In which Ellen and I compensate for our failures by buying everything in the Republic of Vietnam

         We’re on our way to Ha Long Bay and our driver pulls into a compound of low yellow buildings.  Elegant white stone statues line both sides of the road:  Romanesque women with bare breasts and no arms, Dali-style abstracts where a twisting figure-eight reveals two lovers about to embrace.  I’ve been to China before so I understand what’s happening as we climb out of the van and are pointed toward the bathroom.  But I don’t think Ellen does.

“Meet you ten minutes,” the driver says, and pulls off in the van—to the other side of building. 

Which means, of course, that after we’ve peed and helped our kids pee and apologized to the bathroom attendants for the inordinate amount of pee on the walls and floor, we have to walk through the building. 

Past all that merchandise. 

This particular warehouse—because that’s what it is:  a huge building, maybe 50 meters by 50 meters—is filled with traditional Vietnamese art:  handmade silk ties, silk-stitched tablecloths and pillow-cases, carved wooden bowls, egg-shell paintings made from flattened pieces of eggshell glued to wood and then lacquered so that the final painting has a cracked, textured look. 

All of these items are beautiful.  Gorgeous even.  And, it turns out, they were all made and are sold by the physically handicapped. 

All of which is nice, but for one small detail:

I don’t care. 

I want to get to Ha Long Bay.  I want to get on a junk and watch the waves and see those magical, dragon-curved mountains popping up out of the water around us.  Eventually, yes, I want to buy some souvenirs of Vietnam, but at this point I’ve only been here for 24 hours and I’m not in the mood to be guilted into buying some fancy crap that’ll spend the next 15 years gathering dust in some drawer before eventually getting pawned off on gullible neighbors at a garage sale.      

The only two comforts I have in all of this are: first, the knowledge that, all over Asia at this very moment, this same thing is happening to approximately 1.5 million bald white guys.  This is how things work in China and Vietnam and Cambodia and Malaysia:  tour guides and van drivers and concierges get kickback for getting tourists to buy stuff.  Ten years ago when I was first in China, a tour guide drove us past a crowded city square full of people laughing and dancing, saying, “Don’t you wish you could get out here?”  “Yes!” we all yelled.  But he just smiled and took us up to some god-forsaken mountain in the middle of the night to see a 1/1,000,000^th scale model of the dam we would see in real life the next day—all because there was gift shop there run by the his sister’s brother-in-law’s uncle’s cousin’s half-daughter twin’s pet schnauzer. 

My second comfort comes from the fact that I know that my wife, Ellen, isn’t going to be taken by this crap.  No, Ellen is a down-to-earth common-sense woman raised by two depression-era parents who taught her how to spend her money wisely.  Why, I’ll have you know that in our house we wash and re-use our Ziploc bags—sometimes two or three times.  And it’s a good thing, too—about Ellen’s tightwadedness toward spending, not about the plastic bags—because, Ha Long Bay aside, yours truly just loves to buy fancy crap that’ll spend the next 15 years gathering dust in some drawer before getting pawned off on gullible neighbors at a garage sale.    

This in mind, I stroll confidently through the art gallery, gently tugging Jamie away from the life-sized etching in lace-thin glass of two Vietnamese women wearing Ao Dai, until—

“We should buy some of these.”

I turn and stare at Ellen—or the woman who I thought was Ellen.  She’s holding a pair of silk-embroidered table runners. 

“Why?” I say.  I can’t think of what else you say to the alien that’s sucked out your wife’s brain and replaced it with it’s own, lime-jello-y self. 

“For—“ my wife says, and then names some obscure cousin that came to our wedding 17 years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.

“Really?  Because, you know, we just got here.  We have two whole weeks to buy gifts.”

“We have a lot of gifts to buy,” she says, rattling off three dozen names of people I’ve never met.  “We should get started now.  Besides,” she says, then silently nods toward the one-armed, no-legged man who doesn’t actually have a torso either, and who is somehow nonetheless hovering nearby, managing to appear simultaneously helpful, courteous, non-obtrusive, and quietly dignified (I hate people who can do that, by-the-way).

