Subject: Merry Christmas from China
Dear Friends and Family,
...in five days I will begin a month-long excursion through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand with three other foreign teachers... I have a very important visit I want to make [in Vietnam]... As some of you know, last semester I helped a friend at school with his Thesis project: a Jarai-English dictionary. The Jarai people are an indigenous tribe that comes from the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The indigenous people of Vietnam are known as the Montagnards -- mountain people... My friend's name is Lap Siu. He is Jarai, and because his father fought on the side of the U.S. during the war, Lap immigrated to the U.S. with his parents as a teenager. Two of his sisters had to stay behind, and he has not seen them in the fourteen years since he moved to the States... I worked with him briefly on his dictionary project in my last semester at school, and now would like to try to see his sisters in Vietnam during my travels. Currently, I have only their addresses, a phone number, and three travel companions who are willing to try to get to them. The Vietnamese government has in the past restricted travel in the Highlands... One American did recently visit Lap's sisters, so I know it's possible to get to them. Seeing them would be very special for me, for my travel companions, and for Lap and his sisters. We will try to go to them sometime in mid-January.
Subject: First Official e-mail of the Southeast Asia Sexies
Distinguished members,
At the first meeting, our secretary Joe Matar FORGOT to take the MINUTES! So there will be no record of what we said or did. It was a complete waste of time.
Yours sincerely,
Joe Lennon
RE: First Official e-mail of the Southeast Asia Sexies
Distinguished members:
One more costly mistake like that, and I move we hold a vote to appoint a new secretary.
Sincerely,
Anonymous distinguished member
Fellow timewasters:
I believe if you refer to the SE Asia Sexies Official Rulebook, you'll find that a new secretary is only brought in when the previous one dies. Therefore, I will be continuing my sub-par performance in my current position for the foreseeable future. I would urge the other members not to attempt to plan some sort of uprising/murder to push me out of my position. That would be far too predictable.
Regards,
Disgruntled Secretary
Fellow Distinguished Members,
As you know, I take my self-appointed position of treasurer very seriously and am greatly insulted by the lack of sexiness presented by Joe Matar. This will not be tolerated. Therefore, I motion that we demote him until he can prove his current position in our elite group is indeed deserved.
Sincerely,
Concerned Member
1.1.10
I’m writing from my first train ride in China. Rachel and I are off to Guilin to meet Joe Matar and Joe Lennon, to begin our month-long excursion through Southeast Asia. We have named our group the Southeast Asia Sexies, and I’ve saved a series of e-mails we’ve sent to each other over the past two weeks. Most of the travel decisions have been left up to the Joes. Rachel and I are proud of ourselves, I think, for even making it safely to our train in Zhengzhou this morning. We woke up at six, and caught a bus to Zhengzhou with the help of a Chinese friend. We had a wonderful breakfast at McDonald’s (hotcakes, hash browns, and coffee), and were at the train station by ten thirty.
Now we are on our way, and I only hope we have all we need. A passport and three thousand kuai are tucked away in my coat’s breast pocket. The past two to three days I’ve been frantically trying to get information about the Central Highlands from people who have been there. Lap told me he knew an American vet who was able to visit the Siu sisters. I e-mailed the vet, Benny, but had no response. When Lap tried to get a hold of him for me, we fared better. Benny has offered to connect me with his contacts in Vietnam. I still don’t have all the info for the contacts, but I’m hoping there will be an e-mail in my box by the time we get to Hanoi.
I want to get to Lap’s village and see his sisters. I’ve brought his completed thesis, the Jarai-English dictionary – all 125 pages. He also sent me a Jarai letter and pictures to give to his sisters, so I have those with me as well.
There is no info about the Highlands in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and next to nothing about it online. The nearest big cities to the village are Tuy Hoa and Pleiku. We need a translator and a van, which I just don’t think we’ll get unless we get a name and number from Benny, someone trustworthy that can be our guide.
I’m looking now out the train window, at the railway yards and the backsides of gray buildings. Everything looks desolate, but once or twice we’ve passed a small platform of people. I see factories with cement spires and smokestacks -- metal structures that I can’t describe and don’t really know the name of. They probably made the clothes that I’m wearing.
