Shallow Trenches

There are things you can buy in Hanoi, Vietnam, that might surprise you. For your reading enjoyment, I have put together a short list here.

• $1 DVDs. For less than the price of a movie rental back home, you can pick up the latest George Clooney film from any one of a large number of DVD shops stocking thousands upon thousands of pirated movies. While the price can’t be beat, not all copies are created equal. Some of the discs don’t play at all. Others aren’t what they claim to be. My friends Leon and Carmen were told they were buying three complete seasons of Arrested Development, and ended up with only a handful of episodes. One movie I bought turned out to have been shot with a camcorder in a movie theater, dubbed into a language I couldn’t understand. Still, it’s hard to argue with one dollar movies. The same deals can be found on music CDs and computer software.
• Dolce & Gabbana. Fashion is paramount in Hanoi, to young women especially, but also to the young men who style their hair and weave through traffic on flashy red motorbikes. The brand name of choice is Dolce & Gabbana, the Italian fashion house known for its exorbitant prices. In Vietnam, a pair of “D&G” jeans will set you back only around ten dollars. Authenticity undetermined, of course.
• Prescription drugs, without a prescription. Feel like diagnosing your own illness? Go ahead, pick up some antibiotics or narcotic painkillers from one of the hundreds of pharmacies in Hanoi that will sell anything, to anybody, cheap.
• Dog meat. It’s a delicacy. A special treat to be eaten at the appointed time of the lunar month. To answer the question on everyone’s mind, yes. I have.
• Peanut Butter. Needless to say, I was nervous about this before moving to Vietnam. Thankfully, my staple food made it here before me. A handful of small grocery stores catering to the expatriate community carry peanut butter (not Skippy, unfortunately), as do Big C and Metro, two Walmart-wannabes I try to avoid. The price of a jar here is about the same as it is in North America.
• Kentucky Fried Chicken. Before McDonalds, before Burger King, before the arrival of any other fast food chain, KFC has set up shop in Vietnam. To the best of my knowledge, the half dozen or so KFC locations were the only North American restaurants in Hanoi, until the first Pizza Hut opened its doors last month. KFC and Pizza Hut are, it turns out, owned by the same parent corporation. I expect we’ll be seeing Taco Bell and A&W joints opening shortly.

On Thursday I fly to Bangalore, India to spend twelve days with the School of Peace, and I fly to Laos for an MCC regional retreat shortly after I get back to Vietnam. Details and pictures to follow.

Mennonite Central Committee works exclusively with local development partners in Vietnam, rather than working alone.  The theory behind this, and I believe it to be a good one, is that it’s better to build sustainable development capacity in a country than to move in, give money to particularly needy individuals, and move on.

But there is a very popular model in the charity world that involves sponsoring individual children.  Doing it this way provides something tangible to donors: letters, pictures, report cards.  Things you can put on your fridge.

MCC generally believes group assistance to be better than individual assistance for a number of reasons outlined here.  The challenge, then, is to convince donors to support these projects, and provide them with something tangible in return.

Which is why I had to wake up at 5:00 a.m. last Monday morning.

Together with Vinh, a Rural Community Development program staff worker with MCC Vietnam, and Rachel, I travelled to the province of Phu Tho with my camera in tow.  Rachel is doing a writeup for donors to MCC’s Global Family program to stick on their refrigerators.  I was the designated photographer.

On the way, we stopped to watch a drama team educate high school students about HIV/AIDS, part of another program supported by MCC.

Students watch a presentation about HIV/AIDS.
View full album: MCC Projects

After the presentation, we visited three preschools in the Hien Quan district of Phu Tho, where MCC subsidizes nutritious lunches for 3 — 5 year old students.

Two preschool students eat a lunch subsidized by MCC’s Global Family program
View full album: MCC Projects

If this picture doesn’t inspire you to click here and donate, I fear for your soul.

[Note: MCC does not believe in using guilt to extract money from donors.]

Last Friday, my camera was called into service once again, this time by Anna. Anna spends a good deal of her time working with Just Massage, a massage centre in Hanoi with a mission to train and employ visually impaired youth. It was jointly founded by Action for the City, a partner organization of MCC in Hanoi.

Our Italian model receives a therapeutic Shiatsu massage
View full album: MCC Projects

Take some time to browse through the full album.

Having taken nearly 2,500 pictures since the start of February, I am wondering how soon I can justify buying really, really expensive lenses for my new camera.

