I'm Not the Man You Think I Am

Hi everybody. 


I'm sorry if I've let you down. I know you've come to expect more from me, and to be perfectly honest, I expected more of myself. Fidelity and loyalty I consider two of my bigger strengths. I can no longer say I possess these qualities because of my recent actions. 


For the past three weeks, which is 21 days, I've eaten at a certain Bun Bo Hue restaurant about 18 of those days. Pho, I've probably eaten on 7 days. Bun Bo Hue is the winner. It is the best. It kills pho now. I am not the man I was.

Last Day of School, 2nd Grade.

I spent a night with Mom and Melissa, inside our new Park Place home (for more on Park Place, read previous entry). It was May 1987, and it was my last day at Burnett Elementary. This is what I remember.


1. Anh Ngon and Chi Bao picked me up in their tan Cutlass from school and dropped me off with Mom back at Park Place. "With or Without You" was playing on the radio as we passed by my soon-to-be new school, a place that could just as well have been a haunted house and it wouldn't have been a scarier site for me at the time.


2. All of my siblings were out doing their own last-day-of-school things with their respective friends, leaving me in our empty home with only Mom and Melissa present. 


Crazy note to include here: My roommate, Adam, a Northern English guy who recently arrived, was listening to his Ipod in our completely silent room as I was typing this. I could hear what was pumping through his headphones, where it came on just after me writing #2 - "With or Without You", of course. We were like, "Duuude..."


3. I wanted to venture out and explore the apartment. I walked by the steps that lead up to Grandma's unit, where a few days ago Anh Ngon, Chi Bao, Chi Ha, Chi Tram, Chi Thu, Anh Vien, Anh Hai, and Chi Thoa were all hanging out one night. I really wished they were there with me at that moment.  I sat down on the steps and pretended they were there around me. I got up to hang on the metal pipe banister doing pull-ups, impressing my imaginary family that were surrounding me.


4. One of the few pieces of furniture in the house was one of those collapsible plastic park/beach benches that have three parts to it, where it can stretch out to allow one to fully recline on it. Mom, Mel, and I fell asleep on it, and it wasn't very comfortable for me.


5. I woke up to the sun already setting and the house very dark. The electricity had went out for some reason. We walked to ABCO, a convenient store, to buy candles.


6. I asked Mom why we didn't just save a whole lot of money by using candles at night instead of the light bulb. (In Vietnamese) "Because we wouldn't really save that much money. It probably costs about 10 cents a day to power a light bulb. It's just too much trouble using a candle when it's that cheap to power a bulb." 


7. I asked if the light bulb was so cheap, then powering a fan was also probably cheap, so why don't we just buy a lot of fans for the house, one pointing in every direction, instead of using what I knew was the costlier A/C (since we rationed the usage of that). "You don't get cool with fans. Fans don't cool you down the way A/C's do."


8. I stared out the window, waiting to see Dad's station-wagon, signalling his arrival home. There was a U.S. Marine Corps sticker in the room window and I imagined the people living in the unit before us keeping a room filled with heavy artillery and camouflaged bedsheets. There were a lot of false alarms with cars coming in every few minutes, something I wasn't used to when we lived in our own separate house.


9. Dad came home first, and then the rest of the siblings slowly started filing in. By then, the electricity had turned on already. The house was buzzing the way it normally did. I wanted to let everyone know about the serious ennui I had to endure while they were gone, without directly telling them that I was miserable, but I didn't know how. I wanted to make them feel guilty for leaving me home alone, but other than directly saying so, which I didn't allow myself to do, I tried walking around sadly. I think they were coming down off of their last day of school highs themselves and couldn't notice.


10. I remember taking Lisa into the room to show her the U.S. Marine Corps sticker, reading it out to her. I wanted to make her envision this apartment as the armory I was sure it was before we came here. It's pronounced "CORE", not "CORPSE", she told me. She tried to take the sticker off but couldn't.

Park Place, where the rent in the Monopoly board game, which is Depression Era prices, mind you, actually cost about the same as it did for us in 1987

I made reference to the St. Joseph’s Condo on 8250 Park Place Blvd Houston, TX 77017 on Hai and Judy’s post recently. Just saying the words Park Place makes me want to eat Funyuns.

8250 Park Place, as found on Houston Citysearch

They say smell is the strongest sense linked to memory. I agree, and think this is so because sight and sound are so constant that to remember specific linkages to those senses would be nearly impossible. Not taste, because we generally find ourselves eating the same things with the same ingredients, so the monotony of taste doesn’t present much of a singular experience for our memories to cull from. Not touch, because sight and sound generally interfere with the sense of touch; plus, we’re always touching something of some sorts, whether it’s the clothes on our backs or the rings around our fingers, and like the other senses, the inundation of touch makes it far less special. Also, whatever men find pleasing to the touch, or whatever women enjoy, even if one is said to find these opportunities on a regular basis, there are also other senses involved in such moments that can often overpower the touch, even if that moment of touch is rare and indeed very enjoyable itself.

Smells, on the other hand, are egalitarian. No matter how repulsive you are, you still get to smell. Touch is nice, but not everyone gets to. If I want good smell, I can just walk to any Popeye’s parking lot and get my fill.

Our sense of smell is not in constant use. Our brains quickly grow accustomed to a room’s smell after we’ve spent a few minutes in it, so any new scent that registers in our heads, we are likely to remember because it actually does represent a break in the normal flow of the moment. And smell isn’t interfered with by imagery, or sound, or touch. It’s sometimes accompanied by taste, but doesn’t have to be.

I’m concurrently planning for tomorrow’s lesson for 6-7 year olds and getting in a Dr. Seuss frame of mind:

Oui oui

Kelly

Smells are free

you see,

for you, and for me!

Smell is the most powerful because you can only hide from it for so long. If you don’t want to see something, close your eyes. If you don’t want to taste something, don’t put it in your mouth. If you don’t want to hear something, put on some headphones and listen to GWAR on high volume. If you don’t want to touch something, don’t. If you don’t want to smell something, you can breathe with your mouth for a little while, but either through a morbid sense of curiosity, or the thought of ingesting these particles through your mouth grosses you out even more, and you eventually succumb to smelling it through your nose.

