luggage before we have beers in District 4. The garbage is being collected across the street. Restaurants poor the organic waste in the gutter and a guy in a truck pulls up, sweeps it into a shovel and  mosies down the street. Pretty much the same manner as New York City, except with less black plastic bags. My stomach’s untwisted at the familiar. 

20160610 Sài Gòn or HCMC or TP HCMSai Gon or HCMC or TP HCM

The day began in layers of sound. First it was the rooster crowing, which technically started in the around 3 am, well before sunrise, and no one other than me and possibly other tourists, who were holed up next to this thing, heard it, because it doesn’t stop. Nothing came of the crowing. I wasn’t perturbed by this crowing, although if it were going on in my own neighborhood it would have been addressed in a litigious way long ago, but here I was wondering how the hell the myth of the rooster crowing at dawn holds any water? 3 am in the middle of the goddamn night, not dawn.

Around 6 am the purring of motorcycles echoed up from some narrow passageways that even Google maps had a difficulty locating, hence the sidetracking, literally sideways last night, to locate Hoang Yen Guesthouse. Phúc made four passes before seeing the little jetty away from the chaos (hỗn loạn) of bui vien  street (Dướng bui vien) and he lives in HCMC.

Then the honking. There’s an intersection somewhere. The horns are a higher pitched than back home, sort of sound whine.

Vietnam is a country that starts the day early. I remember that from my first trip here a few years ago, with my father. Rush hour began at 7 am and with a vengeance. He was sleeping late at the time, he was yet to be diagnosed with liver cancer, and there was no hurry in that trip. The preface had been very similar to this trip with my siblings: father, son bonding. Now sibling bonding. Equally a script for a bad indie film.

My first trip to Vietnam was when I was 30. My father had returned almost annually since the 90s, but we weren’t on speaking terms during that period, nor most the period after that period, nor even much of the period during which we did converse. The trip with my father had came about in a rather hurried way: I was giving a lecture about my artwork at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle and he was in the audience. Literally, I had not spoken with him on principle for more than seven years and had broken that silence with a simple note, sent via post during the holidays, saying I would be present in Seattle for an exhibition and if he were interested we could have dinner during my visit. After the reception he mentioned he was traveling to Vietnam in a few weeks and wanted to know if I had any interest in joining him. It wasn’t clear whether he was saying that as a sincere invitation or in passing, or whether he framed it as ambiguous out of fear of being sincerely rejected or whether the plans really were only tentative, but I accepted without much hesitation. The invitation was formally extended to my brother and sister, but Ethan was devoted to the cynicism of his divorce proceedings and my sister was wrought with the principle of her own vow of silence toward our father, she being always the last of us to give up. So my estranged father and I, or the prodigal son, as he liked to think of it, spent a month without hurry in a country that wakes up to crowing roosters. After his funeral, my siblings had decided to make this trip together.

The sounds existed in layers and the voice of men came to try to dominate the noises. A loud speaker. The message repeated. It was either a traffic signal or a flash sale.

A few liberated song birds fluttered between the soundtracks. I saw them cooped up on a balcony. A freed partner danced on the exterior of the cage. I watched across the archipelago of balconies as a young man undressed the cages of his birds. Each one he methodically took down, placed on the balcony and then unwrap the fabric. His army of birds. And on both sides of the caged birds’ perch, those free, wild birds fluttered to the next cage before finally ejecting the scene. 

Phúc, the son of my aunt’s child, met up with us in the afternoon. Last night he told me about his life in Ho Chi Minh city. He lives in District 4 and is a DJ of live music karaoke. He studied computer programming and wants to make online applications. In a direct question to me he asked if I thought that the Vietnamese hated the Americans. I answered ’no,’ it was the past, right?, basing my answer on the impression I had got from Hương, my Vietnamese language tutor, who had told me about the burgeoning U.S./Vietnamese relations. He said that I was right and actually the Vietnamese now hate the Chinese, or more precisely, the Chinese government. According to the New York Time’s article about Obama’s visit, Phúc’s information is reliable and his situation wasn’t unique. About 50% of the country is under 30 years old and increasingly ambitious to have a global experience and inclusion. 

The welcomed American support and collaboration reignited the post-World War II reality of global superpowers. Russia and the U.S. and now China. Vietnam was befriending the U.S. as a call not only for economic development but a hope that the tensions over the Spratley Islands and South Asian Sea can be quelled, as China has laid claim to them recently. 

Thành Phố Hồ Chị Mình (Ho Chi Minh City) was Sài Gòn until the Communist revolt against the French and later U.S. As the biggest city and economic engine of the country, its southern location makes its namesake sensitive. The city was the seat of southern resistance to the northern communist powers. The conquest of Saigon by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) makes the renaming a symbolic gesture. Both Phúc who’s a resident and Hương say that the city is still Sài Gòn.

The dynastic tradition of renaming or relocating the administrative capital, such as from Huế, the Nguyễn capital, being moved to Hà Nội gives the whole country notion a nomadic slant. The capital is not just a city, it’s a tool, like a sculptor’s blade, that can excise or recess a characteristic to emphasize one plane to overshadow another. But a rose by any other name still has thorns.

