WED JUL 25
HV Dragon and notes from the Vietnam “Conflict”
Sometimes things happen just the way they’re supposed to. Saigon, or Ho Chin Minh City, is a bustling, noisy, and very dirty place. If you can judge a place by its dogs, which Bri thought for sure she saw several skinned and deheaded ones were being loaded onto a cart outside a restaurant, Saigon’s in sorry shape.
Michelle Hoang is from Hue, the Imperial City, about 600 miles northeast of Saigon, and from the get go, she wanted out of the city. It seems the woman “house sitting” in her gandmother’s place was equally anxious to get rid of us. “We have this great five-day bus tour to Hue that stops at several of the most touristy spots along the way. Then, whenever you want, a plane can get you back here,” this lady said as her uncle watched on. It was a bit on the pricy side and would definitely be the way to go if Michelle wasn’t fluent in Vietnamese, with a dozen or more cousins, aunts and uncles in Hue, our main destination.
We opted for the luxury sleeper train that would leave the next night just before midnight. Instead of paying nearly $200 for the five-day cross-country bit, we paid $34 for a 17-hour express to the Imperial City, called Hue. So, come Saturday, we were simply waiting for our train to arrive. The previous day’s rain cooled things off, but the heat was coming on again and we choose that time to do some last minute shopping.
Gringo Price-fixing
I should’ve gone with the original prices because I can still hear her cackling laughter days later. But when in Rome, they say, bargain or you’ll be seen as a fool by all your friends. However, when in Rome, sometimes they set it so you don’t have to make a bigger fool of yourself trying to bargain over pennies in a different language. “I think they were giving you pretty good prices the first time,” Michelle and Bri admitted AFTERWARD. I mean, they had to agree that 70 cents for two notebooks was a steal. But it was also Michele who had advised walking away, as the best bargaining tool, to get them to lower their prices even more.
It’s the principle of it all. I know, you’re wondering, for goodness sakes, it’s a few dimes!!! But when you get into the heat of the battle and, you know, you believe deep down they are taking advantage of you, you fight like it’s your last few dimes. Therefore, I was determined to practice my numbers and get better prices than with Michelle, for I was certain that even after she helped, the vendor had shorted me in my change. They left to get lunch from the street vendors and I returned to the market.
“This fool just paid 45,000 ($2.70) for that towel,” she laughed while giving me my change for a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bill. That’s like $8 US. I may be exaggerating a bit, but their money, colorful and picturesque, has more zeroes than Fort Knox. And not since tennis has Love meant so little….I love this game!
“I tried to sell him a towel for 25,000, but the idiot wouldn’t buy it,” the first vendor a few stalls over approached, yelling to the laughing one. “Hey, this one is much bigger,” I called, opening up the green towel and trying to explain. Of course the only words I truly understood were the numbers! In the end, I paid about 50 cents more for a larger towel and about 20 cents more for a bigger notebook and a small pad, which came in handy a few hours later……
Determination and Reaching Goals
Around 7 p.m. this man, HV Dragon, comes into the front room and invites us to watch the soccer game on t.v. Michelle had just gone in to take a nap before the train ride and Brianna wasn’t into soccer with a bunch of men.
This, however, had nothing to do with Asian Cup’s first day of soccer.
“My name is Dragon, Determination,” he said. “I don’t get the chance to talk English,” Dragon said shortly after inviting me to sit with his friend, Hue, and the younger of his two sons, Minh. (Strangely, all four of his kids he calls Minh, not their mother’s maiden name. In the dictionary, minh means mine, so perhaps it’s his term of endearment?) He directs Minh, the younger who, at 20, jumps to one of the three mopeds behind the sofa and speeds out.
“I listen to the radio, watch TV, but I don’t often get the chance to speak with someone.” It wasn’t long before HV Dragon mentions he was a journalist and Radio War correspondent. “Where did you learn English,” the most obvious question, took me awhile to actually ask. “I worked with American soldiers at Long Binh Base 8G AMSFC-CC from 1970 to 1972,” Dragon, 58, said. “I worked on computers, the NCR 500.”
Have I mentioned that serendipity is my word of the summer? One of my goals was to find and interview survivors from the conflict and get them on film. Here, less than 40 hours and I found one that spoke English!
