Let's go home

The lack of internet over the last two nights caused me to embroider more and more detail into my personal accounts of what transpired. Now, in the interest of brevity, I try to reduce those six pages to the big picture.

1. I made it to Ben Tre. Internet access is hopefully on its way to my room.
2. I have big windows and no curtains, so I feel like I am constantly scampering around on tiptoe trying to sneak from one room to the next. It doesn't help that I was told that everyone is curious to catch sight of me, which makes me feel like I should expect people to be loitering around my windows. My bedroom is enclosed in a metal and blurred plexiglass cubicle, so I do have some level of privacy. But I don't want students' first glimpse of me to be as I plod to the bathroom in boxers and an oversized sweatshirt.
3. Story time

08. 28. 11
This morning at breakfast Hang came and sat right next to me and put her arms around me and started crying, saying that she was going to miss us. I was simultaneously flabbergasted and moved. I don’t think I have written much at all about the hotel or its staff, but they have been like big brothers and sisters to us all month. This is the third year the Fulbright contingent stays at the Rising Dragon II, and every year the ETAs and the staff get very close. I had actually been feeling guilty about not making more of a point to get to know the staff, so for Hang to choose me as her shoulder to cry on meant a lot to me.

I got a call from Trang, the woman picking me up from the airport. I was comforted by her excellent English. She told me to look for a big woman in a navy suit. I was curious to find out what the descriptor ‘big woman’ would mean when uttered by a Vietnamese person. After breakfast we went to a place called Western Canned Goods looking for gifts for our hosts. I briefly but strongly considered buying a box of grits, which I was shocked to find, but was dissuaded by the fact that it would add an extra pound to my luggage.

Andrea, Kelly, Taylor, and I were all on the same flight to Ho Chi Minh City, and I was glad to not have to navigate the airport alone. The flight was brief and I slept most of the way. When I woke up I moved my arm onto the armrest and grazed something. I thought it might be a hand but it was the sock-clad foot of the person behind me. Ack. Is grazing a monk’s foot good luck? Once we dropped below the clouds, the landscape changed from mountainous to agricultural with a smattering of settlement to densely and expansively urban. There was a skyline! Hanoi is certainly a city in its own right but, as a big city girl, ‘city’ just doesn’t feel quite right without a distinctive skyline. Ho Chi Minh struck me for its completely un-American organization. It looked as though someone had dumped out a bag of sprinkles, and they piled on each other in every color and facing any direction. Moreover, Ho Chi Minh is huge. I am looking forward to visiting it on the occasional weekend, and getting a taste of it.

 The foot!

Ho Chi Minh

The welcoming committee

We landed; I got my bags quickly, and I found Trang easily enough from her description. It helped that she was carrying a glittery bouquet of flowers, indicating that she was waiting to receive someone. Trang asked me if I was hungry and the truth was that I was famished but didn’t know if it was appropriate to say so. I gave a vague and indirect answer, which is generally the right approach. She told me that she was quite hungry, so I hoped that this would mean food in my near future. When everyone arrived we took a zillion pictures and then set out for Ben Tre. No sign of intent to eat. After just a few minutes of driving we pulled over on the side of a large roundabout. Apparently we were waiting for a ‘hitch-hiker’. At first I stared at the passing traffic and salivated at the many food stands just across the street. Though I would have felt very confident doing so, I doubted that they would have been happy if I had hopped into oncoming traffic to go buy food. So I sat. Once I ingested the big picture I started savoring the details: some geckos had a well-lit showdown on a billboard featuring living room furniture. Several language schools were on this street and I decoded which words meant that. Finally our hitch-hiker arrived and we were really on the road.

At first most of the passengers spoke to each other in Vietnamese and I took in the sights. Eventually, though, Trang and I got to talking. I got to know a lot about her and I also started getting some answers about my time here. Trang already invited me to spend independence day (September 2nd) with her and her mother in her hometown. Her mother will make the local specialty, bánh xèo. I can’t wait.