I’ve been inside a good amount of Vietnamese homes and restaurants in my couple of months here, and every single time I step foot inside one, I’m harkened back to Park Place. Vietnamese cuisine uses some pretty specific ingredients, and a hundred kitchens in a small apartment complex pumping out breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time, all generally making the same dishes, is going to have a certain scent. What that scent signified to me was very confusing as a youngster. The St. Joseph Condominiums (from here on out only to be referred to as ‘Park Place’) consisted entirely of Vietnamese-Americans, was right smack in the middle of a predominately Latin-American neighborhood, directly surrounded by African-American apartment complexes, and bordered to the south by, of all things, a pretty decent golf course.

“Golf is a rich man’s sport? I live right next to one. I’m rich?” I would often try to reason inside my 8 year old head.

It was home, and it made a lot more sense to me then than it does now. Regardless, what I smell here, I smelled everyday in Park Place. I could only connect these dots after arriving to Vietnam.

Perhaps I’m far overstepping my boundaries by speaking for everyone else who spent a few years living at Park Place, but I’ve deduced that this is why those years have remained so poignant to us: if we were Vietnamese-Americans, in Park Place, we were living as Americans in Vietnam. Walking around Park Place, you’re in Vietnam (at least Vietnam in 2011). There’s no difference. Unbeknownst to us who do not have memories of Vietnam from childhood, we were living in Vietnam at Park Place, but had no way of knowing it with nothing to reference. For us with only memories of America in our childhood, entering Park Place, when we had to move there from a very racially diverse suburb twenty minutes away, we had to re-examine our identity not only as Vietnamese-Americans, but also, just as immigrants, moving to a segregated neighborhood straight out of The Wanderers.

 Twenty-seven guys with the last name "Wong'; all know Jujitsu and kill you with one judo chop. 

There weren’t any turf wars, at least not the kind that involved chains and switchblades. In fact, there was actually pretty decent camaraderie between the minorities. But what we all had to come to terms with was our outsider status, that the fortress of high trees preventing us from seeing the golf course was equal parts the golfers not wanting us to invade their course, yet also, to prevent them from seeing how we were living.

These sentiments are all in hindsight. You don’t feel it when you’re surrounded by everyone else in the exact same predicament. I guess that’s the strength of community. We were all still on a boat, so to speak; the same boat.

Dinner At My Uncle's

Me (with odd pompadour courtesy of new barber), Cau Manh, Mo Hien, Cau Dung, Cau Manh's granddaughter, Cau Manh's daughter.

I had dinner at my Uncle Manh's house, in memory of his wife who had passed away. The dinner was fantastic - fried shrimp, sweet rice with dried chicken and fried onions, a shrimp and vegetable stir fry, boiled chicken, beef and onions and cilantro, and a fried spring roll with cheese(!) or some kind of cream inside. It was fantastic, and my strategy to not eat any lunch in order to adequately gorge myself at his house paid off. You see, Vietnamese elders, when you eat with them at their house, always insist, incessantly, that you 'try this', or 'have this', or 'eat more', or 'are you full'? It's S&M hospitality, I don't know how else to describe it. It's always done with the sincerest of motivations, but my appetite is not massive, yet I often feel I have to eat like a madman every time I'm in their presence. If I stop, take a breather, and put my chopsticks on my plates, you can be sure I'll instantly hear a "why are you eating so little?", even though I've been stuffing my face apparently without them noticing for the past twenty minutes.


Well, of course of course, of all days, when I planned for it, it didn't happen. It was a very chilled night, I was starving, the food was great, yet I didn't get any "eat this!", "eat this!". You know looking back, this hasn't really happened much in Vietnam, but definitely tonight, I was spared. It wouldn't have mattered, really, that's the funny thing, because I ate everything in sight, and the food was stellar. My Uncle Phu made dinner for his children, grandchildren, and I last week and it was just as good, yet I foolishly ate some popsicles before that dinner and couldn't eat as much. Uncle Dung is a funny guy and was constantly teasing me during dinner, always good-naturedly. He calls me Cu (Penis), something my Father doesn't even call me (it's a traditional Vietnamese nickname for the young boy in the house) and called me a 'fake Westerner' today after his sister commented on my strong American accent and if people can tell I'm Vietnamese-American over the telephone. He was also plying me with beer the whole night, but it wasn't much of an effort for him. Beer and Vietnamese pair amazingly well together (except for pho). It was a lovely dinner and I felt very happy to be there to share the night with them.


After dinner, we watched the Monte Carlo finals, which featured Ferrer vs. Nadal. Of course Nadal was there; Monte Carlo is played on clay. And if Nadal isn't in a wheelchair, he's going to take it on clay, any day of the year. I really miss playing tennis and probably want to start up again, yet the only problem is that you must join a club in order use courts here, as there are no public ones. Watching any tennis match on clay is how tennis is meant to be watched, with rallies, hustling, and visible strategy. And it made for great viewing with my aunts and uncles, who turn out to be avid tennis fans and whose analysis of the game indicated they've been fans for a while. 


"Watching tennis like this is so much fun," my Aunt Hien (Uncle Dung's wife) was saying. "It's not like when Sampras was playing, and his game was all about the serve." Amen to that. I can't blame Sampras for taking the serve to a whole new level, and at least he had a great one-handed backhand along with a superior net game. Surely the only reason my aunt didn't mention Andy Roddick as the poster boy of ugly tennis (and who literally only has his serve as any notable part of his game) is because he doesn't win any tournaments.