Dragon, who lost many friends, avoided active duty because he was studying. “Sometimes when you are in high school or university, you were [exempt] from going into the army. I studied Journalism, but later covered the war with US soldiers.”
“Did they have a draft here?”
“If you were of ages, 18, you had to go,” he said. “I lost many….It was bad everywhere, bombs dropping and I, trained on the NCR 500 computer, so I worked away from the font lines. But I also went out to the battle fields, making reports with a rifle in one hand and taping with the other.”
While waiting for the beers his son went to get, he offers me “wine,” this dark brown concoction in a large mason’s jar with twigs and roots and mystery bits that get caught in your teeth. Minh rushed back in with two flat white filets with what looked like tentacles and a dozen warm 22-ounce Saigon Lagers. He quickly serves four glasses with ice and three warm beers before returning to the kitchen to prepare the fish soup and the fresh fish he just bought.
“Why don’t you make bottom’s up?” Determination asked of my nursing my beer. I thought I was drinking relatively quickly, especially since sipping his rot-gut “wine” which, “I drink to help my gout,” he smiled.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
The other problem with drinking in Vietnam—electricity is very expensive, so instead of having a few cold ones on ice, they put ice into warm glasses of beer. Yum ech?! Problem #3 with this—if they don’t boil the water they make the ice with, we foreigners are visiting the crapper for days on end. There’s nothing like a nice luke-warm beer on a 98 degrees day with 99.9% humidity.
But this isn’t about me.
“Bodies and explosions happened right in front of me. My leg of my pants were blown to shreds,” he pantomimes some time afterward. Clearly a close call because, though his legs are thin and pale, they were very much intact. That, of course, was his favorite part of reporting; being in the fray with all the action. He would make tapes of what was going on and send those back to the base. Other times he would return and report live.
“Did they ever censor what you reported?”
“No, I was allowed to report everything, sometimes live, but usually I’d send the tapes back.”
He even worked alongside other famous reporters. “Do you know Ut? Huynh Cong Ut. He took that picture of a little girl running, escaping from Napalm….burning skin. He won the Pulitzer Prize for that photo. I worked with his brother, who was also a photographer.”
Better known as Nick Ut, the photographer of Kim Phuc…. If there was one photograph that captured the horrific nature of the Vietnam war, one photograph that tore at our collective conscience, it was the picture of a nine year old girl, running naked down a road, screaming in agony from the jellied gasoline coating her body and burning through skin and muscle down the bone. Her village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam was napalmed that day in 1972, and the little girl took a direct hit. It would take many years, and 17 operations to save her life. And when she finally felt well enough to put it behind her, that very photograph would make her a victim, all over again.
http://www.peace.ca/kimstory.htm (photo is not for the faint of heart–enter at your own discretion)
Thinking about where she lived, it must be very close to where I am now, in Central Coastal Vietnam. In fact, some of Michele’s relatives may know or have known her (Phuc’s) family.
I have one word for you……Plastics
In between the “interview” they’d break into song. All American, all circa 1970 and all somewhat odd coming from these three Vietnamese men. The group had grown, for now, Minh, the eldest, 25, had returned from his night of working in the Plastics shop. Among these old tunes were: “Country Road,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly!”
“Can you sing us something?”
I began with Lennon’s “Imagine”.
Minh, the elder, spoke better English than his younger brother, who I found out wasn’t the Ut, or the baby of the family.
“Why is he serving everyone?” I finally asked. “He’s the youngest in the house at the moment!” Minh, the elder, laughed. While Minh, the younger, studies electrical engineering at the Technology University in Saigon, Minh, the older, is avoiding the customary marriage before 25 and having some fun.
“We make and send plastic bags to Australia, America and all over the world.” In fact, even at 8:30 on a Saturday night, he claims they were trying to reach him, though I think it may have been a girl or two—or, at the very least, his buddies wondering is he was coming out to play!!!
Hue,(pronounced “Way”) 61, is HV Dragon’s best friend and a professional photographer. He sat and watched the Thailand vs. Iraq game that the rest of us ignored almost entirely. I did notice how Thailand’s goal was on a cheap call for a penalty and how they should have been awarded one later on for a blatant yellow-card foul. Iraq’s one goal was a brilliant header from the corner. I left at the 1-1 half, but just now found out that’s all the scoring that took place, but who was paying much attention?
