Christmas, in Vietnam, with a dead guy

       It seemed like a good idea at the time.  There we are, standing in line to see Ho Chi Minh’s body, when Will says, “It’s Christmas.”

Ellen and I look at each other.  He’s right.  Today is Thursday, the 24^th of December.  With all the scrambling to finish up the semester, put together a workshop, get the kids through school, and pack for Vietnam, we pretty much forgot about Christmas.

Well, not forgot, really:  just put it on the back burner.  Friends had loaned us a small Christmas tree and a bunch of ornaments; when we plugged in the lights, we were surprised to discover that they were attached a music box that played cheery excerpts of “Here Come Santa Claus,” “Jingle Bells,” and “In the Bleak Midwinter.”  Normally this sort of thing would have offended us, but this year we just shrugged and went with it.  At least we wouldn’t have to track down the holiday tunes on the iPod. 

Being in Vietnam, I have to say, didn’t really help our Christmas spirit—it’s hot and dirty and filled with Buddhists (and we all know how cranky they get around the holidays).  Besides, we’re in Hanoi, busy seeing the sites.  On Wednesday it’d been the Temple of Literature and the Water Puppets; now, on Thursday, it’s time to buddy up with the bane of Nixon’s existence, that bringer of light himself, uncle Ho. 

“You mean he’s dead?” Lucy says when we told her the plans for the day. 

“Well, yeah,” we say, suddenly realizing that taking an impressionable six-year-old who sometimes has nightmares about baby rabbits to see a dead guy might not be the best idea. 

“But he’s been dead for a long time,” I say, like that helps.  Lucy and Will stare at me.  I blunder on.  “It’s not even really his body.  I mean, he’s embalmed, and when they do that, they basically suck everything out of the body and replace it with chemicals.”

Their eyes widen. 

“Besides,” I say, remembering something Ellen read in the Lonely Planet Guide, “the Vietnamese aren’t really that good at embalming, so every year they ship his body up to Russia for two months, you know, to repair it and everything.”

“Repair it?” Lucy says.

I glance at Ellen, desperate.  It’s hard to tell if she’s grimacing or grinning. 

“Sure,” I say, “because, you know:  stuff falls off.”

 

So now we’re standing in line waiting to see what’s left of Ho Chi Minh’s body, and I’m suddenly thinking, “What the hell was I thinking?  Who goes to see a dead guy on Christmas?”

If anything, all this talk about embalming and rotting parts has only peaked Lucy’s interest in going to see “The Dead Guy,” as she now refers to the founding father of modern Vietnam. 

“How did he die?” she wants to know.

“I’m not sure.”

“Did somebody shoot him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“In a car accident?”

Ellen considers a moment, then shakes her head. “Maybe he just died of old age,” she says.

“Like grandpa?”

“Yes,” I say, wondering if there are any dead pets or babies with cancer we can mention to make this an even cheerier Christmas.  “Like Grandpa.”

Seeing the body is actually a much more convoluted process than you might think.  When you first enter the compound, you’re told to leave your bags at the check-in desk.  Sliding them across the counter, you gesture, asking if you should include your camera.  Oh no, the woman behind the window says, barely able to tear her eyes from your blonde-haired children.  Cameras are okay.

Which they are, until you enter a covered walkway and walk one hundred yards forward, at which point you’re handed a bright orange velcroed bag and told to place you camera inside.  You do, thinking this is the last you’ll see of your crappy $100 digital Cannon for a while. 

But no.  After sealing your camera inside the bag, the guard hands it back to you and gestures for you to follow the rest of the crowd.  Which you do. For another hundred yards. At which point another guard flags everyone holding a bright orange velcroed bag and points to a separate hut in a grove of trees.  Wondering quietly if orange Velcro is Vietnamese for “Undersirable who needs to be terminated,” you shuffle toward the hut, blowing goodbye kisses to your wife and children. 

