Monthly Archives: August 2005

Bă´c So’n
I never got to finish the tales of my Nghe An trip. I must tell you about the highlight, however, which was a small commune called Bă´c So’n. It is a remote ethnic minority community located deep in the Vietnamese countryside, where the roads are dirt and cars are a rare sight. We had to get out of our car and take motorbikes the rest of the way because the mud-filled ruts made the road impassable. Farmers in cone hats planted rice in fields of Technicolor green. One water buffalo cart driver almost ran off the road because he had never seen a foreigner before.

The people of Bă´c So’n are very warm and welcoming. A stream edged with trees runs through the village, and little mud paths connect their simple houses. The women all wear white shirts and black pants as their “˜professional attire’. If they are married, they wear their hair in a bun at the top left side of their head, while unmarried women wear their hair in a regular bun. For the most part, the people live in stilt houses, one of which we visited at lunch time. You climb up a wooden staircase to go inside, and you can look down between the wooden floorboards of the house and see the water buffalo that are tethered below. The owner was a Women’s Union member, who hosted a fantastic feast for us! We first washed our hands at the well outside, and then we 25 people sat on tatami mats on the floor of the stilt house. We must have eaten a million kinds of food, most of them made from duck including duck soup, fried duck, duck bone meatballs, etc. (These people really like to eat duck!) The main food is sticky rice, which we rolled into balls to eat with our hands, similar to how people eat in Thailand or Laos. If you want to be very polite and show your generosity to someone, you roll a ball of rice in your hand (right hand only, of course!) and drop it into their bowl. The whole meal was an endless exchange of rice balls and grinning.

The funniest part about big group meals in Vietnam is the rice wine drinking rituals. Everyone gets a shot glass, which is constantly filled by the little old men you’re sitting next to. After some ceremonial and usually humorous speeches, everyone has to clink glasses and drink – the amount of which is determined by the announcement of a percentage. Example: “100%!!, ” someone will say, and everyone cheers, knowing that they all have to drink the whole glass. Afterward, the old men will shake your hand and beam toothless smiles at you like you’re some kind of champion. Oftentimes the toasts are hosted by someone, who will come around to where you’re sitting with the rice wine bottle to make a funny little speech and drink a glass with you, while everyone laughs and cheers you on. This must have happened about 50 times among different people during the course of this particular meal. At one point, to my chagrin, Khanh suggested that I grab the bottle and go around to toast some people on my own. When I heard this, almost choked on the twisted chicken foot I had been gnawing on. I swallowed my fear and tried my best. My “speech” turned out to be something like this in Vietnamese, “Greetings Bă´c So’n. I am called Little Orchid. Thank you. Good luck Vietnam. 100% !!!” The party erupted into a roar of laughter. They must have thought my speech was brilliant, because according to Khanh, they’re still talking about it!

Later, during the program planning meeting for the Bă´c So’n commune Women’s Union, I was supposed to be taking notes and listening. What I found especially funny was when the women farmers announced that they want their primary income-generation activity to be frog raising. At one point, I attempted to put my hair up in a high side bun like theirs. This made all of the shy Women’s Union members giggle during the meeting, and I was afraid I’d get scolded by my co-workers for the disruption. It turned out to be just the right thing to do, and it seemed to break the ice too, because after the meeting, all of the ladies wanted to style my hair and dress me up in ethnic minority costume – black woolen skirt with beautifully embroidered edging. The meeting then turned into a singing contest, during which I performed an enthusiastic rendition of the Eensy Weensy Spider (thanks, Carly, for this idea!), which they thought was the most beautiful song they’d ever heard. They clapped and sang along with me. The whole thing made for a terrific and hilarious photoshoot. Be sure to check out the pictures of my trip to Nghe An!

At the end of our visit, the president of the commune offered to give me a plot of land, use of his buffalo, and 50% of the building materials needed to construct my own stilt house and live in their community. I told them I really did plan to come back next year with Clinton and try my hand at frog farming! This made them extremely happy. It is one of the greatest feelings on Earth to make friends with people in such an isolated place, halfway around the world and know that you are welcome to live among them.

The lens of my mind’s eye
A combination of low-quality camera, lack of photography skills and about a thousand missed opportunities means that I rarely take good pictures. When I am snapping shots, though, I try to imagine that I am recording one beautiful moment in time. Unfortunately, it is very seldom that my pictures are beautiful. I do believe, though, that I have an excellent inner camera. Through the lens of my mind’s eye, I can capture life as it passes by the proverbial car window, every moment like a page in National Geographic. I did this on the way to Bă´c So’n, but this time through a literal car window. Here’s the snapshot: It was 5:47 PM. At that instant, a silver-blue light was shining out from under dark blue clouds and onto the rice fields below. The sky was reflected in the rows of water between the paddies, against a dramatic mountain backdrop of limestone outcroppings, arching up from the fields like the jagged spines of ancient dragons. The light gave the world a supernatural effect, the way Vermeer or Rembrandt might have painted a rice paddy if they could visit Vietnam. It fell onto the backs of the water buffalo, glistening wet with fresh silver-brown mud, their noses in the water. They were frozen in one instant of mid-movement, like perfect earthen sculptures in this land where time stands still. It is a moment I cannot erase from my memory.