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“As Obama heads to Vietnam, Current Events overshadow History,“
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/world/asia/as-obama-heads-to-vietnam-current-events-overshadow-history.html?_r=1

20160616 Equation of the Sun, Declination, Latitude, Altitude

As the setting sun came earlier than in New York I realized that the earth’s till must be to blame. 

The sun is setting at 6:45 pm throughout this trip and coming up around 5:15 am. In New York it’s coming up about ten minutes later but staying up almost two hours later. Because of declination, the further north one goes in the northern hemisphere, the longer the days get in the summer time while the inverse is true in the south. But here’s what’s confusing in Vietnam: the seasons. It is not the simple reverse of north-lying New York. It’s June and summer in New York and in Hoi An they tell me it’s summer here also. What? Not only is it not the reverse here, it varies by the region. Except Hanoi, the northern lowlands, there isn’t even summer or winter, meaning hot and cold, but rather wet and dry or at best cool and hot. 

Roughly there are four regions with varying calendared seasons: the mountains of the far north, that are dry from October to March then wet from April to September and get very cold in December and January at night. Down the mountains in the north, like in Hanoi the cool and dry winter is from November to April with the coldest months being January-March. But even then temperatures are still 17-22 C in the “winter.“ 

Central Vietnam like Hoi An and Da Nang is hot and dry from January to August, the heat getting up to the mid 30s. During winter the rain comes and there are typhoons. This is between October and November. Yes, two months. So mostly hot and mostly dry. 

The south, like Sai Gon, have a constant weather year round but split between wet and dry season, which begins in November and ends by May. So those afternoon torrential downpours I’m experiencing on this trip are their wet season. 

Vietnam runs from 8-23 degrees north latitude and sea level to 3,143 meters to the peak of Fanispan, the highest mountain in the norther region. There are other climatic factors, such as ocean currents, direction of winds and mountain ranges. That subtle suggestion that weather is really a boring last resort as a common topic of conversation is a little more nuanced here. I don’t mean that I’ve heard locals discussing the weather (I can’t understand them that well), and the little conversation about the weather has been in terms of the heat, but rather that these weather trends reflect largely on tourism, the largest industry in Vietnam. First of all there’s tourism year round and the reason and timeframe for anyone visiting is more about his personal calendar than following weather trends. For example, most Europeans and North Americans vacation in the months between May and September. June-August being the least comfortable is heavy American tourist time. 

In further regards to tourism, the amount of the economy that tourism comprises an area’s economy reflects on the level and expertise of the hospitality there. In Sai Gon 22% of the GNI, tourism is less important and the hotels, were the worst, at least at the bottom price point. Inversely, in Hoi An, where basically the entire economy is tourism, the hotels were the best and least expensive, although almost everything else was overpriced in most parts of the city. This makes sense because the reason to visit Hoi An is Hoi An. The city is the attraction. The Old Quarter are what I would assume to be the “authentic” Vietnam, meaning not influenced by 20th century construction. There’s a lot of porticos, French-influenced buildings of the 19th Century but also a decent number of Chinese-influenced Buddhist temples from the 12-century and on. The tourism is temporally driven; escaping the most recent. 

But also one easily gets lost in Hoi An and sees what isn’t even concerned about maintaining its authenticity, meaning the local homes. In a strange reproach to tourism the city lacks identifiable and reliable street signs. The local map shows about 25 streets, which is a fraction of them and the eager entrepreneurs who will help you with directions just before offering you their goods or services give you directions like “turn right and then turn left,” but exclude specifics. The absence of reliable street signs may be due to the aim of keeping street signs “authentic” meaning those that are up from before 1950 are those that will continue to direct us and the rest…too bad. 

So it’s easy to get lost here even with GPS. There are many spaces—like between rice fields—that one wouldn’t presume is a “street” or “road” as part of the infrastructure, but they are. On trying to locate “the good beach” —An Bang—we got severely lost even though it was  a straight shot down the main road. Just locating the road was tedious. 

An Bang was filled with what felt to be a slight jellyfish venom. I spotted a few and even without direct contact they made the water not really desirable to be in, although people were wading and swimming there when we arrived. I spent most of the day sitting in the shade of a circular boat made of a lattice of bamboo bent upward, forming a sort of tea cup shape, that had then been sealed with tar. I saw a man using one, fully standing. They seemed designed for near-shore fishing as it had only one paddle and moving the boat forward was achieved by sort of stirring the water vigorously…I expect a small USB-powered motor would work equally well. 

Behind me on the beach were the crowds of tourists who were renting chairs and umbrellas for 40,000 dong, or $2 USD. Behind them were a row of roofed dining areas that were twice the price of anything else we’d seen in Vietnam. Around 4 pm locals came with their own food and drink as well as tables and chairs and set up long dining areas perpendicular to the water. The intensity of the sun had diminished but still locals were crouching in the incidental shade of objects placed on the beach, like pyramids of inner tubes and boats. 

The night market in old town is a testament to the wonder of the work of Tesla and Edison. It’s basically the same tourist junk as during the day—knick knacks, textiles and souvenirs—but with lighted sculptures of dragons and fish made of paper and placed along the bridge and promenade. We ate banh mi sandwiches for $1 and had drinks for 20 cents each in the child-size seating of the promenade.