It seems I rarely post about the work I do (exceptions are here and here).

For the most part, I spend my days trying to decipher sentences like this one:

It was also recommended that 10 kinds of trees used for land evaluation should be used and land map adaptation 1:10,000 should be constructed with 18 kinds of adaptations, thus, proposing 8 types of lands to be used and appropriate fertilizer putting down, coherent with the district land condition and development orientation.

Or,

However, the amplitude enlarging of this modulation, with its advantages and disadvantages, is an undeniable truth.

I am a manuscript editor in the English department of The Gioi Publishers. I am not a translator: my Vietnamese is not that good. Rather, I am given broken English and asked to fix it.

However, there is another aspect to my job that is often equally as challenging. A few of my coworkers translate English books into Vietnamese. They occasionally come to me with words, sentences and ideas that their dictionaries cannot sufficiently explain.

Some of these questions are easy to field. What does it mean to dunk in basketball? Here, watch this YouTube video:

Others are not so easy. One of my colleagues is translating a book about Feng Shui. When she comes to me with questions like, “What does it mean to centre your inner energy flow?”, I have to refrain from answering, “Nothing. They’re just meaningless words.”

The author of that book has given subsections “witty” headings like Here a Fence, There a Fence. I am forced to explain and sing Old MacDonald (though the singing might not have been strictly necessary), to prove that the author isn’t, in fact, referring to two fences.

A second colleague is translating a book titled How to Think Like Einstein, subtitled “Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius”. It is a book that counsels counterintuitive thinking in order to break out of self-imposed ‘rule ruts’. Unfortunately, in my observation, the Vietnamese tend to be rather literal. (The Vietnamese word for diabetes, for example, is “to pee sugar” – đái đường.) Explaining why you would preemptively discard obvious and sensible ideas in order to approach a problem in a radically new way is like explaining vegetarianism to a pig farmer.

The same book also described the (re)productive exchange of ideas between people as sexual intercourse between two minds. This was not only difficult to clarify, but rather awkward as well.

Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, I always enjoy it when my colleagues bring me questions like these. I love words and language in general, and sometimes their questions prompt me to research etymologies I had never thought to investigate (why, for example, do we ‘dress to the nines’?). The English language is a flexible and culture-saturated organism. It’s a messy, wonderful thing.

Rather than offer a formal apology for amount of time that has passed since I last posted here, I would point you toward my Flickr photostream, which is where most of my energy has been directed lately.

Translated roughly, the titular question of this post means, “Did you enjoy Tet in Vietnam?” (Literally, it would be, “Tet in Vietnam has happy no?”) It was a question I grew sick of answering.

Marking the lunar new year, also known as the Chinese New Year, Tet is the most important holiday and festival of the Vietnamese people. The name is probably best known in the West because of the 1968 Tet Offensive, but Tet really has nothing to do with what is known here as the American War.

We were given a week of holidays for this Christmas on steroids. A lack of initiative on my part left me without travel plans, so I remained in Hanoi to celebrate Tet with my host family.

I won’t write up my experiences at length here, though I was originally planning to provide some background information on lunar new year traditions such as paying respect to ancestors, giving ‘lucky money’ to young children, returning to countryside homes, and wrapping banh chung. This post has been germinating for too long already.

Instead I will let the pictures speak for themselves. If you haven’t already, take a moment to peruse the photo album linked to the picture below (or here on Flickr).

I have a new camera, a Canon Rebel XTi, and two prime lenses. People who know me can attest to my excitement about this.

New photographs will appear in the Photos section of this website. Click the link in the right sidebar to see my new albums.

Photos taken with my old Sony point-and-shoot can still be found at Picasa Web Albums.

Some people maintain a constant disposition and reputation wherever they go. We all know these people. “Oh, he’s always been that way,” we say. Or, “She’ll never change.” They will try the same jokes in every crowd. They will take the same approach to every problem. They will be unfailingly and relentlessly upbeat, lazy, immature, pedantic, emotional, or rational. “You can take the boy out of Canada,” the oft-adapted saying goes, “but you can’t take Canada out of the boy.”

I am not that person. As a constant embrace of change is perhaps my most consistent quality, I see relocation as an occasion to form new habits, adopt new ideas, try new personalities. Here I will try to pin down some of what might constitute the “new me” (though I would take exception to that term) since arriving in Vietnam.