So we choose two of the table runners.  And then we choose three more.  And an egg-painting.  And two sets of serving dishes.  And three of the wonderful water-color paintings that Americans think of as typically Asia, with the tall mountains and willowy trees sketched out in faint, misty lines. 

Fortunately, though, that’s all we buy for the next three days.

Of course, we spend the next three days on a boat.  After that, we go to Hanoi and go apeshit. 

I’ve never been any place where there’s more stuff than Hanoi, Vietnam.  Every corner you turn you find art shops and gift shops and tailors and tie shops and places to buy bowls and plates and Tintin paraphernalia that’s outlawed in every state but California.  You can buy Ao Dai and Dai Ao and Auld Lang Syne.  There are women on the streets carrying oranges in baskets and pineapples on bicycles and musical instruments and whole sheets of tin cut and hammered into the shape of Mao Tse Tung french-kissing Ho Chi Minh.  (And it’s official folks:  I will never get back into Vietnam). 

I suppose to be truthful, it’s not that there’s actually more stuff in Hanoi—it’s just that there it’s out on the streets where you can’t miss it.  In Hanoi, the shops literally vomit goods onto the sidewalks; there are places where you actually have to step off to curb and into traffic to get past a particularly expansive flow of ceramic gods or “hand-made” artificial-silk purses.  There is so much stuff in Hanoi, that I can’t imagine there’s any way it can all every actually be sold:  there just aren’t enough people to purchase everything.

Fortunately for Hanoi merchants, though, Ellen and I are willing to try our best. 

Probably the only thing Karl Marx got right was the idea that the revolution would be threatened by the fetishization of material wealth.  Basically, what he meant by this was that poor folk would be distracted from the grave injustices of the world by all the new, shiny crap they could buy now that factories were making everything cheaper.  When we “fetishize” something, it takes on an added value that exists only in our eyes:  where most of us see feet as smelly lumps of flesh that carry us from place to place and produce nail clippings, to someone who fetishizes feet, they’re sexy and provocative, flirty and dirty and ooooooh, so very naughty.

Not that I’d know. 

Those are nice sandals, by the way. 

What scared the living be-jesus out of Marx was that the poor would start thinking that all the new junk they could buy at cheap prices—gloves, soap, clothing, candles—somehow solved the problems in their world—little things like social injustice, social inequality, and the oppression of entire nations, races, and genders for the benefit of a few.

We do this all the time.  We’re having a bad day; maybe, for instance, our spouse took away our favorite pair of black leather pumps.  Then we’re walking down the street and we see a life-sized replica of a water buffalo welded out of hammered tin, and we picture ourselves sitting in our living room, gazing happily at our water buffalo while sipping a banana daiquiri, and the image makes us feel all warm and fuzzy and filled with hope for the future.  That the water buffalo in no way solves the larger issues in our lives—e.g., our disagreements with our spouse, our inordinate affection for sling-back sandals with red leather laces—is beside the point. 

Back when we lived in Ohio, my Chevy Citation started to smoke and burp every time we drove it more than ten feet.  Sensing intuitively that this was a bad sign, we decided to buy a used car from a friend back in Wisconsin.  That weekend, while I graded papers, Ellen and a colleague drove back to Manitowoc to pick up our new vehicle, a Dodge Colt, bright red, with “Smokin’!” painted on the side.  All Saturday and Sunday, as I dragged my brain through paper after paper beginning “Webster’s dictionary defines . . .” I kept finding myself thinking about that shiny red car, it’s fancy sound system, it’s manual clutch and fluid stick shift.  I’d picture myself driving along the highway, listening to music, the windows down, my hair blowing in the wind (this was a long time ago), not a care in the world.

And I’d feel happy.  Having that car, I was certain, would give me something my life currently lacked:  I would be a better person with that new car, smarter, more likeable, easier to get along with.  My jokes would suck less, my racquetball game would improve, and God would stop pulling out wads of hair in the shower every morning. 

Finally on Sunday evening, Ellen arrived with the new car.  She handed me the keys.  I climbed in, rolled down the window, cranked up Vanilla Ice, and put it in gear.   

