smell ya later Da Lat

It has been many mouths since I have posted on this blog. The reasoning? The excuses? I'm not sure. I still think I just needed time to think. A three month thinking endeavor to free up the emotional constipation that started during Tet. Da Lat is a great place to think. Sometimes that's all there is to do. It provides the space, the air, and the elevation for “lofty” thinking. Here is an assembly of some thoughts:

Tet:

I'm worried this might be my first and last Tet with my grandmother. She's weak, and constantly thinks of death, and tells the family so. We sit and tell her it's not her time. But we all know it nears. Her health reaffirms my long established philosophy that I want to my own life to be meaningful. Meaningful to who and how are questions I still have to figure out. In Vietnam, meaningful takes on the perspective of family. You work to make a meaningful guidance within your family, and I guess to do that, I would need to start thinking about settling down, and starting up. I believe this is the mirco-perspective. It's something we all have to think about eventually, I have been thinking about it a lot. It was only a year ago that I set out on this voyage thinking much more macro-spectively. I wanted to see the world, learn, and somehow work to change and contribute to something larger. I don't see this perspective as fool-hearted. It's not something that one can extinguished if it burns from within. But more and more, the path of being meaningful to a few and the path of making a difference to many are diverging in my mind. When I talk to grandmother, meaningful is how it feels.

Teaching:

I'm going to miss my classes. I made friends here that I hope the absolute best for. I realize I'm glad to have been placed in Da Lat because the students here are of modest to poor background. I see in them a strong determination to escape the poverty in which they endured. I see an acceptance of modesty in their social status but the willingness ( a zest almost) to share what they have. I see in them an appreciation of happiness.

Drinking:

This was my last night in Da Lat with the sociology crew. We drank 6 bottles a lot of Ukrainian Vodka. I passed out at the Karoke bar, and woke up in Vu's room. Goodbyes are best if you don't remember them. It's the Da Lat way.

Home:

I miss it. Miss my family. I miss driving. I miss an animal-style In-n-Out burger and fries. I miss my friends, BBQ, BBQ sauce, watching movies, and I miss my cat, Off.

A Bad Night:

You know it's a bad night when you wake up the next morning with street candy and wild horse cigarettes.

TV:

Sometimes when I'm bored, and there's a cable TV around, I watch the many animal rescue shows that are on and laugh aloud to myself knowing that I'm watching them in Vietnam. There's a lot of copy cat shows in Vietnam, but you'll never see a Vietnam adaptation of Animal Cops.

Side note, some of the funniest things I have ever seen on TV has to be Vietnamese infomercials. Most of the product beings sold are just left overs of crap they couldn't sell in the US. Remember your bow flex? Thigh master? Well, they found a convalescent market in SE Asia. And the corniness of those infomercials are amped up and dubbed over, you have to see it to believe it.

ICR:

For those that don't already know, I have decided to stay in Vietnam for another year. I have taken a new job that will require a move to Hanoi. I'm excited to try something new that will provide a better pay, but I'm worried about the heat and the long time spent away from friends and family back home. Two years is a long time, and there's bound to be some initial disconnect when I return. It's a risk that I took on the faith that the friendships I have made are strong enough to withstand two years. I'm excited for Hanoi, but I do realize it will require a learning curve. I'm a southern raised boy, and the north can feel very out of place for me.

Da Lat:

Now that I know I'm leaving Da Lat, I realize that Da Lat taught me the lesson of simplicity. It's not hard, but I think the depths of such things are hard to understand when your perspective has been cultivated in a very different world. Here, the energy and demands of urbanites are brought in by the tourists, and lingers in the tourist havens. Walk away from them, and you'll see a city where people live their lives, grow their food, and watch the clouds then the rains and then the stars. I have, and I'm thankful for it. Sometimes you just need to get just a bit higher to see it a little differently.

Since I will no longer be in Da Lat, I feel a blog titled High on Da Lat would be wrong. And so, I have decided to end this series of blogs. I will continue to write online and update on Facebook.