Anyhow, we also bonded by rooting for the underdog, as I am cursed to do for my entire life. Although they appreciated Nadal's incredible intensity, they just couldn't bring themselves to root for the kid at this point in his career. We got to talking about the recent history of tennis as well. 
"I hate the Williams sisters," my Uncle Phu chipped in as we were running down great players of the past. "I don't like how they play."
"You only root for the gorgeous women players," my Aunt Hien informed him.
"What do you mean? I just don't like the Williams sisters' game."
"Which women players do you like, then?" she asked.
"Sharapova." 
We all got a laugh out of that.


Watching tennis with them was like watching the Rockets back during our championship years with my family. Every Ferrer unforced error, or missed opportunity, was followed by couch smacking or a loud "Phi!" ("what a waste!"). They mentioned that Ferrer had beaten Nadal recently, and if he took a few chances, would have a prayer of winning the match. My Uncle Phu wasn't so convinced.
"Nadal is too strong, far too strong."


I agree. I really like Nadal's self criticism and confidence on the court, contrasting with his quiet and humble self off it. I actually have no problem rooting for Rafa, whether or not he's the favorite (he's not going to be an underdog for a very long time). We watched Rafa hold serve at 4-3 to make it 5-3 and figured the first set was over, so we said our goodbyes, and Uncle Phu took me home on his scooter, a Sunday night ride through the main arteries of Hanoi that looked a living, moving, cheap postcard with "Hanoi at Night" written on the bottom. That postcard would only capture the feel of the city if it had speakers to hear the honking and the conversations taking place as you ride home. Or if the postcard were scratch and sniff, the streets divided by pockets of aroma usually amazing, sometimes frightening, always pungent. Because no such postcard exists, I don't see myself sending one home any time soon.


I guess I had a little buzz on the way home. There's still a slight breeze here in Hanoi and the scooter ride added even more of it. In the streets, I can hear families on scooters talking about a movie they just saw (yes, father riding scooter, mother in back holding baby, and toddler in front of the father holding onto the handlebars. Families on scooters), or where they want to eat ice cream, or to "thank your father for taking you to the park today". It makes a ride in the streets here so much more communal. 

America's roads serve only as a means to an end, a mere conduit for our own private, floating little houses (automobiles). The streets here in Hanoi are like an open wound, where it's surely more raw and pound for pound maybe more dangerous, but at least you can feel something during your commute. If Marshall McCluhan says that the car is the aggressive carapace of modern man, a sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with, I wonder where the scooter fits into that analogy. There are obviously cars in Hanoi, and even more so than in America, their owners treat it as if it were their own private tank. There is utter denial that you're in a 3 ton behemoth that can kill anything in its path, the way they drive. And cars here cost 3x as much as they do in the States, so extrapolate the magnitude of douche that guy in the Ferrari is in Vietnam when compared to the already high douche levels back in the States. 


Scooters aren't perfect, in fact, they're even more polluting than cars, but at least I can reach my hand over to you to shake your hand at a traffic light, or give you a piece of gum, or articulately bitch you out if you should do something stupid in your scooter (instead of a horn). I think the Vietnamese, in the midst of their intense drive and focus to develop their nation and grow out of its postwar quagmire, are still holding onto the final remnants of community by traveling on scooter. Or you can say, "No, idiot, you just said cars cost triple what they do in the U.S. Added to the fact that the per capita is one twentieth of the average American, and I don't think it has anything to do with the preferred aesthetics of scooter transportation." Fine. It's still not a car centric city, and it feels better for it.

That's So Raven

Miss Raven Simone
what does the title of your
show mean? I wonder.


I've never seen her show before, but I do often wonder about the meaning of the show's name. In a moment of weakness, I typed in "what does thats so raven mean" into my Google search bar. I would never trust Bing with this type of a job. Only Google would safely guide me through the murky swamps of the internet, leading me safely to the answer of this vexing mystery. This is what I found:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110101212330AA6Mv0A

Yahoo just scored some points with me, because there it was, on Yahoo Answers.  I'm very satisfied with the explanation given by BRaini: If someone does something silly, you can say, "That's so silly." If someone is known for doing things in a certain manner over and over and over again, you can use their name as a "brand" for the action.

In her TV show, Raven Simone is known for getting into trouble, so when she gets into trouble YET AGAIN, rather than just saying, "that's so silly", you can brand her by saying, "That's so Raven." Those that know Raven will understand the usage - but those that DON'T know of her and her antics will be at a total loss.

If Timmy is known to have problems by falling over all the time, rather than saying, "That's so clumsy," you can say, "That's so Tim."

Style points go to QuestFC: "Its a tv show that is freaking stupid."

I'm happy with BRaini's explanation and can only assume that is the rationale behind the show's title. But isn't every sitcom about somebody, and that somebody probably has a lot of trademark quirks which get him/her into and out of trouble on a regular basis? Why wasn't the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" called "That's So Mary?" Why wasn't "The Hogan Family" called "That's So Sandy", or "That's So Valerie" when it was only "Valerie"? It probably should have been called "That's So Hogan", because I don't even remember that show focusing on Sandy Duncan all that much.

Peter Pan

What I was hoping to find was this: that "That's So Raven" is an allusion to "That's so random", an unstoppable phrase with seemingly universal appeal. I don't know when it found its legs, but there sure are a lot of people that use it, me included. For us citizens of English speaking countries who cannot decide on what to call potato chips (alternate: crisps), flashlight (alternate: torch), or markers (alternate: textas), the ubiquity of "That's so random" seems significant. I've heard Aussies, Irish, French, Canadian, English, and Swedes use it, usually to refer to a comedic moment where something unexpected either occurred or was said. Or maybe it was used when a slippery comment from out of leftfield was uttered, and the people within the vicinity do not know how to respond. Maybe in the past nothing would have been said after such an event. Silence would ensue, and people would move on. Has everyday existence always been so orderly that a random moment is immediately worth taking note of?

Raven Simone getting her own sitcom seemed totally random, and I was hoping maybe the entire series would be a self-referential commentary on the arbitrary nature of fame, wealth, celebrity. Instead, it sounds as if the show had episodes about Raven drinking alcohol and hiding it from her parents, or betraying her oldest friend in the world by hanging out with her newer 'cool clique' friends. That's fine and all, but I think the show missed a real opportunity there. Maybe Raven could have scripted episodes about how growing up a pint-sized child star was due more to being in the right place and the right time?