Ha Long Bay
After Nghe An I promptly left Hà Nôi again to visit the famous Ha Long Bay with my friend Cynthia. Our 2-day, 1-night tour included a ride from the mainland to Cat Ba Island on sort of Chinese pirate ship. It was beautiful – with dark wood, white canvas sails and great wooden dragon at the bow. When our tour guide found out that my mother is Vietnamese, he said that he already knew that, because I “have a Vietnamese nose”. (Huh?) The best part of the trip was swimming in the bay. The water was warm, turquoise green and very salty. We jumped off the pirate ship and paddled around in an inflatable canoe with our new British friends. We also explored a natural limestone cave system over 500 million years old! That night after dinner, we listened to a really funny (amateurish) outdoor singing contest on Cat Ba Island, hanging out with a family from Dalat and their Vietnamese-American relative from Texas whose (very American) attitude and unfruitful attempts to order a ribeye steak made me laugh until I cried.

Goodbye Hà Nôi
Last Thursday, my boss and his wife took me out to seafood and beer. I think it was one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten – one of my favorite dishes was the squid prepared in dill and other herbs. The jumbo prawns were like getting a taste of a buttery seafood heaven, and the beer was cold and crisp. On Saturday, I went to their house for a small S-CODE party to eat spring rolls and melon, and I did karaoke for the first time ever! I sang horribly — completely ruining Hello by Lionel Richie and Yesterday by the Beatles, among others, but enjoyed myself immensely. I plan to do it again! Holding a microphone and singing for other people is something that is probably in my genes…

On Tuesday night, Khanh and Ha took me to a famous rooftop café called City View, overlooking the beautiful Hoan Kiem Lakewhere we drank tea, ate French fries and talked for ages. On Wednesday, I made my second attempt at ballroom dancing. This time no one was hurt! And yesterday, my wonderful co-workers at S-CODE took me out for a farewell lunch at a gorgeous West Lake restaurant. Here’s the photo of that.

I am sad to leave Hà Nôi because I feel so at home here. Last night I went walking to buy some last-minute items and said goodbye to the city’s beautiful streets. Hà Nôi – oi! I will miss you”¦

Last Sunday, the day I left with my co-workers on the Nghe An site visit, a tempestuous tropical storm swept through northern Vietnam. My colleagues, the ever superstitious Vietnamese, took it as a bad omen, but we decided to carry on as planned.

We were four: Ms. Khanh, the project manager; Mr. Tuan, our able driver; and Phuong, my trusty sidekick. Mr. Tuan, sporting his trademark shy grin, arrived to pick me up in a sort of SUV-mini-van-type vehicle called a Toyota Zace, which they obviously don’t market in the U.S. (Has anyone else heard of this model??) It was a fancier means of transportation than I had envisioned, and its powerful air conditioning system provided us with an ambiance a la upholstered meat locker. Oreos and baby wipes were my contribution to the communal travel supplies for our 6 1/2 hour journey.

Rain flooded the highway, and high winds broke branches off the trees and threw them onto the road. Umbrellas were futile, flapping backwards and inside out with every gust. When we reached a town which was safely out of the storm’s path, we stopped for dinner. The place had the atmosphere of a German beer hall, except it had rows and rows of plastic tables and chairs, flowing rice wine and huge bowls of freshly steamed purple squid, the latter of which I polished off two. Power surges made the lights flicker off for several minutes at a time, inciting our fellow diners, the drunken Vietnamese, to cheer wildly and toast each other with increased fervor. We stayed the night at a guesthouse Nghia Dan and watched overdramatized Vietnamese amateur theater on television so we could fall asleep.

Side note: Guest houses and hotels in Vietnam provide large plastic sandals for guests to use in the bathroom. This is because Vietnamese bathrooms generally have a showerhead attached to the wall, and the water shoots right onto the floor, which is made of either tiles or plain cement, as well as spraying over the toilet and sink. The sink water also runs out onto the floor. All of the bathroom water (well, except for the toilet, of course!) flows down a single drain hole in the corner of the bathroom. In other words, your feet (and usually pantlegs too) get very wet in the bathroom.

The following morning we ate Bun Cha for breakfast (good, but not as tasty as in Hanoi!), and after a quick coffee, we drove into Quy Hop (the Quy Hop District’s capital town) to meet with three district-level representatives of the Vietnam Women’s Union (VWU). Khanh has worked with them throughout project implementation over the past two years. They all get along more like family than colleagues, which is the Vietnamese way — telling stories, clucking and commenting about each others’ outfits and personal health, cracking jokes and slapping each other on the back for a hour or so before getting down to work.

These women are in their fifties, and their noble faces and hands are heavily lined from lives as rice farmers and mothers probably seven or ten times over. They are quick to smile and kindly spoke slowly for my benefit so that I could understand a few words in Vietnamese now and again. The rest of the morning was spent discussing the outline of the next project phase and helping them construct problem tree diagram which explained the root causes of poverty in Quy Hop district. Their commitment to helping the farming communities was obvious. One of the three leaders, the wonderful Ms. Hien, accompanied us to the three project communes in the following days of our sejour.

Breaking for lunch, we resumed the back-slapping and story-telling at a restaurant whose specialty was chargrilled dead baby birds. They arrive at our table in piles four or five high to a dish, beaks and eyes wide open in shock that their fleeting time on Earth could be cut so short by the merciless Vietnamese cooking fire. We ate them whole (heads, feet and all) with chopsticks — family style, of course. By the way, the word for bird in Vietnamese is pronounced TCHEEM, and it is also one of the more harmless slang words for a particular part of the male reproductive anatomy. This, of course, provided plenty of fodder for dirty jokes. It was a rollicking good time!

To be continued…