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december 29, 2001
To travel with a consistent conscience is next to impossible after an extended period of time in a developing country. In Vietnam, and in China two years ago, deprivation of the luxuries to which I am accustomed in the first world eventually become extremely frustrating. There were times in Vietnam when all I wanted were the guilty comforts of home. I yearned for long hot 20 minute showers (for me, this is a long shower) without worrying about wasting reserves of fresh water on something so seemingly non-essential. Other times all I wanted was to just be an asshole consumer, driving on the back of a pig of a motorcycle and spending money on incredibly expensive drinks and food when the majority of the Vietnamese people subsist on 50 cent bowls of pho or bun cha. Then there is the absolutely pleasurable contradiction of coming home and going out to a club and spending $7.25 on a drink, drinking water straight from the tap, going out for far too expensive meals, driving a car wherever and whenever I want, and discussing the pros and cons of particular gyms so that we can whittle our bodies into desirable shapes. In a week and half I go back to Beijing. Granted, Beijing is a huge city in which luxuries are readily available, but I already miss the vast selection of yogurt and cheese in my local Save-on-Foods and the guilty convenience of life in Canada.
posted by tina 12/29/2001 10:00:29 PM
december 27, 2001
Travels are over. I'm back home. I arrived yesterday, having experienced an extended Christmas Day, leaving Hong Kong in the afternoon and arriving in Vancouver on Christmas morning. I surprised my entire family and, from their reactions and the aftermath of return, I feel very much loved. Now, a mad rush of activity and errands over the next two weeks as I make preparations for my next departure to start a four-month job I somehow landed in Beijing (not teaching English!). More to follow.
posted by tina 12/27/2001 05:52:09 PM
december 25, 2001
I'm infatuated with Asia again. A few weeks ago, I was on the back of a friend's motorcycle and we were cruising around Hanoi late at night. A group of motorcycles soared past us, going in the same direction, and they were going so fast that the sound of the boys driving them was like something out of the movies - fade in fade out. My impression was one of barely contained excitement and joy, as if these teenage boys epitomized this wildly careering continent.
While on the subject of motorcycles, I think these must be one of the greatest modern inventions. In Vietnam, a society where sex is hidden and girls still giggle behind their hands and blush furiously at its mention, the motorcycle has become the equivalent of the American family car in the 1950s. At night, I cycle past parks full of Hanoian couples making out on their motorcycles as if they weren't on clear display. The sheer design perfection of a motorcycle creates an exercise in restraint, meant to intensify the longing and desire of a young couple. How fabulous it is to straddle a motorcycle behind a man, arms around his waist, cheek to his back, thigh to thigh warmth, with him reaching back to stroke your knee. In Vietnam there is something so deliciously illicit about the heightened sexual energy and frustration created by the widespread neccessity of the motorcycle. I'm a convert.
posted by tina 12/25/2001 11:15:45 AM
december 20, 2001
What does this mean? How is it possible to label something that is essentially a massive infrastructure construction project as a program of hunger elimination and poverty reduction? After working at the news agency for awhile, I realize just how much Vietnam (and I presume other "developing" nations) has bought into the rhetoric of development and modernization. Every other article is about expressing appreciation for overseas development assistance (ODA), massive projects funded by the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, foreign direct investment in hydropower schemes and the development of heavy industry, and the absolute necessity of increasing export quotas, especially of value-added products. There is never anything that is even remotely critical of the "renewal process and national industralization and modernization," except for when there is political leverage in doing so. This strikes me as problematic, especially when there is a passive acceptance of the supposed link between massive infrastructure projects and poverty reduction or when "development" is measured by how many televisions there are per capita.
Although I know that few people actually read the news agency's articles, it is an interesting insight into what the government currently considers important. The articles are often about the "development and consolidation of comprehensive cooperation between Vietnam and [insert whatever country on which they are focusing at the moment]." A lot of the statements in the articles are really just blatant lies. For example, high-level Vietnamese delegations have recently visited Cambodia and China. In the stories about the meetings that took place, I read several variations of this basic phrase: "The two sides lauded the long-term traditional friendship between Viet Nam and [Cambodia or China] and affirmed their commitment to comprehensively cooperate in the future" (no, this is not a joke, I read this type of phrase every day). Long-term traditional friendship? This is a lie on a massive scale. The reality is that Vietnam invaded Cambodia twenty years ago and, when China invaded Vietnam in response, the Vietnamese army decimated the Chinese forces, slaughtering in a matter of days the same number of Chinese as the total number of American GIs killed in the Vietnam War. This is only a single example of the blatant lies propagated by the news agency.