Random is openly celebrated today, so I don't know why it needs to be pointed out when it occurs. The Ipod Shuffle's main marketing gimmick was a feature which has existed on music players since the inception of the cd. My favorite radio station is one of those network of 'random playlist' stations across the nation (Bob in Austin), because, for some reason, Don Henley following The Troggs is far more tolerable than Don Henley coming on after Steve Winwood. 


I admit I hardly ever say "that's so organized" (unless I'm on Jimmie Nguyen's computer and examining his hard drive), but is an instance of 'random' so remarkable? 

Maybe it's merely a recognition of the cruel rules by which the world is ran, or a reflection of us having fallen off some intelligible and coherent path, sliding into an ocean of utter meaninglessness  (far more eloquently said by Fredric Jameson). I saw a t-shirt with V from V for Vendetta doing something unmentionable to Sarah Palin here in Vietnam, and the young man wearing it knew the Vendetta character, but had no idea who Sarah Palin was. Is this the same thing when people pay for pre-faded concert t-shirts of bands they've only heard a song or two of? But let's say you know the length of every song on every single album this certain band has released. Can you lay claim to more 'meaning'? What does the crocodile mean on a Lacoste shirt? Does it mean less when the shirt is counterfeit? Why a crocodile? Does Sandy Duncan have a glass eye?

Watch some TMZ, for my money the most entertaining show on modern television, and try to  mine some significance in any of it. Find something entirely un-random about any of our vocal talents in modern pop and see if randomization is worth commenting on. 
If we are to take Nassim Nicholas Taleb's word for it, the root cause of many of life's foibles is the fallacy of narrative, how we conveniently assign causation to many events that might simply have no explanation to begin with. Random is the order of the day.

the Third World war will be fought with sticks and stones

Jeff Wall. Milk. 1984.

Jennifer Kiev asked me a few weeks ago what was the strangest thing I've eaten since being here. I didn't have anything to tell her. If she asked me today, my answer would be the same. 


I understand the draw of street food, the feeling that you're slumming it with the locals, that you're earning your merit badge for esoteric adventurism with every single bite you take. I suppose a part of the street food experience is experimentation, to make the rounds and sample little bits here and there until you're full. I, however, have rigid expectations for my meals. If I know what I want, I'll usually know where to get it, and I like getting full off of that one entree I originally had in mind. Therefore, I never eat dessert. And I'm not one of those people that say "the sides are the best parts of the meal." I simply make that one side my meal if it's good enough, hence the rapid disappearance of Chi Trang's chicken salad finger sandwiches at Tet. Eclecticism is for the bookshelf, not meals.


I tend to find my favorite spots for food through word of mouth or a review in some type of publication, so I'm not very experimental, either. I need a strong push to get me to a new place, because I have no problem going back to whatever joint I had already been frequenting. If I like the place, I go back. And at that point, every other establishment serving the same type of dish is dead to me. I know I should stop and smell the roses (or frog hotpots), but I want to eat, man!


Back home in Texas, resisting the call of eclecticism and not stopping at some lonely Golden Chick when you're craving a salad is a good thing. Here, I have to force myself to branch out and find new things, even when all I want is that My kho on Dinh Liet. I was in a touristy part of town and thought I could do some good people watching while trying out a new spot, so I settled at the main bend on Ma May. I didn't really settle, but was lured in by a young chap with lightly dyed bangs and a Louis Vuitton button up. Concerning high fashion Italian clothing here in Vietnam: if you can read who made it from more than two feet away, rest assured, they didn't make it.


He hooked me in with a friendly demeanor and overall good customer service, pointing me to an empty stool in which I could sit. What the hell, promoting and rewarding good customer service in Vietnam can be one way I'm leaving the nation better than how I found it, so I obliged and stayed.


I sit down on a blue stool about five inches off the ground and look at their framed menu on a brick wall: pho xao, my xao, com. I choose the pho xao, a dry noodle dish with beef and greens.
To my left, I hear what sounds like French. I look over and see two men with athletic builds and of African descent, sitting back (figuratively), drinking some red soda, taking in the scenes of the frenetic street which lay a foot away off the curb. I'm a little curious about the two gentleman, so I ask them how long they've been in Hanoi and things of that ilk. He said, in English, about two years, and something about Ninh Binh, and soccer. His English was heavily accented, but I didn't want to get into one of those constant "what did you say?" conversations, so I just nodded my head and went along with things. I couldn't even discern his name. I saw a couple of the employees at this particular food stall, as well as from across the street, come up and ask them a few things in Vietnamese. Well, the Vietnamese he shot back was clearer than his English, so I didn't know what language to use from that point on. 


The cooks had two massive woks fired up, one cooking thinly sliced beef, the other frying dua, a bok choi or cabbage like green (I don't know the English equivalent). They were prepping for the busy night that lay ahead, as there were only three customers at the moment, and I was the only one that hadn't eaten. It was about 8 o'clock. The kitchen was open air, yet I could still feel all of the steam from the stir fry billowing in my direction. Vaporized garlic and charred beef flesh formed a formidable fog, a hot blanket of flavor providing me the best appetizer possible. It didn't take long for me to hit the point where I stopped minding the heat and just started to accept that I was going to sweat. Just as I did, however, the young cook put a giant lid over the woks, trapping the nuclear fission. 

The stool I sat on had a warped leg. I had to lean forward to not fall backwards. A young girl, about a year and a half, wearing a stained white cotton dress, walks in between the soccer player and I. She's doing a fancy little walk, obviously trying to get our attention. She hops off and back onto the curb while using her arms for balance like a little Nadia Comaneci, garnering applause from the men around her. She's on the curb and is about to turn back around to start all over again, as young children are wont to do when they've got an audience, when I hear a loud boom over in the direction of the kitchen. "It was a sound, like a garbage truck, dropped off the Empire State Building." A metallic crash, near deafening, reports straight from the woks, and I snap my head over to the right and see the lid on the dua flying up about two feet in the air. The green leaves shoot off the wok in slow motion like tossed lettuce in a salad dressing commercial. Heck, I knew it was hot in them woks, but this is a little surprising.