After a good while on the road we pulled over for roadside phở. Even though I bought a shirt claiming that ‘I [heart] phở’ in Hanoi, I never actually had street phở. This is kind of sad since phở is a Hanoi specialty, but at least I’m having it now. We got back in the car and Trang turned to me and said, “Let’s go home.” It was such a casual turn of phrase, but it triggered an internal reaction. I wasn’t just headed to Bến Tre; I was headed home. Maybe it was just my newly increased energy level, but the second half of the ride seemed much shorter. We crossed the longest bridge in southern Vietnam, which connects Bến Tre Province to its neighbor. Until its completion two years ago, the only way to get into the province was with a 45-minute ferry ride; now, it is a five-minute drive. Residents hope that Bến Tre’s improved accessibility will lead to an increase in development.

At long last, we arrived on campus. I am now in my room and I am not sure how to feel. This is going to be my space for the next nine months, so I better make the most of it. This is not the space I envisioned but it is the space I have so I will make it mine. It is daunting, but so is the rest of this adventure.

“Life is a roller coaster. You can either scream every time you hit a bump, or you can throw your hands up in the air and enjoy it.” – Unknown

08.29.11
I am kind of overwhelmed by the expectations people have of me. This morning I met a ton of people whose names I promptly forgot. One of my longer meetings was with the facilitator of the newly formed English club, who seemed to expect me to already have a plan for the four three-hour sessions that will take place this coming month, despite the fact that this was almost the first I’d heard of it. He is also the professor for the second year speaking skills class that I will be assisting. In my efforts to nail down exactly what he was telling me regarded the club and what regarded the class, I think I gave him the impression that I am rather dense. Hopefully I can turn that around. I think the problem is that people have very specific expectations, but no one has really told me what they are. Am I teaching classes or just helping? Will I be making lesson plans after all or not? It turns out that I am teaching two two-hour classes twice a week. And then I have additional activities including two three-hour English Club meetings, one for students and one for faculty and staff. Three hours? How does anybody keep people engaged for three hours? It will be a challenge.

I am quickly learning that even though people ask me about my preference or seem to offer me a say in the matter, the person doing the asking usually has a desired reply in mind. If I say something else, I will be shown why there is another option that is better. My hosts asked me if I would like an au dai and what color I would like, perhaps purple? I suggested green. But purple means faithfulness, and green is not a popular color. No one really likes green, but purple has a very beautiful cultural symbolic value. Purple it is.

Trang took me to her home for lunch. We rode her motorcycle and I got to meet her son and her husband. He is recently retired and takes care of things while she works – he was the one that cooked our lunch. I suspect that this is a rather unusual arrangement. We ate mildly spicy trout and okra and rice. I used to hate okra as a child but I actually enjoyed it today. Trang’s son was eager to practice his English (or so she insisted) so he and I chatted for a while as Trang served the food.

Over lunch I learned a lot about table politics and guest/host relations. If you need to put your chopsticks down, put them flat on the table with the ends past the edge of the table. This keeps the table and your chopsticks clean and indicates that you are still eating. If you put your chopsticks together on top of your bowl it indicates that you are done and your food may be taken away. It is a host’s duty to serve the guest whatever the host anticipates the guest will find most delicious, and it is the guest’s duty to eat it. If the host does not do so it is rude, but it is a tricky procedure as what the host serves may not actually be something that the guest likes. The host should always be the last person to finish eating. A guest may claim to be full but if the host does not offer more food the guest may leave hungry and think poorly of the host. So, the host should always offer more food, but the guest is allowed to decline if she is indeed full. However, if the guest does not eat a ‘normal’ amount (about three small bowls), then it will seem as though the guest did not like the food. Did you follow all that? I am constantly afraid of committing a cultural blunder, so I am grateful to Trang for being willing and able to explain things to me. I think she is also eager to see what things carry across to US culture and which things are different.