A couple is patiently trying to converse with me, and I wish I understood what they were asking. I told them the little I can say: “I come from America. I am a teacher.” I think they’ve given up now. They are silent, but probably watching me. Maybe God is giving me patient Chinese people so that my desire to learn Chinese will grow. This morning at McDonald’s, a young boy was talking to me. He seemed so disappointed that I couldn’t respond. He stood and stared at me for a long time, and I guess maybe he was hoping I would remember how to say a few more words. He left and brought back French fries and ketchup, told me they were for me, that I should eat them. Then he stared at me again, but I couldn’t tell him any more than I told the couple on the train just now.
1.3.10
We arrived in Guilin at six in the morning. Joe Matar was waiting for us at the station. After putting our things in his room at the hostel, we wandered empty streets hoping to find breakfast. Around eight, we finally saw a sign with a picture of baozi, so we went inside and ate anything familiar – baozi with pork, dumplings, hard-boiled eggs. We took a van to the Li River and paid too much money to ride a bamboo (actually it was PVC pipe) raft down-river to Yangshuo. It was rainy and cold, but the mountains were pretty. We got to Yangshuo that evening and found a westernized tourist town. There’s a McDonald’s, a KFC, and lots of little coffee shops and bars. We ate at Dumpling Dynasty and had coffee at a café near our hostel.
1.4.10
We go to meet the final Sexy today. We’ll take a bus from Yangshuo to Guilin, and then take the train to Nanning, our last stop in China.
Yesterday we rode bikes outside of Yangshuo, on a path between the hills and the Yulong River. We rode through villages and even, by accident, crop fields. We left at eleven and didn’t get back to the hostel ‘til five. It was much more enjoyable than the cold bamboo ride the day before; the sun was shining, the sky was as blue as it ever is in China, and the hills weren’t hidden by clouds.
A guidebook in a café said that we don’t need a permit to go to Pleiku, a city near Lap’s village in Vietnam. But permit and guide are likely needed for travel around the Higlands, it said. It gave a name of a travel agency in Pleiku – Gia Lai travel. We might be able to get a guide, permit, and van there. It is probably the next best option if Benny’s contacts don’t come through. The guide said Pleiku is accessible by bus…
I’m writing from the bus now – that’s why my writing is shaky. We were late getting to the station because our breakfast was slow, and I doubt we’ll make the one twenty train out of Guilin. We’ll have to settle for the next closest time.
We are on a bus bound for Hanoi, backing out of the bus station in Nanning. Vietnam is within our reach. I’m glad, because I’m ready to leave China. I’m half-hoping that the change of culture will curb the complaints that have been voiced within our little group of travelers: it’s obvious that my travel companions are just as ready as I am for a break from the gray skies and pushy crowds of China. Much as we may attempt to love the country, sometimes we are overcome by the parts of it that we don’t like. I don’t expect to find less crowds or cleaner streets in Vietnam, but a change of scenery and people may draw our attention away from the challenges of living in the Chinese culture.
Hanoi was a break from Chinese culture. The first, obvious changes were the motorbikes that flooded the streets, the readable street signs, and the French influence that we saw in the buildings and the food. We could eat French bread from street stands, and find coffee on almost any street.
One of the highlights of Hanoi was my visit to Hoa Lo prison, known to American POWs as the “Hanoi Hilton.” When I went to the prison, I was reminded of a PBS documentary I’d seen many years ago, a documentary about the conditions the POWs lived in at the prison. The prison has striking yellow walls (like a lot of buildings in Hanoi, actually…I found out later that yellow was once the color of royalty in Vietnam…don’t know if that has any bearing on the prison walls, or the popularity of the color throughout the country today). It was these yellow walls I remembered seeing in the documentary; despite them, the building looked drab and dark to me.
The museum within the prison presented a description of the POWs conditions that was very different from the one given by the documentary I’d seen. The museum has pictures of the prisoners playing basketball, decorating for Christmas, smiling into the camera…
1.9.10
We left Hanoi today for Ha Long Bay. We booked a tour through a company that was much cheaper than many others, though our guidebook told us that we’d get what we pay for. The junk we sail on is no luxury liner – the rooms are small and smell musty. Our lunch was seafood…I didn’t like it much. We have just concluded a thirty-minute wait for the one-night, two-day customers to kayak in the bay (we purchased a two-night, three-day tour, so we will kayak later)… we’re not sure why we had to wait, but we are reminded of the guidebook’s warning. A few in our group are angry because we have just discovered that drinking water was not included in the price of the tour. The bottled water on the ship is over-priced.