Jeff Wall. Untangling. 1994

Of course I'm transfixed, and in moments like this, when calamity strikes, half a second creates an hour of memories. I'm staring right at the woks, looking to see what other fireworks lay in store, when the cook jolts himself back, blocking my view. I inch my head over to get a better view, when I see an orange stone the size of a softball fly into view. It collides with the wok containing the beef, tipping it over, spilling about a third of the meat onto the street. In the middle of the street, two boys in a white scooter, about the same age as the cook and the maitre d', hurl another stone. I see it hit the backsplash of the kitchen, with the cook using his arms to block his face. Seeing the scooter kids are likely out of ammo, he sprints toward his enemies like a greyhound gunning for the stuffed bunny. A couple of feet in front of him is the pile of beef, resting in its own fat and the cooking oil's. Clearly too furious to see it, he slips and trips face first, deftly blocking his face from the pavement with his palms. With the grease beneath his palms and feet, he's running stationary in the stack of meat like he was in a Tom and Jerry skit, but is quickly able to gain traction and book it for the perps. I'm not sure if the scooter had a hard time accelerating or if the cook was that quick, but he catches up to the boys and gives a few swift kicks with his left feet to the engine cover. The scooter is able to accelerate and speeds off beyond the bend, the cook having no problem keeping pace. The trio speed off into the night as abruptly as they had met.


I look over at the soccer player, and his mouth is halfway open. He turns to look at me and I probably had the same look on my face, so he lets out a chuckle and starts nodding his head. The presumed owners of the kitchen, a man and woman likely in their late 40's, are boiling.


(in Vietnamese)
"Who are those boys?"
"How am I supposed to know? I'm going to stab them in the head the next time I see them!"
"How are you going to see them if you don't know who they are?"
"Well they better not come back here!"
"If they come back here, I'm going to stab them in the head!"
"Who are they?" looking at one of the employees.
"I don't know who they are!" he shouts back, gesturing heavily with his arms.


There's plenty more that was said, but in times like these, I am very glad my Vietnamese is as limited as it is. The male owner slams his hands on a table, his long bangs shooting up from the air the impact created.
"Kill 'em!"


"This isn't common, is it?" I ask the soccer player.
"I have not seen stones like this," he informs me, "but the Vietnamese. So angry. So angry. Always fighting!" Meanwhile the owners are still ironing out the situation, screaming as they're doing it, understandably very bothered. 
"I always see hands fighting on the street, but never stones before," he tells me as he keeps an eye on the owners.
"I'm going to smash their scooter the next time I see them!" the lady owner shouts, to nobody in particular.


The young cook who trailed the scooter comes back into view, casually walking with a lit cigarette in one hand. 
"Boy, did you get 'em?" the lady asks.
"What, you didn't see me dent the scooter right here?"
"How could you expect me to see? I was ducking," she shoots back.
"Well while you were ducking, I got them. And down the street, I got them, too."
"Who were they?" the male owner shouts.
"What makes you think I would know?" he asks incredulously.
"They look like your friends!"
"My friends don't throw rocks at me!"
The talking gets a little fast at that point, with a lot of finger pointing, hair flapping, and diagonal eyebrows.


The soccer player lets out a big sigh.
"I look at the food and thought it explode," he tells me, echoing my thoughts exactly. 
"I don't know why they do it this way, with all the fighting," he continues. 
Who knows the story really, but either the snipers had really bad aim, or only wanted to hit the woks for a non-violent, demonstrative surgical strike. For a split second it felt truly violent, but I had to take a step back and see that they were only rocks. Nobody is armed here, not even the policemen. I felt very safe at that moment, remembering this. From the looks of the cook's pinky as he's taking drags off his cigarette, the only casualty was about a millimeter of skin.


"Why you not help us?" the male owner interrupts as we're talking.
The soccer player chuckles a bit. "I did not know what was happening!"
"You could kick the boy for us," the male owner says, pantomiming one of those soccer kicks where you strike the ball with the inside of the foot.
"I told you I kicked him already!" the cook shouted. For emphasis, he demonstrates that exact same kick. 
The soccer player, the cook, and the male owner stand in a triangle, discussing how the cook got his kicks in, all the while comparing proper form and technique of the kick.
"Are you sure you got some kicks in?" asks the male owner.
"Ask him," the cook motions to the soccer player. "Ask him if I got some kicks in."
The soccer player nods his head, looking at me, the owner, the cook, and back at me, laughing. They still kick the air during the discussion.


"Your food will be done soon, don't worry," the lady owner tells me. 
"It's fine, don't worry about it. Has this happened here before?" I ask.
"Not at all."
I wondered if that remark was in the best interests of her business, or if it was actually true.
"Boy, did you get any kicks in?" she asks over my shoulders.
"If you weren't so scared, you would have stuck your head out to see me smashing in the scooter!" the cook screams back.
The lady owner smirks and mops up the beef and fat off the pavement, or really, their restaurant floor. 
"Teach him how to kick so he can protect us next time," the male owner demands of the soccer player.

"What are you going on about?" the cook exclaims in disbelief. It's all becoming pretty funny to him, too. A few minutes after the little fiasco, everyone is sitting back and able to have a good laugh about it. I get my pho xao, topped with the same greens and beef that had been cooking in the wok. Maybe it was the goal of the assassins to kill all of the flavor in that restaurant's food, because my dish was disappointingly bland and tasteless. The pickled daikon couldn't really rescue it, either. I guess I should return on another day to give it a fairer assessment. An angry cook is a bad cook, they say.