I wasn’t, of course, to the end of the block before I understood I was the same balding, unfunny, racquetball-losing jerk I’d been before.  Only with a different car. 

 

Ellen and I didn’t buy a new car while we were in Vietnam, but we purchased pretty much everything else.  I don’t know what happened.  Everything we saw was just so pretty, had so much character, would be just perfect for our house back in Virginia.  We pictured ourselves sitting in our living room back in Lexington, sipping banana daiquiris and gazing at a life-sized replica of a water buffalo made out of hammered tin, and we knew, just knew—well, you know the rest . . . 

If, as I’ve been told, people buy stuff to fill a hole in their lives, Ellen and I must have a gash the size of the Mississippi River delta tearing through our world.  We bought 15 watercolors, a dozen purses, 42 serving plates and bowls of various sizes, 11 lacquer paintings, and 107,000 miniature wood carvings of everything from the tourist cyclos that are everywhere in Vietnam to of-scale replicas of downed American fighter jets with the crispy pilot still inside.  We bought carved wood with in-laid mother of pearl, and mother of pearl with in-laid wood.  We bought tableclothes and pillow covers and scarves and cinnamon boxes and something long and green and smelling vaguely of sulfur and baby powder that, I have to admit, I still haven’t quite identified. 

Some of our purchases were just stupid:  at one point in Ha Long Bay, we were dragged to a tiny fishing village consisting entirely of houses floating on blocks of styrafoam.  We were told that this was a “tour,” but of course it ended with a visit to the village gift shop where, for some reason we still haven’t quite figured out, we bought five 8x6 watercolor paintings for 10 US dollars—a piece.  That this was roughly twice the price you’d pay for a similar painting in, say, Des Moines, didn’t occur to us at that moment. 

Another time, I was somehow suckered into paying $10 for a big flimsy piece of red paper with the symbol for “Happiness” on it.  I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but when we got back to Hong Kong and pulled that crappy little piece of scrap paper out of the suitcase, all I could think was “Temporary Lobotomy.” 

Other times, we made some really smart choices:  arriving in Hoi An, the last stop on our two-week tour, Ellen and I both felt mildly disgusted with ourselves, like a pair of would-be dieters who’d just gorged themselves on a six-pound box of chocolate.  No more, we told ourselves.  We’re not buying another thing.  Nothing.  We don’t care if the Lord Jesus Christ himself comes out of an art gallery and says, “With this painting, ye shall have everlasting life”—we’re not buying. 

Then, as we strolled through the narrow streets of the old city, our guide, Kem, pointed to a tailor shop and said, “If you want to have something made, that’s the place to go.” 

Now, there are a lot of tailors in Hong Kong.  Walk down Nathan Road any day of the week and you’ll be accosted by three dozen young men offering custom-made suits.  My friend Chris regularly goes to Shenzhen, just across the boarder into mainland China, to get tailor-made shirts, pants, and suits.  I always found this a little funny, as most of my clothes come from this guy named Eddie or his friend Mr. Bean, and I couldn’t see the need to shop elsewhere. 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I occurred to me that, actually, most of the stuff I bought on-line or from magazines really sucked.  It seldom fit the way I liked, and when it did, the materials were often too waxy, or too coarse, or just plain cheap.  Standing outside that tailor in Hoi An, I understood that I could pick exactly the fabrics I wanted, the colors I wanted, and have clothes made to exactly my, admittedly rather peculiar, body shape.  Why not? 

When I mentioned this to Ellen, she looked as though she was going to be sick.  “Leave me out of it,” she said.  “I’m done.  Done.” 

So I left her to wander with the kids and went inside.  It didn’t take me long to figure out I’d made the right choice.  Normally, I hate buying short-sleeved shirts for work—everything looks like Best-Buy uniform rejects—but inside the tailor’s I found some nice cotton/linen blends that were light enough for summer but formal enough for work, no “My Name Is:  Todd” tags required. 