I learned that the combination of words ‘eat+rice,’ means meal, and if you add the time of day then it becomes the equivalent of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

After lunch Trang took me home to nap. I don’t know if this is common practice here or if she just thought I would be tired or thinks that Americans nap. I took a 40ish minute nap and spent the rest of my two and a half hours brainstorming activities for the English club. When the time came, Tran picked me up to go buy ‘necessities’. She showed me where the nearest market was, took me to the post office, took me to get measured for my purple au giai, took me to the bookstore where I bought a Vietnamese-English/English-Vietnamese dictionary and some picture frames, and took me to dinner. We had my new favorite dish: bánh ướt, which literally means wet cake but doesn’t fit that mental image at all. I was pretty full after that but a street vendor passed by and Trang flagged him down. This was going to be interesting. He brought us something that I can only describe as fish jerky. Dried grilled fish run through a press to soften it up and served with a brown tangerine dipping sauce. This is what I get for saying I like to try new things. It wasn’t bad at all, not even unpleasant, just probably not something I would have ever ventured to try on my own. It was certainly edible, and I probably would have enjoyed more if I hadn’t felt full but obligated to finish it. I tried to be clever and divide the last piece in two to leave the rest for Trang, but she divided that piece in two and gave me the last last piece. The joys of being the guest. We washed it down with cool coconut water.

Cart of dried fish, etc. What I had is dangling from the string closest to the camera. Some of the other ones are squid. Final product in the next picture.

I learned more manners at this meal. Apparently, because I am a woman, I must take care to keep my plate looking tidy throughout the meal. If your chopstick usage causes you to push and prod and spread your food all over the plate, you should be using the spoon to keep it in check lest you seem improper. I have also heard that you should try to hold your chopsticks as far from the tip as possible, but I have not yet asked Trang about this. Some things make me laugh. There was something funny looking in my food and when she noticed it Trang reached into my plate to pick it out. Which is worse, mystery item or someone else’s fingers in your food? Trang is clearly eager to make the most of me as a cultural resource, and I am happy to be one, though sometimes I feel ill-equipped. At least she is not asking me about politics. Instead, she asks me for very specific words that we may or may not have, like 'what do you call a dish that you eat so that you do not have to eat rice?' Questions like these, that stem from a completely different way of looking at the world, sometimes take me a while just to understand before I can even address them, but I’m sure they seem like perfectly normal curiosities to her. I’ll have to keep this in mind when I have my own questions to ask.

Getting my feet wet

 “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” – Orson Welles

Friday morning I arrived at the airport, and things were slightly more complicated than I expected. When I checked in it turned out that I could not get my seat assignment for my second flight and I could not get a boarding pass to my third flight. But I was assured that neither of these were problems and that I could probably take care of both when I got to Dallas. When I got to my gate I discovered that my plane would be leaving 20 minutes late. No big deal. A few minutes later, that got edited to 60 minutes late. Big deal. My layover was only about 90 minutes long and I would have to change terminals; cue the terror. I spoke to the lady at the counter about my odds of catching my flight. She broke it down to me in terms of my options: take my assigned flight and risk it or deciding to change travel plans then and there. If I took my assigned flight, the worst case scenario would be that I would miss my connection and they would reroute me from there, where there would theoretically be several options. I'm not one to call it quits, so I took my assigned flight. She was also able to print out a new boarding pass for my second flight, this time with the seat assignment. Upon landing in Dallas I sped to the interterminal shuttle and then to my gate. My next flight was 10 minutes late, and I made it in good time. In fact, I was able to get my third boarding pass, and it turned out that my seat assignment for this flight had for some reason been changed and I would now have a window seat. Yay!

From Dallas I would be flying to Japan. It would take 13 hours. Cue the boredom. My seat back was broken so it couldn't lock in place. This meant that during takeoff it leaned back, and that when I wanted to lean back it would creep back to upright if I didn't maintain slight but steady pressure. It also meant that the guy behind me could shove my seat back forward whenever he decided I was getting too comfortable. My original plan was to sleep for the first half of the flight, during which it would be night time in Vietnam, but my body was not so cooperative. Instead, I watched Big Bang Theory and tried not to laugh too loud. I watched an array of entertainment and played around with the language options, rewatching part of Water for Elephants in Portuguese just for kicks. After thirteen hours worth of intermittent naps, TV, movies, games, and three meals, we arrived in Narita.