Jeff Wall. A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Hokusai). 1993

The Height

No, I'm not leaving out the 's' on that gritty Fox show which spawned the irrepressible hit "How Do You Talk to an Angel" in my title. I'm only talking about the height of the Vietnamese I've seen in Northern Vietnam. To put it simply, they're pretty tall here. I didn't notice it the first few weeks, I realize, because I'm used to being shorter than everyone, and so none of that changed once I stepped foot in Vietnam. I'm not saying the Vietnamese are as tall as the Dutch, I'm just saying that I don't think I'm even the average height for men here, and the women aren't much shorter than me as well. I'd say the men average 5'8 here and the women 5'4, but it's not at all uncommon to see 6' men and 5'9" women, though I'm not looking down to see if it's the ladies' high heels are not. 


Are you surprised? Are you surprised I'm surprised? What, you never heard at some point in your life that Vietnamese people were short? I have. I haveVietnamese blood, and I'm short. So I've heard it. But they're not that short here. 


The Hmong are not so very tall, but I don't consider them Vietnamese, and neither do they.
My cousin Thinh and his wife are both taller than me. My uncle Phu is taller than me. My local friend Thang is taller than me. Thiet, my coworker, is taller than me. They're all northerners, nguoi Bac. I guess the Bac are taller than the southerners, nguoi Nam?

I forget, which was Swayze, a Confederate?

Even in the United States, just from hearing my aunts, uncles, and parents (the people who formed all I knew of Vietnam before coming here) talk, I know that there is a big divide between the Bac and Nam in Vietnam. It's a different dialect, different lexicon, there are different customs, the weather is different, one region calls soft drinks 'pop' and the other 'soda', and so on and so forth. But the separation between the north and south is inescapable. Living in a hotel, I meet different tourists everyday, and even they have a lot to add to the conversation when it comes to differences between Saigon and Hanoi.

"It's like a whole different world once you pass the mountains of Da Lat," Lyle told me, an Australian teaching English who has lived in Hanoi for three years. "They're far friendlier down there."

"Yeah, I guess I can remember a few more smiles down in Saigon," John told me, an Illini. "But I don't see that much of a difference, really."

"Saigon is ugly, and the Nam are loud," a waiter here told me.

"The Bac are snobs," I hear, from just about every Nam person I've met here.

And I think back to all I've heard, and reading the sampling of statements I've written here, none contradict each other, so I guess it's all true. 

The South is still a mystery to me. The supposed binary nature of Vietnam makes the South seem as far away from me as Vietnam did when I was in the States. And Hanoi already feels like home.

North and South, NES. I dare you to challenge me.

Happy Birthday, Melissa

I've seen that I have not gotten this posted in time for April 3 (U.S. time). I wanted to say Happy Birthday to my youngest sister Melissa, who turned 25 yesterday. Ah, 25, what a milestone. I remember when I was 25, what a momentous year. That was the year I...hmmm....that was the age when I....


I'm not sure what the count is right now, but from what I last knew, Mel was working 3 jobs, one because she loves it, the other because she loves the clothes, and the other probably only because they really love her. For a younger sister, she's never asked jack squat from her older brother, except I think there was this one time a decade ago she asked to borrow 20 dollars.
Not having to worry about a younger sibling is a huge luxury. I never had to worry about Melissa, but to be fair, I'm not really sure any of my older siblings had to worry about her, either. She always possessed a remarkable precociousness from ever since I could remember, though precocious has merely evolved into wise, since she's an old lady now. Melissa had to grow up really fast in our family because as sharp as she was at such an early age, we expected her to mature as proportionally fast. We all took this aspect of her for granted and treated her as an adult ever since the birth of Amanda. 


That would have made Mel about 6 at the time. We corrupted Mel's Bible school values by asking her to participate in elaborate ruses to help protect her siblings from the wrath of our parents. I made Mel watch The Kids in the Hall with me while she was in 2nd grade, never balking when I was asked to explain some of the more scandalous sketches. I would threaten her when she persistently sang songs I didn't like, such as "Brother Louie" by German FOB gods Modern Talking. Maybe this sounds like typical bored-teenaged-boy-at-home-with-nothing-better-to-do type of behavior, but Mel was always cut very little slack if she did something childish, or heaven forbid, something on par with children her age, not just by me, but by everyone in the family.


It's time the tale were told
of how you took a child
and you made [her] old


Of course those lyrics popped into my head. If you know what that song is actually about, no, I'm not talking about that, I'm just talking about Mel's forced maturation, and to insert lyrics from a band that I probably approved her singing when she was 8. So now that Mel is a jack of all trades, super intelligent adult, we can all take credit for this, right family?


I love you, Melissa. Happy Birthday. I hope you enjoyed your Crawfish Shack and had a wonderful rest of your day. I'm sure Thomas had lined up rose petals from the doorstep to your car or something along those lines. 


I took this video of Linh, a boisterous teenage native of Sapa who just loves to correct my Vietnamese . She, along with her mother, sells skewers on the sidewalk next to the main square in town, and I would occasionally stop by to chit chat with her, since she always had her guitar and I was curious to hear her perform. She'd sing me some songs, but would never let me record them, because she figured I would put her on the internet and make her famous (ahhhhh, kids in Vietnam frown upon the pursuit of fame).


She swore she'd eventually let me record her before I left town, but that I still couldn't put it on the internet. I've left the title of the youtube video with its default file name in order for this video to remain as anonymous as possible. And I'm sorry Linh, but the 20 visits I get at allthephopuns.blogspot.com a day can't really qualify as fame, so I'm putting this up in the hopes that I am not violating any pact that we've made. 


She knows a few English language songs (I only recognized one, the others must be German pop from the 80s) but when I first met her, I tried introducing her to some tunes I knew she could play, and might enjoy. I made a playlist and let her listen to my ipod. Linh was very appreciative, but said she aged 10 years just by listening to my selection.  I guess I have that effect on people.


Here she is knowingly performing for Mel and Anh Vien, unknowingly performing for everyone else that might visit this page. Thanks Linh!