Inside the hut, you offer your bag to a pair of guards who are busy watching the Vietnamese version of “America’s Got Talent,” only there are no Americans and the talent part of the equation seems to involve trying to beat Elvis in a tacky costume contest.  Once a commercial comes, one of the guards rises from his chair, scratches himself in a place that qualifies as “Bad Touch” when done to children, and takes your bag grudgingly, as though perhaps he thinks that one of the other 62 guards you’ve passed up to this point might have bothered to take care of your camera—possibly the only view that you and he share in common.  Handing you a nondescript octagonal blue tag, the guard flings your orange bag over his shoulder into a corner full of identical velcroed sacks, and gestures for you to leave.  Which you do, thinking that maybe, after all, it was a swell camera, and you would’ve liked to keep it just a big longer. 

 

It turns out, too, that there are rules for seeing a dead guy.  For one: no hands in pockets.  For two:  no chewing gum.  For three:  no giggling incessantly, pointing, and whispering, “Jesus Christ, he looks just like that really bad replica of Colonel Sanders we saw at Madame Tussads.”  None of these rules are actually written down, of course, but all of them are very very real. 

Trust me.

Actually seeing Ho Chi Minh’s body isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think.  The room is tall and well lit and nine guards in dress whites stand at attention, one at each door, three at each side, and one at the foot of the cask—um, podiu—um, glass case they stuck him in.  You come in at the top of the room and follow a sloping red carpet that leads you past Ho’s right side.  He’s dressed all in white, with his long hands resting on his lower abdomen.  He looks seriously peaceful.  It’s hard to tell, but one can assume that by the time he died in 1969 (of heart failure, as it turns out), it was relatively clear to everyone except Nixon that the north was going to win this war and Vietnam would finally achieve modern self-rule. 

Looking at Ho Chi Minh, it suddenly occurs to you what a nightmare he must have been for the American Presidents with whom he did battle.  For one thing, say what you want, he was Vietnam’s version of George Washington.   How else can you describe a man who pretty much single-handedly led his country to independence after 120+ years of colonial rule?  Rule by the French, no less, who, as much as they are known for their fine wines and brilliant cuisines, really aren’t paragons of administrative excellence.  Take, for instance, their rationale for taking over Vietnam in the first place: 

“We’ve come to educate the savages!” they told the Vietnamese emperor when they first arrived. 

To which the emperor and his various lackeys responded by informing the French that the first university in Vietnam was founded in 1074.

Hearing this, the French looked at each other and said, “Really?  Wow.  Even the Sorbonne’s not that old.”   Then they thought for a bit, before one of them said, “Well, okay then:  we’ve come to bring religion to the savages.”

To which the Vietnamese responded that they already had religion, thank you very much.  Three, infact:  Confucionism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

“Okay,” said the French, “but do any of those religions have a guy nailed to a cross?  Because ours does.  Nailed to a cross, then left to rot for three days.”

The Vietnamese glanced at each other and shook their heads.  Then one of them suggested that, perhaps, this sort of mutilation and torture didn’t necessarily recommend a religion as “civilizing.”

So after a bit of thought, one of French said, “What about food?  You guys have decent grub over here?”

The emperor’s chef gave them all fresh spring roles and bowl of pho chain, complete with its traditional warm, beefy broth, cilantro, and sliced chilies.  The French ate, looked at each other, and just shook their heads.  Finally, one of them, a greedy merchant named Jean Dupruis who was looking for a route to supply weapons and salt to a general in the Yunnan province, threw down his bowl, grabbed his gun, and said, “Screw it.  Just give us all your money and women.”

Which the Vietnamese did, leading to over a century of some of the most inept, ineffectual colonial rule the world has ever witnessed.  I mean, let’s face it:  at least when the British took over a country, they built roads and railways and impressed upon their subjects the necessity of hyphenated names and gin and tonics before dinner.  All the French gave the Vietnamese, on the other hand, was a sloppy way of kissing and a taste for crusty bread. 

All of which seems rather funny, of course, if you can ignore the fact that millions of Vietnamese people starved to death under France’s inhumane, bestial, and just flat-out stupid policies. 

Who then, can argue with Ho Chi Minh’s efforts to free his people—or, for that matter, with his firm belief in communism? 