I really don’t mind the setbacks of the tour, if you want to call them setbacks. I like having a small boat, warped floorboards in my bedroom. The view of the bay is lovely. We’ll sleep on the boat tonight, and tomorrow we’ll kayak and go biking and hiking on one of the islands.
1.12.10
We are on the train to Hue – we should be there soon. We have a nice four-person sleeper on the train, though we are fairly certain we saw a mouse run past the door last night.
We’ve spent enough time together now, our traveling group, that I probably speak for everyone when I say I’m happy for any chance to be alone. I’ve had enough experience of hostel dorms and close train and bus rides to develop a new appreciation of privacy and quiet.
1.14.10
We have been in Hue the past two nights. From what I understand, Hue was sort of the seat of government when Vietnam was still an empire. Joe L and I wandered the old citadel yesterday, where empire officials lived and worked. The guidebook said there wouldn’t be much to see there, but I walked around inside for two hours. Vietnam stopped using it in the forties – by then the emperor was only a figure-head because the French had occupied the country for some time. It’s strange to think a place could so quickly experience abandonment and deterioration; parts of the citadel have already become ruins.
While in Hue we also visited the tombs of three emperors, some of which have also fallen into ruin.
It was also outside Hue that I experienced my first Vietnam War site: we took a bus several hours north to the former Demilitarized Zone. The seventeenth parallel is on a tiny strip of Vietnam where one could easily visit the coast and cross the Laos border in one day. This part of Vietnam looked more like the Vietnam that I had pictured before arriving in the country: hills, trees, rivers. It still doesn’t look exactly like the jungle I imagined it would be, possibly because of deforestation caused by Agent Orange and napalm, or possibly because Hollywood movies didn’t give me an accurate portrayal of the landscape. We drove through Tuan Anh, a city once occupied by the U.S. Marines. Near the parallel, a rusted American tank still sits on the side of Highway One, and nearby is a memorial to the North Vietnamese soldiers.
Our bus drove us across the Hien Luong Bridge, above the Ben Hai River, the barrier between what was once North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
The advertised highlight of the tour was the Vinh Moc tunnel – twenty-eight kilometers, thirty-eight entrances, with meeting rooms, a hospital, a bathroom. At one point three hundred Vietnamese lived in these tunnels.
Though Vinh Moc was much taller and wider than the combat tunnels I later toured in Cu Chi, there were times I felt frightened by the closeness of it, especially when I had to stop and wait behind other tourists. The tunnels were too small to stand in, and they were stuffy and hot. The exit we took led right to a stone wall along the sea. What a sight that must have been to the people cooped up in the tunnel, after spending a weekend or weeks in the darkness.
There was a very short Vietnamese man in a red cap that followed me through the tunnel. He walked close behind me with a flashlight, and when I stood with a camera in hand at the stone wall outside, he pointed at the sea. I guess he was showing me where the good photos were. He kept brushing my shoulders and back, as if the tunnel had left dirt on them, but I don’t think there was anything there. I realized later that he wanted money.
After the Vinh Moc tunnels we went to the site of the former American base at Khe Sanh. American accounts of the battle that took place there differ somewhat from the account given at the tour ... my tour guide made it clear that the siege of the base was a momentous victory for the communists. The museum on the site called it the "hell" of Khe Sanh -- which, no doubt, it was. The communists laid siege to it for seventy-seven days. According to our guide, there were 30,000 men killed in action.
I was curious to see what would be left of the base. Everything was blanketed in fog when the bus stopped at the site of the base. Mist billowed over the few things that remain at the site -- aircraft remains, sandbags, a sign with a picture of the air strip that once existed. A man was walking through the mist with a wooden tray, selling rusted Vietnamese and American dog tags, pins, and medals. I started to bargain with him, but then I thought maybe it was wrong to own, even more so to bargain, for the dog tags of a dead soldier. It suddenly seemed irreverent for something like that to be sold as a souvenir. I walked through the bunkers, looked at the pictures in the one-room museum. The fog made everything seem surreal.