I'm watching this video and I realize I look a little flustered. If I do, it's because I was. I only had a little more than an hour until I had to depart Sapa, yet I hadn't packed up my room back at the hotel yet, and she had taken a while to get started with her performance. As you can tell from the look on my face, the clock was rapidly ticking.

Paul is Dead

The Backstreet Boys were here recently. “Live in Vietnam” it said, for their “This is Us” tour sponsored by Water Buffalo Productions.

Backstreet Boys "This is Us" tour, Vietnam.

There are only four Backstreet Boys on that poster, and you know, I could have sworn there were five in their heyday. So I ask, did one die? I asked Valerie, and she said “No way, that’s so sad!?”, but why  be so sad if we’re not even sure if that’s the missing one’s fate? In my book, I’m either sad for him and his family, or incredibly proud he chose to dis his brethren. I know there are search engines to do this type of difficult work for us curious humans nowadays, but really, is that something we really want to type in a search bar? Of course it isn’t, and I requested that Valerie abstain from such a search herself. So if you know the answer, without doing a search, is one of them deceased?

We Might Have to Wait a Long Time for Long Distance Olympic Runners from Vietnam

High altitude training is supposed to build more endurance, at least that's what Gilbert Arenas was told when he spent thousands to rig up his house to have Colorado altitude while living in D.C. I thought I'd give it a whirl, since Sapa is the highest elevation I'd be living in for a prolonged period of time. I headed to the town's main lake and was only able to manage a few laps, with there being a noticeable difference in difficulty. I didn't get to run as long, but I pushed myself a bit harder in the laps that I did run, wanting to get home as it was already getting dark.

My eyes were really drying up during the jog. There are a lot of little pharmacies in both Hanoi and Sapa which are about the size of a large closet, where you just walk up to the counter while you're still standing in the street and ask for what you need. I was needing some eyedrops, so I stopped by one I had been to before. The owner of this one, I think her name is Phuong, when I first met her, had asked me to teach her some English in order to increase her profit at her shop. One of the cardinal rules of freelance teaching, or lets just be real, freelance anything, is don't do it for free, even if you really feel like the person needs the help. It could become a slippery slope and you'd end up having no time for yourself while resenting the student for getting something for nothing. I told her I was too busy at work, but if she needed anything translated at the moment, I'd be happy to. She didn't have any pressing concerns at the time, but thanked me for my offer. The subsequent few times I would walk by that pharmacy, it was rarely ever open, no matter what time of day it was. Either that or she would be chilling in front of the pharmacy with the store doors closed, conversing with a friend on little foldup chairs, ignoring all of her potential customers walking on by. After seeing that far too many times, I was very satisfied with my decision to not tutor pro bono.

My eyes were dry and I went up to Phuong's currently open pharmacy and asked for some eye drops, or as it translates literally from Vietnamese, 'saltwater'. Like I said I had been pushing myself, dripping sweat that pooled around my t-shirt collar and my hair puffing out like Casper in "Kids". 

(in Vietnamese)

"What? Why are you so warm?" queried Phuong, jointly perplexed and concerned.

"I was running," I murmured, still tired.

"Good heavens, from who?"

Some students of Sapa O'Chau

This is Chi, a student I have no issue saying is probably the most endearing I've had in my time at Sapa O'Chau. She, along with Ha, came into school about a week after I started, both girls wily veterans of the outdoor markets. It's a huge sacrifice for them and their families back in the villages to have their daughters live at the campus instead of making good money hawking their handmade wares to tourists throughout the day. It's what Chi has been doing for years, and as a team, her and Ha were very good at it. Despite the draw of good money, Chi has thrown herself headfirst into school, not only learning how to write proper letters and words, but learning how to READ English in a matter of weeks (by no means is the credit all mine; I worked with 6 other teachers). Chi even had enough gumption to separate herself from the comfortable desk next to her good friend Ha in order to focus more, parking herself right next to me in the front of the class. As is the case anywhere in the world when you are entering a new school, a lot of the students at Sapa O'Chau are timid and afraid to speak up, made all the more difficult because it is a language class. Chi never once had a moment's hesitation, and it's not because she is what one would coin naturally fearless - she just really wants to learn and has the perfect mixture of attitude and effort. Chi, along with Lan, always took it upon themselves to bail me out when the rest of the class was either too tired or simply refused to answer questions I'd pose to them as a group. What made Chi's effort extra sweet was that she would shout out an answer just to help me out, even though she knew herself she hadn't a prayer of getting it correct. She's simply one of those dream students you hope you have when you head into jobs like this, or really, any teaching job. She also really reminds me of my little neice Bella!

In the photo, I'm showing off a bracelet she made as a thank you gift for me. As you will see in the ensuing pictures, I've posed with every student who was so thoughtful and giving enough to actually make me a gift for being their teacher. Bracelets, satchels, and belts were not the only gifts I got.  I received plenty of wonderful hand written letters from my students, where I've been reading one each night since leaving Sapa this past Sunday. 

If Chi reminded me of Bella, Lee here reminded me of my little neice Amanda! The same tough, steely resolve, the same insane work ethic, and is it just me, or does she somewhat resemble Amanda, too? Lee takes not only 5 hours of English lessons a day, she also takes nightly Hmong and Vietnamese lessons, as well as weekend classes at another school. So she gets zero days off throughout the week and, understandably so, often looks very tired. If you've ever taught a class, you would know how important it is to be consistent with all of the students, to not give any special privileges to anyone, lest you want a chaotic classroom full of entitled children. However, whenever Lee protested my request for her to do something in front of the class, I must admit, I backed down. It just seemed so out of character, plus I knew her busy workload, so if she flat out refused to do something, I could either chalk it up to "she's overworked" or the very convenient 'cultural sensitivity' excuse, that maybe it was some cultural violation for me to ask her to put on a hat in order to demonstrate a clothing vocabulary lesson.