In Vietnam…

• I am not a picky eater. This flies in the face of 20 years of received wisdom about Brent Durksen. In fact, here I have earned a reputation as being easy to feed, in addition to being the guy who’ll eat any and all food left on the table.
• I consider 8:45 p.m. a reasonable time to go to bed. An earlier me would have scoffed at this juvenile/geriatric regime.
• I am a keyboard player. In most places I am known as the guitar player. In a few, I’m known as a drummer. Without my guitar or djembe on hand, and with a superfluity of electronic keyboards in Vietnam, I am best known here for tickling the plastic ivories.
• I love playing volleyball. In all of my past incarnations, volleyball was my weakest and least favourite team sport. Here I get out two or three times a week to play with a group of salty (rather than SALTy) foreigners. Notice, though, that I’m not saying I play it well.
• I’m an idiot. This, of course, implies that idiocy has not always been a characteristic of mine, and sets myself up for any number of witty retorts. Perhaps I should disable comments on this post. But I am not convinced that my reputation for sheer imbecility extends widely beyond my Hanoian home, where my 9-year-old host sister frequently looks upon me with scorn as I desecrate the Vietnamese language.
• I’m tall. (Again, I really should disable comments.)

I’m sure there are other changes I could mention. And, of course, there is much about me that has remained the same. Perhaps those things will provide fodder for a later post, though probably not. I’ve always been lazy.

I read once (maybe it was twice) that new arrivals to a foreign country are the most likely to write a book on its culture. Once you live in a place too long, you start to realize that your assumptions and hypotheses are about as accurate and useful as opinion polls: they might contain a semblance of the truth, but they hardly do justice to the issues they address.

Having lived in Vietnam for five months now, I am in the sweet spot. During that time, I have lived with a Vietnamese family without committing any grave cultural faux pas. I speak enough Vietnamese to prompt a double-take by passing tourists. I have read books written by foreigners that by and large agree with my own conclusions. I am hereby ready to make some pronouncements on this strange and wonderful culture.

A few weeks ago, thumbing past the Vietnamese channels on our cable television towards the English ones higher up the dial, an instantly recognizable theme song caught my ear. Half expecting to hear Bob Barker – arguably the greatest game show host of our time – reminding us to stymie rampant pet sex, my fingers hesitated on the remote control. But, of course, it wasn’t The Price is Right. It was the Vietnamese copycat version Hãy Chọn Giá Đúng, or, Choose The Right Price. It had the same set, the same games (remember Plinko, anyone?), the same yellow name tags, but no Bob Barker, no “NEW CAR!!”s, and stiffer, more typically Asian applause.

My implicit comprehension of Vietnamese culture led me to watch with amused interest, but without surprise. After all, there is probably no game show on American television better suited to the Vietnamese culture I know than that brilliant commercial-within-a-commercial.

The Communist Party of Vietnam (the only show in town, politically speaking) has been gradually opening up the Vietnamese economy by way of free market policies since the 1980’s. The strategy known as Đổi mới, or renovation, has led to an astounding upsurge in international trade. The newly-capitalist Vietnamese have embraced consumer goods with as much passion as their incomes allow, and price comparison rivals the weather as a favourite topic of conversation.

This is a country in which “How much money do you make?” is reportedly an acceptable question to ask an acquaintance (though I have never asked nor been asked this question). Certainly “How much did that cost?” is fair game. One of the first things we studied in our Vietnamese language classes was numbers, and I was quickly struck by how much the average conversation here revolves around numbers. Usually huge numbers. It takes around 16,000 Vietnamese đồng – yes, the currency is called the dong. I’ll take a minute for those with the maturity of a seventh-grader to stop guffawing – it takes around 16,000 VND to buy one American dollar, so prices above 60 USD quickly soar into the millions. Here you have to be a millionaire to buy a rice cooker.

My Vietnamese host family were early winners in this capitalist game. Luxury items scattered about the house include laptops, digital cameras and an Apple iPhone, not to mention the new car parked beneath the kitchen. They all attest to my host parents’ skill at playing the domestic stock market, which has been shooting up like a junkie [Ed: too far?] in recent years. Their combined salaries alone would never have bought these status symbols.

And so the spirit of Bob Barker has come to southeast Asia. According to my intimate knowledge of the Vietnamese national psyche, it comes as no surprise. If I may say so, though, I’ve never been a big fan of game shows.