Having thus killed any hopes I might have of ever holding political office, even in the state of Minnesota (sorry Al:  you’re on your own), allow me to go a step further and point out that, relative to Johnson and Nixon at least, Ho Chi Minh was a formidable foe, if for no other reason than that he was kind of cuddly. 

Okay, well maybe not cuddly exactly, but definitely affable.  In every picture you see of him, he’s got this tiny little grin at the corner of his lips, as though he’s really really pleased to be hanging out with you. 

Compare that to Lyndon Johnson who, let’s admit it, looks like someone stuck a nose on a prune and painted it pink.  Or Nixon, who looks like the uncle you try not to be left alone with for too long at Christmas. 

Strolling past Ho Chi Minh’s slippered feet (one more sign of his dedication to his people), up his left side, and out into the balmy Hanoi morning, you consider all of this.  All in all, it’s a sombering experience, albeit in a relatively pleasant way. 

What strikes you most though, are the guards standing attention around Ho’s body. 

Let me explain:  back in the ‘80s, when I viewed Lenin’s similarly embalmed and enshrined body—the opening act of my three-decade long, “Dead Communist Rulers” Tour (sponsored by Wrangler Jeans)—I was less struck by the guards than intimidated by them.  They looked like cold-war guards, the kind of guys who would toss you in a Gulag or break your jaw just for breathing out of the wrong nostril in the presence of Uncle Vladimir (talk about cuddly).  They stood ramrod straight, their bayonets gleamed in the cold light, their jaws were set like something out of Dudley Do-Right.  They meant business. 

The guards around Ho Chi Minh also stand iron-bar straight; their bayonets also gleam and their spats are also spotless.  There’s a qualitative difference, though, that’s hard to explain, all the more so since his mausoleum is essentially modeled after Lenin’s.  In the end though, the whole atmosphere around Ho seems just a touch less austere, a tad less distant.

What it comes down to, finally, is the fact that, for all their weaponry and distant stares and spitty shoes, the soldiers are there seem to be there not out of a sense of duty, but because they want to be.  It’s as if they are less guards than friends, come to stand by the body of an old warrior and keep him company on his last night on earth.  And something along these lines may very well be the case:  in contrast to the French and the emperors who ruled before (and sometimes alongside) them, Ho Chi Minh made a point of living in a simple house and riding in a simple car.  Sure, some of this might have been pure political theatre (Bush clearing brush on his “ranch,” Reagan wearing blue jeans), but the significance of these gesture in a country long ruled by the greedy French and spoiled emperors were not missed by the Vietnamese people.  To them—particularly those in the North—Ho Chi Minh wasn’t—and isn’t—some distant figure who advocated obscure political doctrine.  He was a guy who cared deeply about them, who understood them, who fought for them. 

And that must have driven Nixon nuts. 

 

Back outside, I get in line at yet another hut to retrieve my camera.  When it’s my turn, I hand the guy behind the counter a blue disk indistinguishable from every other blue disk he’s just been handed.  He takes it from me, turns to a pile of bright orange, velcroed bags, picks one out at random, and hands it to me. 

Inside, I find my camera. 

The five of us leave the mausoleum and stroll into the garden nearby.  There, we’re allowed to admire Ho’s various cars, the big old French-style house he inherited from the, um, French, the small green house on stilts he chose to live in instead, and a couple nice orchards.  There’s a peacock in a cage, looking tired and pissed off, but it spreads its rather dusty plumage nevertheless, and we snap pictures dutifully. 

Strolling around a large pond toward the exit, I ask Lucy what she thought about the dead guy. 

“Alright,” she says. 

“Just alright?”  I was hoping, of course, for some witty observation or child-like insight into communism, or embalming, or whatever.  I’m blogger after all—I can’t just made stuff up.

But Lucy nods.  She’s holding my hand, and squinting against the sun.  It’s turning into a nice day despite the attempt of Hanoi’s pollution to shunt it down. We’ve only been there for two days at this point, but already we’re starting to feel slightly overwhelmed—it must be a city of ten million motorcyles, all of them going the wrong way down a one-way street.  In these gardens, though, it’s quiet.  Peaceful.  Almost, I think to myself, befitting the final resting place of a beloved leader. 