I was just moving on to the silk cotton-blends (and yes, I really am gay) when I turned around and discovered Ellen had wandered in.  She was talking to one of the clerks, pointing to a dress dummy on the top shelf wearing a short-sleeved blouse with shaped sleeves and rounded collars.  In her hand was a light cotton with a flower print. 

She saw me watching, and shook her head.  “I’m just looking.”

Nine shirts and two skirts later, we walked out of there poorer but oddly satisfied. 

And frankly?  Not really that much poorer.  After all, my friend Eddie can’t sell me a long-sleeved silk-cotton dress shirt for $17.  Or a matching silk tie for $4.

We had to buy another suitcase to make the trip back to Hong Kong.  When we arrived, exhausted and tired but happy, we unpacked all our dirty laundry and all the kids’ coloring books and all the half-eaten candy bars and the roughly 6,247,891 shells we’d gathered at the beach.  Once all that was done and the laundry machine was pumping away, I started collecting all the gifts and decorations and clothes and just plain junk we’d picked up, and laid it out on the bed. 

Or tried to.  It didn’t fit. 

“Ellen,” I hollered over my shoulder.  “Is this a double bed?”

She yelled something that sounded like “Treen Pies.”

“Really?”  I could have sworn it was a double bed.   Or even one of those extended twins.  Because, you know, if it really was a queen-sized bed, that meant we bought an awful lot. 

An awful lot.

Aw well, I thought, at least my life is better. 

And then, of course, I realized once again that it wasn’t true:  I was the same jerk I’d always been, only with a hell of a lot more stuff.

And some really nice shirts. 

Toitles

          We’re at the Thien Mu Pagoda, on the Perfume River in Vietnam.  It’s a hot, hazy day, the sky not quiet blue but sunny nonetheless.  Small palm trees and thick brush cover the far bank of the river, and it’s not hard to imagine the Battle of Hue, back in 1968, ripping through the thick leaves and into the streets of the nearby city. 

The pagoda is tall and a pale yellow, 60 feet high, with seven stages, each dedicated to a Buddha that appeared in human form.  Kem, our guide, is telling us the story of the emperor who was coming down the river and saw this lovely hillock.  Climbing out of his boat, he scrambled to the top and found himself dazzled by the view of the gorgeous hills in the distance, the smell of pine from the nearby forest, the warmth of the sun.

As he’s sitting there, an old man came up to him and told him how the villagers gathered there every full moon to see the vision of a lady in a red shirt, blue trousers, and a yellow scarf.  When they asked her why she came, she told them that—

“Lucy!”

--one day a great man would build a pagoda there. 

Upon hearing this story, the emperor took a moment and thought to—

“Lucy!!  Stop it!!”

--himself:  “Wait a minute:  I’m a great man.”  And that was when he decided to—

“Lucy!  Get down from there!

Damn it.  I hand Jamie to Ellen, give Kem an apologetic look, and storm over to my two eldest. And when I say storm, think hurricane crossed with blizzard crossed with earthquake crossed with really pissed off 220-pound white guy who hasn’t had enough caffeine.   We’ve been in Vietnam for 8 days, now, and the two of them have bickered like a couple of old ladies fighting over who left the toaster running and burned down the house.  Seriously, they’re acting like their 9 and 6, in a third-world country, and bored out of their frigging minds. 

Lucy is sitting on a stone wall, her back against a pillar, legs out in front of her.  Will is standing ten feet away, telling her to get down.

“Lu-cy! “  He makes it a six syllable word. 

“Wi-ll!  Stop it!  Mommy said I could.”

“Shut up!” I say, violating one of the two cardinal rules the Hanstedt family (the other of which is, “Don’t touch Daddy’s popcorn.”).  Grabbing Will and Lucy by the roots of their hair, I drag them to the edge of the rock cliff on which the pagoda is perched. The Vietnamese vendors stare at us—children are sacred in Vietnam, revered more than any place I’ve ever been.  The Australians and French, on the other hand, ignore us.

“See that?” I say to the kids, pointing to the twenty-foot drop. 

They nod.

“Can you fly?” I say.

They shake their heads. 

“Can you behave?” I say.