I knew that here I should convene with several other Fulbrighters who would be on the same flight to Hanoi, but they were nowhere in sight. I was going to sit at my gate, but I decided to wander. In a bookstore, it was a strange feeling to be surrounded by text that I could neither read nor imagine how to pronounce. Maybe 20 or 30 minutes after I went to the gate, the rest of the group arrived. After a good while of catching up and bemoaning the humidity in the airport, it was time to board the last flight. I ended up sitting next to a Vietnamese man who at first asked me if I was Japanese. We chatted for a while and, aside from being repeatedly told I was very beautiful, I found out that he was a civil/electrical engineer who spoke Russian in addition to Vietnamese and English. In Russian, I said I speak Russian too -- just a little bit. I felt like he overestimated my humility and started speaking to me in Russian, in which he was apparently much more comfortable than English, but I guess maybe I was being overly humble, because I understood everything he said. He told me I was very beautiful again, but in Russian. After two more movies, a lot more sleeping, and yet another meal (including miso soup served from a clear pitcher -- at first I thought it was a really pulpy tea), we landed in Vietnam. After claiming our bags, my peers named me the best packer. 

By the time we made it to the hotel, it was almost midnight, almost 30 hours since my 'day' had begun. This whole summer I have been waiting for the reality of this pending experience to hit me. Even though I am perfectly aware that I will be here for 10 months, I don't really know what that is going to mean. I expected it to start feeling real when we landed, or maybe on the way to the hotel, but it didn't. I think that might have been because it was so dark. Landscapes that might have been quite striking and indicative of this new life were reduced to the silhouettes of banana trees and the bright lights of karaoke bars. Neither this, nor the unique architecture, nor our shuttle driver, who seemed to consider the lane divider more of a center marker, driving as often right over it as on one side of it, were enough to make me really feel the magnitude of the change in my life that is just beginning.

At the hotel, I discovered that I forgot one member of a pair of shoes. I also discovered that the TV has channels in Vietnamese, French, Russian, German, and English. I said good night around 1am, and so far haven't been feeling any jet lag. I think that the exhausting chronological length of the journey compensated for my failed attempts to reprogram my sleep schedule on the plane.

----

This morning, after a breakfast that included pho and watermelon juice, we went wandering. Not long after we set out, it started drizzling. I was pleased with myself for having decided to bring a poncho (thanks Mom!), though in this humidity encasing yourself in plastic might make you just as damp as if you had just braved the rain. My photographic impulses were at odds with the weather, but I got some nice shots. The streets are a beautiful interplay of color, trees, grit and grime, and people. I had my first street crossing, and then my second, and third, ... and I lost count. It really is less daunting than everyone made it seem, but it is much easier to jay walk than to try and deal with the onslaught of an intersection. Our seemingly aimless wandering led us to the lake, where there is an island with a temple. On the way back we stopped for lunch. Hooray for street food! It was heavenly. On tiny stools (and by tiny I mean 10" high if that), I introduced my mouth to heaven. Spring rolls (which are actually fried; summer rolls are what we call spring rolls in the US), vermicelli, meat, yum yum yum. I do have to say that Vietnamese food in the US seems to resemble Vietnamese food in Vietnam much more so than other foreign cuisines do. I was accosted by a woman selling fruit, who loaded her baskets onto me despite my fervent 'no thank you's.

After a morning of drizzles and puddles, I think the soles of my feet have become permanently blackened. I am looking forward to starting language classes tomorrow, and decreasing my miming and reliance on other people's English.

Just an update

I made it. I'm writing to you from my hotel room. In Vietnam. More details to come soon.