Or Christmas. 

Christmas, in Vietnam, part II (with Freakes)

      The big plan for Christmas Eve in Hanoi is to spend it with our friends the Freakes.  Hedley Freake (sorry folks, that’s his real name—and yes, he’s English) is another of the Fulbright scholars, just like me, with the difference that he’s smart, mature, and doesn’t make stuff up on the job just to see if people will believe him.  He, his Minnesotan wife, and his twin teenaged sons are also in Vietnam, convinced by our thoughtful arguments that there’s no better place to spend the holidays than in an emerging communist country with few if any pollution controls. 

Right around the corner from our hotel is a restaurant called the The Green Mango.  Lonely Planet describes the Mango as “probably Hanoi’s hippest hang-out” with “a real vibe as well as great cooking.  The stunning dining rooms, compete with rick silk drapes, evoke the feel of an opium den while the huge rear courtyard comes into its own on summer nights.”   The food, the guide continues, is “mod-Asian fusion.”  I’m tempted to make a joke about that, but really it’s kind of been done for me, so I won’t bother.   

Anyhow, hip, vibe-seeking opium hound that she is, Ellen has suggested we all go to the Green Mango for a nice but quiet Christmas dinner. 

The Freakes, foolishly, agree. 

Standing outside the restaurant, we scope out the menu.  It seems safe:  there’s pizza for Lucy and Jamie, something that used to go “baah” for Daddy, and Asian-type greeny stuff for everybody else.  Stepping inside, we ask the woman behind the bar if there’s a table available.  She smiles and asks if we have a reservation.  We look at one another.  It’s maybe six o’clock on a Thursday evening. 

“No,” one of us says. 

The woman frowns.  Reaching under the bar, she pulls out a large black book, the kind of thing kings used to use to write down the names of everyone in the fiefdom who should have their head lopped off.  Opening it, she flips through a page or two.  “How many?” she says, after a moment.

“Nine.”

She stares at us.  In New York, of course, this is the point where the maitre d’ makes that funny sort of sheep-gutting noise through his nose and says, “Nine?  With no reservation?  On Christmas Eve?  What are you—?” ending the sentence with one of those colorful descriptions that makes movies about New York prison life so much fun to watch with young children. 

She doesn’t say any of this, of course, because it’s Asia, and because we clearly are such a pathetic bunch of losers that there’d be no real fun in her mocking us.  Instead what she does is consult with one or two of the other restaurant staff, and then suggest that they might have a private room upstairs that should suit our purposes. 

I take this to mean that they’re too embarrassed to have us be seen the by the other customers, but the rest of the gang thinks we should check it out, so we proceed up the stairs to a large room at the front of the restaurant.  On the face of it, it’s nice:  a long table stretches down the middle, covered with a white cloth and surrounded by tall, black, leather chairs.  The room is large and nicely lit:  atmosphere, but not too much, just enough to smoke your Christmas opium in relative privacy. 

Overall, though, it feels a bit like a padded cell.  The walls and floor and ceiling are all the same shade of trendy blue-black gray, and whoever designed the acoustics must have been a worked in radio, because you could shout at the top of your lungs in there and the sound wouldn’t travel much more than an inch beyond the tip of your nose. 

“No,” Elizabeth and I say almost immediately.  Standing in there feels like being in a—well, I’ve already used padded cell, so let me move up—or down?— to mausoleum. 

The hostess looks at us.  She’s known us all of 3.1 minutes, and already it’s clear she’s got us sussed out as the biggest pains in the asses imaginable.  I feel bad about this, of course, but, well, I’m sort of used to it, and when it comes to Christmas Eve and being with friends, I’d rather not spend dinner wondering if I’m about to be an extra in Vietnam’s hidden-camera, real-life version of Twilight. 

“Well,” she says.  “Perhaps I could put you in back.  It would take a few minutes, though, as we’d need to re-arrange some tables.”  She places emphasis on these last words, as though to hint that, perhaps, even stupid people without reservations have manners enough not to ask busy restaurant staff to go through a lot of trouble on one of the biggest business nights of the year.