What does this mean? It means that I work for Minitrue, the very same Ministry of Truth conceived of by George Orwell in 1984. I work for an organization which clearly believes that history can be erased and altered to suit current political goals and ambitions. And here I am, someone who studied critical media theory, getting paid by the Vietnamese government to produce such propaganda.
That said, I have to confess to finding the work somewhat interesting. They are almost always hopelessly soaked with the language of socialist propaganda, and it is a major challenge to try and make propaganda sound even vaguely like real news. Never mind that the English is so terrible that many of the articles are beyond salvaging. As I already mentioned, it really gives an insight into government policy and political attitudes. Although I know that not many people actually read these articles, I wouldn't be surprised if foreign policy analysts monitor them for that very reason.
Am I going to rot in hell for doing this work? Should I be experiencing more pangs of conscience?
posted by tina 12/20/2001 03:02:09 PM
december 15, 2001
Much better now.
Hypothetical situation. You are about to be left on a deserted island for five years and you can only take five CDs with you. Which would they be? It's a buyer's market over here in Vietnam and I want to expand my musical horizons.
posted by tina 12/15/2001 06:43:02 PM
december 9, 2001
Forgive my Bridget Jones moment of wallowing self-pity (which I just read and identified with in ways I'm not entirely comfortable with). These are the things I want right now. I want a job, I want a goal, I want something that challenges, excites and inspires me. I want a little more certainty in my life than this half-hovering feeling of in-betweenness that has plagued me for the last several months. And, well, the fact of the matter is that I want to be in love with someone for more than five minutes. I don't want to leave somebody behind or be left behind only because that is what time or circumstance dictate. I want a relationship that is allowed to run its full course, according to what our hearts tell us. If it still lasts for five minutes, then so be it. At least I won't be subject to future fits of longing and crappy romantic nostalgia. I want to be able to make one single fucking decision about my life at the moment, rather than flitting back and forth between possibilities, frozen with indecisiveness until forced to decide by visa, passport and air ticket limitations. It might have been exciting one year ago but, now, I'm tired of not knowing where I will be next month. At the same time, I don't want to go home. I feel like everything I can possibly decide is totally dependent on other people. I'm tired of deciding one thing in the morning and totally shifting gears by the evening. Bloody fucking hell.
posted by tina 12/9/2001 03:08:57 PM
december 5, 2001
Two views of war in Vietnam
Graham Greene - The Quiet American
"Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn't even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, 'I hate war.' There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey - we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world's dead.
"I put on my earphones for Captain Trouin to speak to me. He said, 'We will make a little detour. The sunset is wonderful on the calcaire. You must not miss it.' he added kindly, like a host who is showing the beauty of his estate, and for a hundred miles we trailed the sunset over the Baie d'Along. The helmeted Martian face looked wistfully out, down the golden groves among the great humps and arches of porous stone, and the wound of murder ceased to bleed."
Michael Herr - Dispatches
"But once it was actually going on, things were different. You were just like everyone else, you could no more blink than spit. It came back the same way every time, dreaded and welcome, balls and bowels turning over together, your senses working like strobes, free-falling all the way down to the essences and then flying out again in a rush to focus, like the first strong twinge of tripping after an infusion of psilocybin, reaching in at the point of calm and springing all the joy and all the dread ever known, ever known by everyone who ever lived, unutterable in its speeding brilliance, touching all the edges and then passing, as though it had all been controlled from outside, by a god or by the moon. And every time, you were so weary afterward, so empty of everything but being alive that you couldn't recall any of it, except to know that it was like something else you had felt once before. It remained obscure for a long time, but after enough times the memory took shape and substance and finally revealed itself one afternoon during the breaking off of a firefight. It was the feeling you'd had when you were much, much younger and undressing a girl for the first time,"
posted by tina 12/5/2001 12:56:55 PM
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