Being so busy, Lee admitted to me that she didn't have the time to hand-make a gift, so instead, went down to the market to purchase a cell-phone pouch and a little pillow keychain accessory. A gift in any shape or form is beyond sweet and obviously unnecessary, but to have her go out and buy one for me made me very uncomfortable. Keep in mind my students, when we go on treks, either purposefully run away from me when they make purchases at stores so that I don't have to buy them anything, or take a really long time grappling with the fact that I just offered to buy them a 50 cent soda after six hours of walking. My students' humility and pride marvels me every time I think about it. 

I think of Lan as the matriarch of Sapa O'Chau (if you exclude Shu, the director of the school, of course). She arrived to school barely before I got there, but the command and respect she has of the other students must have been immediate, because when Lan barks, which is rare, but when she barks, the other girls sure listen. Chi led by example when it came to policing the class, and Lan led by letting rip a trademark admonishment in Hmong that I'm glad I didn't understand. If I have led you to believe that the class as a whole were very unruly, that wouldn't be accurate. To sit in a language class for five hours a day is not easy, and one would understand if you had a few moments during the day when you as a student would let your attention run astray. However, it sure helped having students like Lan around to self-appoint herself judge, jury, executioner. 

Of course Lan had a lighter side. On one of my weekend treks, Lan and Su were the teachers' guides, where we stayed in Ta Phin at a Red Dzao homestay. The girls jumped right in and helped the Red Dzao women prepare a perfect Vietnamese dinner, so subtle and so full of flavor. Sitting around a fire after dinner (I'll take a nice warm fire over dessert any day of the week), Lan started giggling uncontrollably, and it was pretty obvious that the laughter was directed at me. She was conversing like rapid fire with the Red Dzao women, in a way that seemed very out of character for what I'd known of Lan. I didn't want to interrupt, but I had to interject and ask Lan what exactly was so funny. As I had said before, she's a pretty new student to Sapa O'Chau, so her English is relatively limited, so all she said was "Chicken", followed by an amusing cackle she could certainly call her own. I just laughed along with her, not wanting to ruin her rapport with the Red Dzao homeowners, and also not wanting to interrupt her good time by pestering her for more English. But by saying I was laughing along with her, I'm not saying I was faking my laughter. It was genuinely hilarious, her repeatedly saying "Chicken" and having her laughter grow stronger each time she said it. I found myself saying "Chicken" and sincerely laughing just as hard, right along with her, us two trading laughter, with only one of us knowing the entire story.

I don't remember the exact moment the mystery was solved, but shortly after, I was informed that "Chicken" referred to this crew of roosters that hang outside the farm, as roosters tend to do I suppose. Instead of cockadoodle-doodling at the break of dawn as I was led to believe is the norm, these guys liked to do their thing at 3 in the morning. So the sadistic laughter provided by Lan turned out to actually be about sadism. She was getting a huge kick of the difficult night of sleep I was about to endure.

Sure enough, those roosters did kick in at the promised time, as I kept my phone next to me in order to see if these guys were really that coordinated. It was a crew of four roosters which formed the night's a capella ensemble, taking turns in shockingly coordinated fashion, going at it every fifteen minutes for a couple hours straight. That fifteen minute interval was especially cruel, where it allowed me to fall asleep just long enough to experience that rude awakening four times an hour. 

I saw Lan the next morning, and she looked pretty chipper. I looked at her, said "Chicken", and let out a few fake laughs. She looked back at me, shrieked back"Chicken", yet only this time, her laughter was far louder than it had ever approached the night before.

Dem is a student I didn't really get to know until about the last week and a half or so of class. The classes at Sapa O'Chau had only recently gone co-ed, and I heard that the arrival of boys ushered in a new kind of timidity and apprehension that just wasn't there when it was an all-girls school. When we would do group activities that would involve the most minimal amount of physical contact between the boys and girls, we were either met with flat out refusal or insatiable giggling fits. Flat out refusal is frustrating and slightly embarrassing for a teacher, especially when it was entirely unanticipated, but giggling, for my money's worth, grew to be far more difficult. And head scratching. If it's not pretty obvious, I'm fond of all of the students I've had in Sapa, but it doesn't mean every single moment at the school was a day at Astroworld. Maybe it's a strange human reaction to be so perplexed by constant giggling, but for the first few weeks, some of the girls were definitely guilty of this, and as their new teachers, we didn't want to be the anti-fun police that disallowed laughter, but it can obviously get in the way of productivity if not reigned in. It never really seemed malicious, either, so I had a hard time trying to put a stop to it. 

Anyway, Dem (pronounced Zem) was probably the biggest culprit when it came to these inopportune moments of laughing fits. It was hard to police with her because she almost always did her work promptly, would pitch in when it came time to speak out loud in class, and was rarely ever disruptive. Except when she would laugh uncontrollably over something I have no clue about. 

One lesson, in the middle of class, I think I asked her to participate in some way, and there she went, laughing again. I didn't try to stop it, I just abandoned the idea that she would contribute in any productive way, so I just turned my attention to another student to maintain the flow of class. After the group lesson, the students were doing individual work, and I isolated her by asking her a concept check question, to see if she understood the lesson. She looked at me and started giggling again. "There is nothing funny," I said. Really, there wasn't anything that was funny at the moment. And I think it really dawned on her, too, because she stopped laughing, after probably a minute straight of giggling, then answered my question. Maybe Dem finally exasperated herself. I know it wasn't what I said, "There is nothing funny", that did it, because surely, I've said that to her before, no? I think during that short moment I had with Dem, when she finally understood, I probably had a really frightening look on my face, a reflection of the cold, stern David that lurks deep inside the dark recesses of his tortured psyche.

It worked. For the last two weeks or week and a half, Dem was Lan part II, sitting on the opposite end of the class, cracking her whip when she found it necessary. As I said, she was never a bad student, but her effort to stop laughing, and to actually stop, was really dear to me. I hope I let her know in class that her efforts at improvement were really appreciated by me.

I feel there must be some typos and lot of cumbersome wording here, but so be it. I'll fix it when I choose to re-read this. All I want you to take away from this post is that laughter is forbidden in my class.

***many more students to come in ensuing posts.