But we don’t.  Elizabeth and I check out the “back.”  It’s gorgeous, like an Aladdin fairy-tale:  plush purple cushions, elegant chairs, and huge swooshes of brightly colored silk strung across the two-story ceiling.  “Oh my,” we both gush.  “This is great.  This is what we want.  This is just lovely.” 

So we’re escorted back to the foyer and asked to take a seat while a crew of fourteen comes in with cranes and loading derricks and re-arranges the entire restaurant to suit the whimsies of one pathetic group of people too stupid to—have I mentioned this?—make reservations. 

Fortunately for us, there’s a real-live Santa near the front door, a twenty-something Vietnamese boy with a round face, round eyes, and a rather thin strap-on beard.  He’s obviously the fattest man they could find and still only a quarter my girth in his red suit with white cotton-wool across his belly.  Over one shoulder he grips a red felt bag in his brown hand. 

“Well hello!” I say to him.  “How are you?   Ho!  Ho!  Ho!” 

He looks at me out of the corner of one eye, smiling a little nervously from behind his beard. 

“HO! HO!” I say again, giving him my biggest grin and patting my belly—something that, in public, I’ve never done before ever in my life, nor ever intend to do again.

“Dad,” says Will, standing beside me, “I think you’re going to make him cry.”

And indeed, Santa does seem a little fearful of the shiny white-faced man making dying seal noises at him. 

We wait for maybe fifteen minutes before being led out to the table, where we’re each presented with narrow sheets of cardboard festively trimmed and listing a half-dozen items.  It takes us a minute to figure out what’s going on. 

“It’s a set menu,” Hedley says.

“For tonight,” says Elizabeth.

Sure enough:  gone is the variety of pasta and Asian dishes listed on the street menu outside.  In their place are a number of distinctly Christmasy dishes:  mould wine, chicken with cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes.  All nicely priced at—

“Thirty-five dollars!” says Ellen.

Now to be fair, thirty-five bucks isn’t much to pay for a five- or six-course dinner on a holiday evening.  Bear in mind, though, that the items listed on the regular menu all ran from 60,000-180,000 Vietnam dong, roughly three to nine US dollars.  The whole time we’d been in the People’s Republic, Ellen and I had never spent more than twenty-five dollars—to feed the whole family. 

All of us look at each other.  Any other time, our next action would be clear:   we’d hand the menus back, apologize profusely, and move on to another restaurant, one that didn’t charge the equivalent of a Vietnamese schoolteacher’s annual salary for a slice of chicken. 

Tonight, though, we’ve already pushed the limit:  no reservations, a large group, rejecting the first table offered, causing the relocating of various pieces of furniture.  We’ve all but asked them to rename the restaurant to accommodate us, and frankly, Hedley’s sons and I spent most of the time in the lobby waiting for the tables chatting about what we’d call the place if it were up to us. 

After all that, we can hardly just get up and walk out.  That would be rude, even for Americans, even Americans accompanied by a lone, Gen Ed savvy Englishman. 

So we settle in and prepare to part with most of the money we have on hand.  Fortunately, Ellen and Elizabeth are quick-witted enough to point out to the hostess that it’d hardly be fair to charge us full-price for the three kids, particularly as the regular menu was still on display on the street.  The hostess kindly agrees, and the kids are served with very Christmasy pizzas and chicken nuggets at regular price. 

The rest of us receive the dinkiest damn pieces of chicken and cranberry sauce you’ve ever seen in your life.  Seriously, you could have taken all of the bits and chunks of fowl from the plates of the five paying adults (one of Hedley’s boys went—wisely— with vegetarian) and still not be able to assemble a single chicken wing from KFC.  Between each course, each of us is given with a thimbleful of lime gelato to cleanse our palate.  From what, I’m not sure since the only thing that’s touched my tongue most of the evening are softly whispered curse words, but you better believe all of us suck that gelato down like it’s the last pea-sized frozen dairy product we’ll ever have in our lives.   