More nods. 

“Are you sure?”

Lots of nods.

“Because I’m about to test every theory of gravity ever known to man, if the two of you can’t behave.  Do you understand me?”

Lots and lots of nods. 

“Good.”  I let go of them—on the grass, mind you—and turn back to hear the rest of Kem’s story.  I haven’t gone three feet when Will says, “But Da-ad—“

I’m not sure if it’s the multi-syllabic enunciation, the whiny tone, or just the fact that he’s stupid enough to say anything to say when I’m in this kind of mood, but I turn and give him a look that would freeze most NFL linebackers in their tracks. 

He stares at me for a minute.  Then his head goes down, his hands go into his pockets, and he lets his shoulders slump pretty much all the way to his knees.  I continue to glare, and he shuffles off, kicking a pine cone. 

 

Once Kem has finished narrating the story of the pagoda, she tells us we should take a look around. 

“Don’t forget the Martin,” she says. 

“The huh?”

She tilts her head, looks at me through her sunglasses.  “The Austin Martin.  Behind the temple.”  And then she explains:  back in 1963, when the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, burned himself alive in protest of the South Vietnamese government’s policies restricting religious practices, he drove himself to the site in a blue Austin Martin.  If you look at the famous photograph of the protest, you can see the car in the background, its hood raised.  Anyhow, Duc was from the monastery behind the pagoda, and the famous car is kept there as a reminder of his sacrifice. 

All of which seems a little creepy to me.  I mean, what’s next?  The bullet that shot Lincoln?  Lyndon Johnson’s cancerous lungs?  Strolling around, I decide to avoid the car and concentrate on the temples and the landscaped garden.  This really is the most beautiful place we’ve been since leaving Hanoi—a ragged, chaotic, dusty, and wonderful city. 

Wandering toward the buildings, I notice an information placard or two, but I’m not in the mood to read, so I just snap a couple pictures.  Coming around a corner, I find Will kicking that same pine cone, concentrating hard on keeping his head down, determined to project misery with every bone in his body. 

“Hey Will,” I say.  “Come over here.”  I gesture towards a huge bell suspended in a side-building.  It’s half-again taller than me, and wide as an oak.  It’s the sort of bell that, just looking at it, you know ways more than a fully armed tank. 

He slumps over, climbs up the steps.  The building housing the bell is open on four sides and we circle it, looking at the inscriptions on the outside.  Will notices a fly that seems to be beating itself against the metal, but then we realize it’s just a husk caught in a web being vibrated by the wind.   

We stare at the bell for a minute longer, then Will says, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I look under it?”

I tell him sure.  We get down on our knees and peer under the immense iron lip.   Inside are more fly husks.  There’s also lots of graffiti, mostly in Vietnamese, but some in English and some in French.  One or two people have pasted yellow sticky notes way up toward the dome.  We stay under there for a while, looking at the scrawls and enjoying the echoes, even when we whisper.  Then we crawl out and meander toward the main buildings. 

The nearest holds a huge drum, the size of a cement mixer, surrounded by a knee-high wooden fence.   Clearly folks have climbed over it, though, as this, too, is covered with scratched names and dates.  Next door is a small plaster building housing three gods, each painted in bright colors that have faded and blistered in the hot sun.  The gods are all life sized, and each one rests a foot or knee on some sort of creature:  a dog, a mountain lion, a turtle.  We talk about what this might mean.  The turtle, we know, symbolizes long life, but beyond that, we’re stumped. 

Will scratches one arm, then laughs.  “You know what Bugs Bunny calls turtles?”

“What?”

“Toitles.  Like that.  He calls them toitles.”

He’s grinning, thinking about the Looney Tunes collection we have back at the flat in Hong Kong.  It’s one of the few things we brought from the States for the kids, and once a month or so, Will or Lucy will hall them out and slide a disc into the computer.  Then they’ll spend an hour cracking up over Bugs or Sylvester or Wil E. Coyote. 

I laugh.  “Toitle,” I say.  “I can hear him saying that.”