Hue was, of course, because he didn’t know any English, but he was helpful taking a few group pix and showing me a body of his most current wedding photos. A far cry from the gruesome photos he took during the Vietnam Conflict.
It’s about this time that Dragon’s youngest daughter entered, not really wanting anything to do with these crazy men. “She’s the Ut Chi, (ut gee)” Minh, the older, called, meaning she was “the youngest girl.” She joined us for another picture, that Hue willing took. Then, like any teenager of 15, she’s off to the computer in the far corner of this huge open living room.
“You are new to this country and the youngest in your family; you are Ut, too!” Dragon laughs.
“Yooo!” we all cheer to the Uts of the world.
We’d break into song again and I was amazed how much he’d taught his kids just through the music he’d liked from a time that was extremely painful and yet rewarding for him too. He proudly recalled times with the US men and he loved visiting the country.
“It’s good to travel to the country and learn so much,” he said.
“Do you, or did you take your kids out to the country and teach them things?”
“No, it’s very expensive to travel.”
“Our father taught us all English so much so when I got to school I went to other teachers to learn more,” the eldest Minh added.
“Your father also taught you all these ‘70s songs, true? They are a great way to learn a language. I’ve always used songs in teaching; for years.”
“You are a teacher,” Dragon sounded surprised. “Come teach this country’s kids English. Education is very important.”
Just Another Day
“It’s a male bonding thing,” Michelle explained. “Men eat fish, drink, watch soccer and talk of old times.”
But when I asked Dragon, he said, “No, we do this all the time.”
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Today is Sunday, July 15, 2007 and though this is late, I lost the first draft which didn’t save or send to my Yahoo account.
Anyway: 1. I’ve filmed the first part of Michelle’s cousin’s wedding yesterday. Too much!!! They were all giving me special passing lanes and everything, “Hin (that’s Michelle’s Vietnamese name), you sent all the way for a Black photographer….you must got BANK!” The second part starts in a few hours so I’ll have to take another shower before filming that part, it’s the one for the friends and children and all those who couldn’t go yesterday to the Buddhist ceremony.
2. We started tutoring young Buddhist-in-training in the Pagoda Friday and will continue for at least another week. We were bummed when we learned we couldn’t just rock up to an orphanage and volunteer. We had to be a part of some bigger organization. Who knew it was so had to give your time away. Serendipity= as we were filming the Pagoda last Wednesday, July 11, one monk, happened to overhear us haggling over interviewing him. It turns out Quang Minh is the English Instructor of the 27 younger (aged 12-21) Monk-ees. They are training to become monks and what a calling!!!!
3. We were forced to move to a hotel ($45 for two weeks) because Michelle’s grandmother (Ba Ngoai) and uncles were convinced we had to register with the Idiot Police. Since we’re not related, Bri and I had to move a block away to a place WITH air conditioning, a frig by the beds and a FLUSHING toilet. Soccer at 5 a.m. (when everyone is forced outta bed with the 2-hour news cast over loudspeakers) isn’t so bad—The Cupa America (World Cup) Soccer is also on (Mexico lost to Uruguay 3-1).
4. I lost or had my bank card lifted from my room, (that’s the hotel room), yesterday and I have finally met my match as far as the food/water bugs are concerned. I’ll draw a picture for those who don’t understand this one.
5. Michele’s cousins Anh High, Em, Ba, Ut and –Meo, 20, whom we brought from Saigon since she’s basically been supporting her family (mom and dad both work, but don’t make as much as she does) for the last 18 months without a break, have been great hosts and hostess. The boys have taken us everywhere on mopeds and out for pool, Karaoke and shopping among other things. Anh High is set to get married next year, before his 26th birthday and Em, 23, just graduated HS. I’ll explain that later. Ba just turned 21 Thursday, and since he loves to sing, but not always on tune, his friends held a party at another Karaoke Bar. Ut, 13, is waiting for me to tutor him (he acts like he hates having to study before we play Thing Lin, his favorite card came, but he and his other cousins Linh, Han and King love hanging with me, even if they have to work a little first.
Hope all of you find happy trails and fun times this summer,
Pay if forward……Shawn
Do Epic Shit 