I know how this works, of course:  I’ve eaten fusion before, and—before, as now—have found myself wondering if they didn’t really mean “fission.”  I get the whole idea, that the servings are small but flavorful so that when we eat we’re less interested in filling our guts than experiencing in a concentrated manner the tumbling and swirling of flavors across our palates.  I get this.  And I like it.  Really, I do. 

Just not when I know that my family’s bill for the evening will total somewhere over two million. 

That two million in Vietnamese money is just barely over a hundred in US dollars helps, of course.  But still, geez, at least let me leave the restaurant not feeling the urge to keep an eye out for the nearest 7-Eleven and any old bag of stale Cheetos. 

The dinner isn’t a complete bust.  Around 7:30, the back door opens and in strolls Santa, felt sack on his shoulder.  Seeing us, he comes over and hands out small brown sacks wrapped in gold ribbon.  The kids are delighted and laugh and shout and grab for theirs.  Santa stands back a little, watching, that same wide-eyed, not sure what the hell is going on look in his eyes; later that evening, I’ll see him, beard gone, stripped down to his t-shirt, delivering a hookah to a nearby table. 

But never mind:  we’ve got presents!  Eagerly, we pull off the ribbons and tear through the wrapping paper. 

Inside, each of us finds, still in their original plastic wrappers, a snow-white pair of sweat socks. 

 

By the time we get back to the hotel, I’m pretty sick of Christmas and third-world countries, and Christmas in third-world countries, and just being away from home and not really even having a Christmas at all.  I’ve got “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon stuck in my head, and if there’s a way to make that droll, melancholy, sarcastically dark holiday tune even more droll, melancholic, and darkly sarcastic, you better believe the little one-armed choir director in my head is doing just that. 

It doesn’t help that when we step into our rooms we discover that there’s a major-league disco going on at the restaurant right outside our back window.  And I do mean right outside.  The music is so loud that you can hear the fingers of the guitar crease the frets, the inhale of the drummer as he reaches for the top of the high hat.  It’s so loud, it rattles the spoon in the glass on the bedside table.

We get the kids down to bed—notice, I don’t say “to sleep”—and then Ellen and I tuck in for a bit of light reading.  My mood only gets better when I discover that Ho Chi Minh’s army once slaughtered 2,500 people in twenty-one days after taking over Hue—and by slaughtered, I mean gunned down, beaten to death, and buried alive.  So much for my hero-worship of the last ten hours.  I put my book on the table, and watch it vibrate across the surface until it hits a lamp, reverses direction, and rattles to the floor.

Finally it’s eleven o’clock and I’m flossing my teeth, wondering if there are any gun laws in Vietnam, and if so, if they explicitly prohibit violence against steroidal sound systems, when something weird happens.

The music stops. 

Completely. 

Ellen and I stand there, frozen in the middle of the bathroom, Johnson & Johnson mint-flavored hanging from our teeth.  We can’t believe it.  We’re afraid to believe it.  We’re afraid to move, actually, for fear that we’ll somehow jinx it, that one twitch of a finger or one hint of a whisper and the next Vietnamese Kylie Minogue wanna-be will kick in with her version of “The Loco-Motion.”

But it doesn’t.  So finally we move, throwing away our floss, picking up our toothbrushes, scrubbing our teeth, spitting into the sink, drinking from our bottles of water.  We use the toilet one last time, kiss each kid again, flick out the lights, and crawl into bed.  The pads are hard, but the sheets are clean and the pillows are just firm enough to keep you comfortable.  I close my eyes and stretch out my legs, and think, “Well, that really wasn’t too bad after all.”

And then, just as I’m falling asleep, I hear it, way off in the distance, coming all the way from St. Joseph’s cathedral, the huge pile of carbon-black rock just outside Hanoi’s old-town:

The sound of church bells.  Christmas bells.  Ringing.  Peeling.  Tumbling one over another in a waterfall of sound.  The highs, the lows, the highs again, all in a rush of discordant, resonant, jumbled, jubilant brilliant beautiful sound. 

So this is Christmas.