Kem is standing outside the main temple, and you can tell she’s got a watch in her head set up right beside a nice little agenda that is already—just an hour into the day—being shredded. 

“Ellen and Lucy and Jamie are inside,” she says with a pained smile.  “Maybe just five more minutes, and then we go?”

I nod politely.  Ellen and I bicker about pretty much everything from the color of our sheets to the right kind of lettuce for tacos, but one thing we agree on is that no tour guide anywhere is ever going to hurry us away from some amazing place.  And this is an amazing place. 

Will and I mount the steps.  We slip out of our shoes, pad into the outer room.  It’s one of the most beautiful temples I’ve seen:  lots of hard, dark wood, clean and airy and bright, with wide open spaces and none of the usual grimy smoke stains on the walls.  The inner temple is set off by a series of wide, framed doorways, all of which are open.  At the threshold of one sits a small boy in a blue robe.  His head is shaved except for one long, unimaginably dark lock growing from the center of his forehead and swept behind his ear.  He’s at the monastery school, training to be a monk.  When they just begin, they’re left with three locks of hair; that he has only one means he’s passed his exams and will be allowed to stay—a mixed blessing for his parents, who can’t afford to keep him at home, but likely get to see him only once a year. 

Will’s about to enter the inner temple, but I put a hand on his shoulder—no one is in there except a thin monk in a brown robe.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to,” I say.

Will nods, and the two of us stand there for a long time, looking in.  The walls are lined with dark wood and colored tiles, and the ceiling is high and slanted, dark-stained wood with two small skylights.  Incense is burning on the altar, and it crosses the shafts of light in thin, woven strands.  Ever two minutes or so, the skinny monk rises from where he’s reading a book, crosses to the alter, and picks up a thick wooden club wrapped in yellow clothe.  Holding it backhand, he taps a huge brass bowl resting on the table.  The bowl chimes like a bell, low and resonant.  I don’t doubt they can hear it all the way across the river, but standing this close it sounds mellow and warm. 

“Dad,” says Will in a whisper.  I glance at him.  He’s pointing toward a girl who’s kneeling on the far side of the altar, sticks of incense between her palms as she bows repeatedly.  “We can go in.”

So we do. 

The floor is tile and cool, and the smell of incense tickles the inside of my nose.  I stand still for moment, enjoying the blue light, the rising smoke.  Will goes straight to the bowl that the monk’s been striking.  It’s silent now, but Will bends his ear to it anyway. 

Then he grins.  It’s a face-splitting grin, an ear-to-ear grin, the kind of grin I don’t get often from my serious little boy who’s less likely to tell a joke than he is to explain, over peanut butter and jelly, exactly how a metal detector works. 

He gestures for me.  I stroll over and he tells me to copy him.  I lean down. 

It’s there, soft but pure, clear as a—well, a bell:  the low, resonating hum, hard as brass, grating as copper, but still somehow so warm it weaves through your skin and wraps around your insides. 

Now it’s my turn to grin.  This is, damn it, my favorite temple anywhere.

 

It takes a while to get out.  We’re reluctant to leave that room, that bell, that incense, smoke drifting through shafts of light.

But finally we step onto the porch, slip on our shoes.  The sun makes us squint.  The crowds have thickened and we hear fragments of German, Chinese, Russian.  I suddenly remember the Austin Martin, realize it’s probably just around the corner.  How do I explain that one to Will? I think, and suddenly wonder where Kem is, if maybe she couldn’t steer us away from that particular icon, the image of a man being erased in a flowing curtain of flame and fuel and air and bone.  But she’s nowhere to be found. 

Crap, I think.  I’m suddenly tired, the calm high from the temple gone.

We drift around the building, into cool shade.  There’s a small garden there, with a few cabbages growing and what looks like an apple tree in the middle.  Water has pooled around the base of the tree, and some one’s left an orange watering can by the fence.

Standing beside me, Will suddenly guffaws. I look at him.

“Hey,” he says.  “You know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“Bugs,” Will grins, looking at the small tree, a few wet strands of grass.  “Bugs Bunny:  he’s really just a man in a rabbit suit.”

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.