The Scales of A Dragon

An article I wrote for Doanh Nhân Sài Gòn Cuối Tuần, a Vietnamese magazine:

The proverbial glass remains half full and half empty depending on your perspective, but after my first five months of living in Vietnam, I have noticed that my glass always ends up finished; emptied of the coffee, beer, or nectar that was there hours ago. It is an extinguishing effort that paradoxically always fuels creation. Perhaps, this is not unique to just this country, but it is an undeniable essence of it. Killing time by nursing a glass of refreshment is a communal endeavor and even if work goes unmentioned in these gatherings, the task of camaraderie building is always progressed.

As one who harbors Vietnamese heritage yet has grown afar from home, the lens in which I observe Vietnam is unique. It is not with a sense of cultural distance that lingers in most foreigners, and it is not with the cultural familiarity of those who have grown up here, it is a tri-focal perspective that one might get looking through a stack of broken glass shards.

I have not looked through a stack of broken glass shards, but I have visited many temples throughout Vietnam. They range in size and location, from a mountain top cave temple called the Perfumed Pagoda to a lakeside temple call Truc Lam in my current home of Da Lat; they each are unique and similar in how they shine with the energy of their environments. A feature that I am utterly amazed by is the usage of broken glass.

A glass bottle or a porcelain bowl smashed is essentially ridden of its function as a container and left on the ground with freshly exposed edges it serves as a danger to all those around. At the temples, these shards are rebirth as the brilliant mosaic of colors and overall luster of the pillars and statues. It is this regenerative spirit that I see when looking up at the shard skin of a thirty feet high dragon statue, and it is this same regenerative spirit I sense when looking down at my cup of coffee surrounded by the friends I have made.

Sitting around a plastic table, it is often the content of our glasses that facilitates the conversations. Coffee will induce talks of the weather, work, and random thoughts. Beer will conjure talks of soccer games, shared memories, and random jokes. Nectar will inspire talks of fruits and earth. On this particularly cold Da Lat morning, we talked about the New Year.

This will be my first Tet in Vietnam, and I'm unprepared, anxious, and worried. The Lunar New Year is celebrated in America, but with a lack of zest. Often, if the New Year Eve were to fall on a workday, I would find myself at work. On those occasions, I fought the traffic to drive hours back home to visit my family for dinner. The children then wished our parents the happiest and healthiest of New Year, received our Ly Si, wished them a good night, and drive back to our lives for the start of the next workday. On the rare occasions that the New Year fell on a weekend, we had three days and celebrated with a large family gathering. The gatherings often ended with the family huddled around the television to watch the Chinese New Year's Parade in Chinatown. Needless to say, but I did anyways to my friend after two cups of coffee, that this year: “Tet will be very different for me.”

I wish to express to my grandparents how much this means to me, how grateful I am to have this one year out of the twenty-eights years of my life to be standing (arms-folded)in our family home to wish them the very best for this incoming new year out of the 87 years they have already lived. I have replayed the scenario in my mind many times, and each time, I saw myself crying, unable to finish saying what I want to say, knowing that many years have already passed before we will have this moment. And when the tears arise, I will see in the soft glaze, the same regenerative shine of the broken shards. Like those pieces, our family ties have been scattered, but like the scales of a dragon that the pieces are now, I truly believe and sincerely hope that our ties can grow again.

As the New Year nears, I find myself in Vietnam, sitting at a café with an empty cup nearby, thinking. The New Year, might be just another lunar cycle around the same spinning earth, circling around the same sun, but what a wonderful familiar bunch of circles it is. We welcome the newness of the year by wishing the same prosperity we have always wished for those we love. We hope for the best, and we pick up the pieces that have always been there.

Happy, healthy, wonderfully motivated new year to all my friends!

Da Lat by Night

Done with the semester, going to hit the road hard, like it was a banker at my door asking for a donation. Going all around the country, the surrounding countries, and of course, back home to Nha Trang for the New Year. But, before I go, a last look at Da Lat at night.

thành phố buồn

I just learned that "Thành Phố Buồn," is the unofficial city anthem of Da Lat. Inspired by the fallen leafs and gloomy days of my city, the song was written by Che Linh, and translated it means "Sad Town." Yes, a little melodramatic, but this is Vietnam, and although hardly anyone has a craving for cheese in their diet, they have an unabashed lust for cheese in their music. This recurring theme of unfulfilled love plays in many many many Vietnamese songs and has appropriately birthed a societal attractiveness to American pop music. If you stay long enough in any cafe in Vietnam, you will surely hear a few (if not all) songs by a boy-band, Madonna, the Beatles, MJ, and any assortment of songs you might find on a TimeLife collection of a decade album. I discovered this song at Cafe Moc, a local basement cafe with live music. A quick youtube search, and I was lucky to stumble upon an actual music video, which I'm proud to share on my blog. I watched this, and a few things came to mind:

1. if you can watch this all the way through, you're a better person than me

2. it's one thing to mope around, it's another thing to mope around in style, from now on, whenever I'm feeling down, I'm going to tie a sweater around my neck and walk aimlessly through the streets of Da Lat while holding my cigarette prison style.

3. what's up with the quick splice job of that lady? it's terrifying

4. perhaps it's not too late to start a new career as a karaoke video director

As the French must have said, enjoy the formage:

Christmas Thieving

Today, I relearned the true spirit of Christmas: thieving! I spent many prelude Christmas weeks working at malls, and then shopping at malls, then home, and work again. I realize now that I spent most Christmas time busy. This is my first time away for the holidays, and to be honest, up until today, I couldn't even register that it's that time of year again.

The spirit hit me today, as we (my fellow teachers/students) went Christmas tree plucking. Climbing up a freshly exposed cliff side where the new dirt had spawned young saplings, we had our choices of Christmas trees. We yanked three, and quickly ran back to the safe haven of my friend's home. This, after all, was completely illegal. You can do a lot of things in Vietnam, from copyright infringing to riding against traffic, but cutting down a tree will get you jail time. We did it anyways. Laughing all the way back home, I realized that Christmas isn't about buying/selling/returning things, it's about taking things, and today I took home a tree and yet another unforgettable memory.

All this reaffirmed for me that most times it is simplicity that enthused the spirit and the soul. One Christmas cartoon that always reminds of this is: "A Pink Christmas." Starting a homeless Pink Panther, the story centers around his search for food and shelter in the midst of winter. Check it out:

I hope all my friends are enjoying this time of year with the simplicity of thieving love from those around them.

Merry Christmas one and all.

T(on)y

Test Riding

What do you do when you first get a new motobike? Take it over a rickety wooden bridge of course. Thanks to my cousin, Hue, for providing the near death experience. I kept flashing back to the Nintendo Super Mario Brother game; thinking if I cross this bridge I would win, and if we couldn't, it was the dragon's fault.

[Upon an attempt to upload the following video onto blogger, I got a prompt saying that the content is inappropriate for uploading. I have been officially censored. ]

But if you're willing to venture into my thoughts as I was riding across that bridge, here is the banned video anyways.

That's it, crashing like the stock market.

I've been gone in November

How the heck did I live through a whole month of November and fail to publish one blog? I guess you can say, I've been gone in November, gone in November, gone in November (I can hear the boos already....lame, just lame Tony, why, oh why are you infringing on Wyclef's intellectual property like that). But it's the truth, I have been gone in November.

I had the blessing to have friends from back home visit me here. Laila, Leia, and I, spent time in Da Lat, Saigon, Hanoi, Ha Long, then Hai Phong. It was good to be able to share Vietnam with friends. For better or for worse, they now have "Nam" stories to recount.

I realize as much as I want it so, blog writing is not journal writing. I have been writing journals lately, and although I do humbly think they make for interesting readings, I don't think the VN gov would agree. There's an honesty that I have been advised to avoid, and that sucks, because I think the underlying quality to good writing is honesty, in the emotional and philosophical sense. But don't fret, if you're willing to do some sleuthing, there will be an uncensored link eventually.

Now that November is gone, I can say with some degree of research that this tends to be the wall or hump period for vols like myself. I think the first couple of months is the honey moon period, where you're just in love with everything new, and now that the holidays are here, you become a little homesick or foodsick for things like turkey, pumpkin pies, peppered bacon, and the such. Strangely, I even miss things I remember as annoyances, like the bickering of drunken family members and getting shoved around by xmas shoppers. Luckily, you can go to any market in VN and get shoved around while you're engulfed by the sounds of drunken bickering.

That's it for now, the triple shot of rum coffee is beginning to fade away, and with it, any coherent thought as well.

More to come from December.