I just came back from Hanoi last week. Vietnam continues to amaze me. It’s a facinating country with a tragic history and a rich cultural background. The people are beautiful and amazing in their capacity to be civil and courteous to foreigners in spite of the hurt done to them in the past. It's one of the few Communist countries left in the world, and for a westerner, it’s a wonderfully surreal experience. No McDonalds, no KFC, no 7-11, no Pepsi billboards yelling at you at every turn. Sure, there are touts on every corner trying to sell you something or trying to give you a ride somewhere, but I think that’s a small price to pay for being able to visit a place so clear of the visual POLLUTION that plagues the democratic world: advertisements, etc.
I went to the Revolution Museum in the Old Quarter one day, which is quite an enlightening place to learn about the Vietnamese people. This museum recounts the people’s history of resistance to the innumerable forces that tried to take over and colonize the people from ancient times up to the present. It tells of how the Chinese, French, English and Americans at various times took the role of aggressors in an attempt to suppress the voice of the people for what they saw as just causes, for what they thought was “best”, or blatantly for their own profit. It details the rise of the Communist Party in the country. Honestly, looking at Vietnam’s history of oppression, it’s not hard to see how this place became a strong hold of a political system that values the voice of the workers and farmers—the common people.
On the second floor of the museum, one whole room is taken up by a huge guillotine that was formerly used by the French colonialists to execute Vietnamese that were viewed as revolutionary or who were accused of fuelling the Communist cause. The guillotine was a method of execution that was used by some American forces in (what they term) the American War, as well. While I was standing there marveling at this machine of death, its very size gazing down at me with an unspeakable blood thirst, a troop of young Vietnamese soldiers who were taking a tour of the museum happened to pass through. Most of them apathetically walked through the room, not taking much notice of the guillotine. One soldier though, a kid just a bit younger than me, stopped on the other side of the machine and marveled at it for a moment, just the same way I was. As we stood there looking at it, our eyes suddenly locked, and I couldn’t help but think the same thought was going through both our minds: about 30 years ago, my ancestors used to kill your ancestors with this thing. I was suddenly overcome with a nameless shame. I averted my eyes and quickly made my way out of the room.
As I walked outside and the sun melted into Hoan Kiem lake like a great, dying ball of fire, the thought of the
blood debt flipped over in my mind again, like a silvery fish gasping for breath on the deck of a fishing boat, the shadows of hungry men ominously cast on it. Do the sins of the father pass onto the son? Does unrepented evil live on for future generations to suffer? Do the sown actions of our ancestors grow like breath choking weeds in our present lives?
I couldn’t help but thinking
yes.
The sins of past generations are living on and coming back as curses and unmentionable evils in our day-to-day lives. They are our frantic, stillborn dreams, our aborted livelihoods, our night terrors. They come alive and we try to suppress them with indulgence. But we can’t stop them. We can’t stop the paranoia, the anxiety attacks, the receding hairlines and pre-mature baldness, the kidney stones, the lung cancer, the drug addiction and heart attacks and eating disorders and teenage suicide. We can’t stop the greed that kills, the jealously that breeds amongst our closest friends, the lust that drives us from our wedding beds, the hate that turns us against our kin. The evil has not died. It lives here with us, beside us, inside us. It is a intimate part of our make up.
I wake up in the middle of the night and the backyard is filled with vampires, coming to suck the blood from my veins, to feast on my flesh. I can’t make them go to sleep. I can’t convince them they’re already dead.
Last weekend I went to Isaan for the first time with my friend Des. We went to his hometown in Nang Rong in the Buriram province, which is about midway between Bangkok and the Cambodian border. It was pretty cool. Isaan is the Northeastern part of Thailand, the heartland of the country. It’s kind of like the Texas—everything there is big. The plants are huge, the insects are scary, and the fish will bite your leg off. Fisherman there don’t have to cast and reel hooks vigilantly to try to catch something significant. They stick a series of poles attached to fishing line in the mud on the side of the river, and by the time they walk back to the first one, the Loch Ness monster is practically throwing itself onshore from the end of the line. The people talk in their own unique dialect. Time goes really slowly compared to Bangkok. The days last for weeks. It’s not as pretty as the rest of the country, and most tourists don’t go there (unless they’re visiting their girlfriend’s parents), but what it lacks economically it more than makes up for in the people’s heart, drive, and innovation.
One of the more interesting aspects of my trip to Isaan was the food I encountered. It’s weird. Northeastern cuisine is distinctly hotter, spicier, more sour, salty, and risqué than the sweet and comparitaively mild Bangkokian food. Many of the dishes utilized fruits and vegetables that I’d never seen before; in fact, upon asking, my friend didn’t even know the names of some of them (probably due to the fact that the vegetation is so ridiculously abundant, people gave up naming it all). Some of the dishes were pretty bizarre to the western palate, though. For example this one dish I had was called goy, which is your basic spicy, minced meat larb, except the meat is raw. That’s right, raw. Uncooked beef and liver with lots of chili. In some variations, they serve this dish with cold, uncooked blood. I’ve had congealed blood before, as it’s served in many Thai soups, but in goy, uncooked, uncongealed blood is served with raw beef and liver… I mean, that’s kind of like chopping up some chili, throwing it at a cow and taking a bite. I tried goy (without the blood) and I have to say, it wasn’t bad, though I quickly washed it down with sticky rice, desperately trying not to imagine what I was eating was the same thing you see behind a butcher’s counter... You only live once, I suppose.
As I walked outside and the sun melted into Hoan Kiem lake like a great, dying ball of fire, the thought of the blood debt flipped over in my mind again, like a silvery fish gasping for breath on the deck of a fishing boat, the shadows of hungry men ominously cast on it. Do the sins of the father pass onto the son? Does unrepented evil live on for future generations to suffer? Do the sown actions of our ancestors grow like breath choking weeds in our present lives?
