Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Dear Twos, 10-8-06



Dear Twos,

I don’t feel I have been entirely fair with my previous beliefs and assumptions about this country. Up until now I have focused perhaps too much on the evils that seem to seep and pour from the cracks and crannies of the poorly paved streets of Saigon. I’ve talked at length with friends and family about the abundance of prostitution and womanizing, about how things like corruption are not just an everyday occurrence, but an integral part of the culture. I read an article in an English-language magazine today about a teacher who blew the whistle on the principal of his school for taking bribes to fudge the scores of final exams, not just for a few students, but for nearly all of them. The principal was promoted to the director of life-long education for the same province in which he worked, a job with better pay and easier hours, and he didn’t even have to change offices. Since then the PhD-educated teacher can’t get a job as an insurance salesman because he has a reputation as a slanderer; he still keeps a shoebox full of evidence in his closet, waiting for someone to come and examine them. This is not an isolated incident, this is reality.

Having said that, there is a certain Lord-of-the-Flies innocence to this country that is both scary and endearing with almost equal veracity. I went for my weekly walk through the city today, this time with a friend from Vietnam. It was a lovely day, beautiful, though hot, weather, it’s the full moon festival this weekend (which, oddly enough, comes once a year, don’t ask why, I couldn’t get a clear answer) so the red paper lanterns lined the street and glowed in the sunlight. We saw Buddhist temples and back alley markets, bands played in parks while we drank fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice for twenty five cents a glass and enjoyed the light breeze. Late in the walk near sunset, we walked by a bunch of stores with cages full of puppies, kittens, and white bunnies. Not a single animal there was more than about twelve weeks old, mutts and mixed breeds to the last one, all happy, playing and yipping while small children danced around the cages and poked their small fingers through the cages to try and get a touch of the heavenly soft fur inside. I smiled at the spectacle, turned to my friend and said, “I love pet stores, they’re such happy places.”

She frowned at me and asked, “Pet stores? What pet stores?”

I nodded at the ten or twelve stores and the perhaps hundreds of small furry animals lining the street, slightly perplexed as to how she didn’t notice them.

She kind of smiled a little at my naiveté. “Those aren’t pet stores,” she explained as though I were a half-retarded five year-old, “those are butcher shops.”

This dynamic of horror and happiness mixing like a martini is present all over Vietnam. A little while ago I was invited to the German Business Association’s celebration of Oktoberfest here in Saigon. When I arrived I felt like I had been transported into the Twilight Zone. I was handed a mug and plate and told to help myself to all the sausage and beer I wanted. There was a huge room full of gigantic picnic-tables and a band of German guys in lederhosen in the middle singing what I assume were old German folk songs, and every once in a while leading the crowd of about a few hundred in the obligatory Zicke Zacke, Zicke Zacke, Oi, Oi, Oi! I kind of nodded and thought, maybe this will be pretty cool, people seem to be into it. That’s when I heard it, popping up here and there like whack-a-moles, “Moat, high, bah, YO!!”

This chant is one that you can not spend more than about twenty minutes in Vietnam without learning to recognize as just about the only form of toast the Vietnamese seem to know, and use every time they take a sip of alcohol. It means something like “1, 2, 3, IN!” and consists of a bunch of Vietnamese (usually guys, though not always) standing in a circle with mugs full of watery beer with ice in it, clinking glasses while staring at their beer with all the fervor of a male juvenile dog staring at the first bitch of his life. They count in unison “Moat, High, Bah…” at the top of their lungs like a high school football team (never QUIT! never QUIT!) and then yell “YO!” even louder, and drawn out like the sound of a Japanese dive-bomber, before downing at least half their beer.

“Moat, High, Bah, YO!” “Zicke Zacke Zicke Zacke, Oi Oi Oi!” “Moat, High, Bah, YO!” was all you could hear above the din of party-goers in the hotel conference room turned beer garden. This was awkward enough, but then I looked around and nearly choked on my bratwurst when I saw that, in addition the German band on stage, there were a number of short, skinny Vietnamese guys dressed from head to toe in lederhosen. Many of them dancing like Vietnamese men do, with that rhythm-less knee-bouncing, two-hammer arm flapping we’ve all seen our four year-old nephew sporting at weddings. “Moat, High, Bah, YO!” Where am I? “Zicke Zacke Zicke Zacke, Oi Oi Oi!”

By the end of the night the hotel staff were wheeling out the wounded and “resting” (Moat, High, Bah, YO!) drunks in wheelchairs like the vultures in Disney cartoon sports games. The Vietnamese men that weren’t being carried away by the vultures were stumbling all over each other as they wandered toward whatever door they thought was the exit. Meanwhile the foreigners (and a fair number of their all-too young Vietnamese “dates”) were all calmly standing around and talking, having a good time, looking at their watches and noticing that, Hell, it’s only 10:30.

This team-style drinking seems to be the only way most Vietnamese men will drink at all. I have rarely, if ever, seen a Vietnamese man have just one beer, or drink anything at his own pace. Uncle Lawnin described it well when he said “take the worst drinking habits of the French, Americans, and Russians, mix them together, then tell everyone they can’t drink. Thirty years later you give everyone a bunch of money and say, ‘Oh yeah, go ahead and drink now,’” I would only add to this the Chinese tradition of toasting someone else to drink with you every time you want a sip of alcohol, and you get a team of 15 year-olds pushing each other to drink. The ironic part of all this is that most Vietnamese believe that foreigners have bad drinking habits.

I could go on but I think I should end this before it gets too much longer. Suffice to say I survived the Twilight Zone and have been having fun trying to reconcile these strange dynamics of extremes in this culture. More recently this has included going to a Vietnamese wedding (don’t worry, not mine). I think trying to explain my experience there will make this letter too long, so I will save it for my next one, which I think will likely come sooner than any of us expect.

As always, I love hearing from all of you, and I hope this letter finds you happy and healthy. Until next time…

Love,

No comments: