Dark Reflections in a Cracked Mirror
By KorskiI’m sitting in the Go Café in Saigon a couple of feet from the sidewalk and a shoeshine boy is cleaning the mud off my dark blue Puma running shoes that he had me take off. He asked for 15,000 dong, I’ll pay him 20,000, a dollar and some change. He is utterly unaware that inside the tongues of the shoes are several 100 dollar bills. I wonder how hard he’d run with my shoes if he thought there was a mere 100,000 dong inside them.
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Today, California time, $800,000, the net proceeds from the sale of my mother’s home, will be deposited in an escrow account. The house cost $15,000 in l954. I will use the money to support my mother in an assisted living home until she dies, and then split what’s left over with my two brothers.
I called my mother a couple of days ago, a day after Mother’s Day because I’d lost track of time. At 95 and losing her short term memory, she sounded amazingly lucid. She opened by complaining as she always does about her bad leg and how it requires her to stay in bed or be moved by others, and then in a wheelchair. She went on to say how good she’s being treated. There’s plenty of good food and no shortage of friendly people. But if only she had her leg back...if only...
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Two hours ago I made a fast exit from a hotel a couple of kilometers from the one I just checked into. My gut told me that some bad shit was about to come down, and I didn’t want to be part of it. I’m anything but paranoid, and I’m a high risk taker, but this is Vietnam. Everyone here is running a scam, and no target is ever as juicy and ripe as a foreigner who walks thin lines, that borderland where corruption and unwelcome threats thrive.
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It’s now been nearly two months since I left home for this jaunt through Southeast Asia, my eighth time here in six years, a home away from home. There’s always something new to discover or experience, even in places I have been to three, four and five times. On return visits, perceptions and opinions sharpen, I gain greater focus, and I shrink the map of places to which I am eager to return. This I do not feel good about.
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It was only ten days ago or so that I was in Cambodia, and I feel the urge to return. I like the easy flow of life on the streets, the sense of lawlessness, good grass that flows like shit in the open sewers here, the kindness in many of the Khmer faces. I treasure the sight at sunset of families with children on their motorbikes cruising along the Tonle Sap. A night out, their pleasure for the week, I imagine. I also imagine that they temporarily shelve constant and central worries about where the next meal will come from. What they would give to have the $5,000 a month needed for the care of my mother!
I remember this young Khmer woman in Phnom Penh telling me that she has two brothers and two sisters that she lives with, and supports. They are still in school. Their parents, too poor to live in the city, live an hour way, in conditions that you see all too often in this country that along with Laos is at the bottom here in Southeast Asia. I would like to see this woman again and find a way to get her to show me how she lives with her brothers and sisters, and take me to that distant world where she grew up. I never tire of seeing how I might’ve lived but for the accident of where I was born.
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I have no idea how much money I have spent on the road in the last couple of months. I tally up nothing in this regard. I keep no receipts. I don’t care to know how much I’ve spent. I have no journal that records where I have been on a particular day, or the hotels I have stayed in, or how much I paid. But I keep a careful account of my writing, the stories and essays I have written since leaving home. I care about my daily production of words, and whether my mind continues to be inventive enough to find and write new stories. I feel I have done okay, no matter what else has happened, if I average over the course of a week somewhere around a thousand words a day. A thousand words, that is, that I keep.
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I spent some good mental energy yesterday trying, once again, to figure out why my mother gave up and decided it was time to die when her left gave out. It is a thought I cannot shake, and a decision by her that I cannot really understand. Other than some predictable short term memory loss, getting worse now—and the leg that is gone—there is nothing wrong with her. Her heart is good, as are her lungs and kidneys and liver, and she does not have cancer. She has no pain anywhere other than that in her head about that leg that took from her the will to live.
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My son, now with his own new car, and soon headed for university, seems so well adjusted. And fit, and full of desire to go to the gym on a regular basis and tone his young muscles. Now his liver is recovering, and quickly, from the side effects of the medicine he was taking to control a mild case of acne. He has so much to look forward to. But I don’t understand why he has not a smidgen of my need to be on the road three months a year. Despite all my time here in Asia, and before that in Latin America, and all that I write and send to him about these travels, he seems to have none of my insatiable curiosity about places and peoples that are foreign. This is a puzzle as hard for me to understand as that of trying to figure out why my mother gave up and decided it was time to die when the leg went.
I have wondered if my son will, years from now and after I am dead, go through the thousands of photos I have taken in my travels. Or reread what are now a couple of hundred stories and essays written while on the road. Perhaps he will just ignore all of this and get on with his life—raising a family, working hard at whatever he chooses to do, getting caught up as we all do in the mundaneness of living day to day.
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John is an Australian who teaches English in Saigon at an exclusive school for the rich. He has been coming to Vietnam for extended stays for nearly two decades. Today he told me dozens of stories about scams in this country. About, for example, having to pay 100,000 dong, like everyone else, when the police come around once a month and knock on the door to his apartment and stand there until the money is in their hands; and then pretend for the next fifteen minutes or so that they are your best friend. Of having a few minor possessions held in customs for six months, and then when he finally had a chance to collect them he had half a dozen pairs of hands asking for, nay demanding, money. The stories are endless, and I find them endlessly fascinating, as with the story about daughters who behind their parents' backs mortgage and then sell off family property, in a country where it is family that seemingly matters above all else.
We talk of all these Vietnamese traits that are so evident and officious: the Vietnamese are so crude, so blunt, so aggressive, so persistent, and they have this need to always be right. They are consummately confrontational. Fuck. Worse than me, and that’s saying something.
Then John is telling me about the time he was on a motorbike in heavy traffic and a woman on her bike had her wallet fall out and bills fly into the air, and how everyone stopped in the middle of the busy street and ran to grab as much as they could, and not return a single bill to the woman.
Then he is telling me how the tourist police are here to only protect the Vietnamese from foreigners, and he has never in all his years here heard of a case where a foreigner was not to blame for whatever happened. He relates how one young foreign woman had her day pack stolen and when she complained to the tourist police, they verbally undressed her for carrying dollars and not dong. It is one of those small stories that seems implausible, and yet so many of the stories here are of just this sort.
To look at many Vietnamese women on the street is to see very sexy looking women. But John speaks of them as sexless when it comes to matters of the heart. Cold, I guess you would say. The description fits based on everything I see and hear. Yeah, it sure does.
John was once married to a Vietnamese woman, when he lived in Sydney. I ask him if he would consider marrying another Vietnamese woman, or getting involved with one in Saigon.
Never, he says. Never.
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I tell John about all the ice in Phnom Penh, and how the young Vietnamese girls there get hooked on it and smoke it four and five times a day and stay up for eight and nine days straight, and then crash, and turn paranoid. I tell him how the mothers in the Delta sell their daughters into prostitution to traders who take them to Cambodia. He is not surprised.
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My mother asked me the other day when I called how much longer I will stay on the road, and I told her about another month, my usual pattern. When will you stop doing this and stay home? she asked me for the hundredth time. I say I cannot imagine that time, and I want to say I hope I do not find myself without legs and the mindset that it brought on her. Never knowing, of course, what the future holds.
I don’t recall that my mother has ever had more than the most superficial interest in my travels, or what I’m up to, and I fear that if I told her I was crossing the Cambodian border into adjoining Mexico or Honduras she would not blink, say no more than, Oh. She would have reacted the same way twenty-five years ago.
If I told her some of the places I go and what I do, I do not think she would believe me. Or rather would not want to believe me. Her mind would only return to the question: when will you stop this madness of traveling as you do?
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Journalists who spend a long time in Vietnam try to find as many good things to say about the country as possible. The reason, I’m told, is that it’s the only way to deal with all that they do not like, the same kinds of things that I as a casual traveler do not like. The same kinds of things that John and others that I meet do not like about the Vietnamese.
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Here’s the ladder to the top. Poor farmers in the Delta send their daughters to Saigon. There they seek out the easiest and most abundant marks: the foreign English teachers. They work them for as much money as they can get, all the while their minds on making contact, through the English teachers they have hooked up with and are milking, with a more lucrative mark—someone ideally an executive for a transnational. They get introduced to one, a romance ensues, they dump the English teacher, and now they are on their way to wealth for themselves and their extended families.
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Surely it must be something about the family structure and the way Vietnamese children are raised that accounts for the traits that so stand out when you compare them with other peoples in Southeast Asia. Is the key somehow to be found in the behavior of the overbearing father? I don’t, at this distance, have a clue what’s really going on.
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My brother, the youngest one. I do not care in the least if he lives to see another day. He is as good as dead in my mind; that is how profoundly his betrayal a couple of years ago has affected me.
He will want his share of what is left of the money from the sale of the house after my mother is dead. It never would have occurred to me in the past to deprive him of exactly a one-third cut of what’s left. Now I do not know what I will do when the time comes. The revengeful devil lives within my soul.
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Yes, persistence. That’s the word that more than anything else defines the Vietnamese character. They persist on the street. They persisted for more than a thousand years against the Chinese. They persisted against the Americans, and because of that trait alone could not have lost the war. It is the kind of persistence we now see in Hilary Clinton as she so blatantly plays the racist card and stays in a race she has so evidently lost. It is this trait, when added to her other slimy tactics, that makes her so despicable. Persistence pushed to its limits can make just about anyone despicable.
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The Vietnamese are not allowed to gamble in the casinos. The exception to the rule is when they are married to a foreigner, and that is a payoff that is no small dividend if the foreigner has money. For the Vietnamese love to gamble; among other things, in the casinos it is a “show” of who you are.
I heard that not so long ago, there were two foreigners who committed suicide in Saigon. I understand that both of the suicides had something to do with the men’s Vietnamese wives, who were gambling away all their money. I wonder how many similar suicides occur that no one hears about.
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I have an eye for women’s feet, and the shoes they wear. I am struck by how fastidiously many women in Southeast Asia take care of their feet. I am equally struck by women who do not care how their feet look, and I unfairly conclude that their lack of attention is a measure of how they tend to personal hygiene. I also conclude, without having a shred of evidence to back up the claim, that women with ugly feet and who give them little attention are lousy lovers. Lie there like a plank of wood.
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I get talking with a tall and thin and pale American who’s wearing a cap with the word Vietnam on it. He is about to leave Saigon and go to a country town where there is a doctor who is into herbal medicines and, he claims, has a 100% cure rate. He needs a cure bad. He has both liver and rectal cancer, and he claims that doctors in the U.S., pawns of the pharmaceutical industry, nearly killed him with heavy doses of radiation. They have given him mere months to live. He does not believe them. He will be cured, he assures me.
I too distrust American doctors, and I too have no doubt about the power of the pharmaceutical industry and its evil agenda. But I think this man with liver and rectal cancer is delusional. But then when one is at death’s door, maybe everyone is a bit delusional, and will believe anything that smacks of hope.
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I heard this figure once before, and I’ve now heard it again. Fifty people in Saigon die each day in a motorcycle accident. The number seems awfully high, but then when you see how many motorbikes there are in the city, and you see how they cut and swerve in front of anything moving, the figure is plausible. Even if it were half this number, it would be in that category of events called mind-boggling.
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Here’s one of my strong prejudices. When I see a Nigerian in Southeast Asia, I think: he is here to seduce a young blond backpacker who wants to continue her travels and doesn’t ‘t have money, and he offers her a great deal of money and phony love if only she will be a mule on a heroin run to Europe or elsewhere in Asia. It’s not an unreasonable assumption. There are many stories to this effect, and the main prison in Thailand has a disproportionate number of Nigerians in it for drug smuggling.
The other day I saw a couple of groups of blacks in Saigon, and I approached one of them to confirm my guess that they were Nigerians. And indeed they were. But I don’t trust my eyes, and am not above changing my mind. So I asked around. I discovered that the groups of Nigerians I was seeing are in Vietnam to play basketball.
Maybe some of them are also here to find young female mules. A Nigerian, after all, is less trustworthy than a seasoned Thai hooker.
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I have breakfast one morning with a French woman who says she is twenty eight and has been teaching English in Saigon for two years. Her English is good, but certainly not what I would consider good enough to be teaching grammar and the basic rules of a language as complex and plastic as English.
I ask her what she does when she is not teaching, and she doesn’t teach that many hours a week. She says, Nothing. There is nothing to do in Saigon. She has stayed as long as she has because she has had a Canadian boyfriend. But he is now soon to depart for a good paying job in Canada’s far northwest.
She does not know what she will do now. She admits to having no direction, and also to not wanting to return to France. She is another one of Southeast Asia’s lost souls.
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There’s this young Vietnamese woman who walks the streets around where I am staying in Saigon, and I have seen her no less than seven or eight times. She comes to me and smiles. She has this incredible braided ponytail that falls several inches below the bottom of her small ass. She wants to sell me a wallet, a small calculator, a bracelet, and I tell her no for the umpteenth time. But I did buy some nail clippers from her the second or third time she came to a table where I was eating. She is now certain that I will buy something else from her.
I have wondered what kind of education she has, whether or not she has children, how old she is, how she makes love, and if when much younger I could have fallen in love with her. She is in fact not that attractive, as I measure such things. I don’t know why I like seeing her, or why I have entertained these thoughts about her. They are as mysterious to me as why my mother gave up, and why my son has no interest at this point in coming to this part of the world.
After my second or third visit to Asia, I entertained the thought that if I were much younger and single, I might seriously consider marrying an Asian woman, one that I met in her own country. I now think that this would have been a horrendous mistake. There is, I have come to see, that much difference in values, in needs, and in what she would ask of me that I could not or would not want to give.
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I was in a bar last night and I was talking to this bar girl because she had insisted on talking to me, even after I had told her that I wanted to enjoy my beer alone. When I left, after we had talked about little things, she asked me for a tip for talking with me. I told her to piss off.
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This is what I would wish for my son if he found himself in this part of the world while still quite young and naïve. I would wish that he found himself caught up in a couple of minor scams early on, and they scared him enough to avoid the larger scam that would really hurt him. I guess this is what I wish for all young people that I see wandering in Asia.
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He was tall and had a big body and curly salt and pepper hair and bad yellow teeth. He said he was from Lisbon and had gotten married one week ago to the Vietnamese woman sitting to his right. He had made his very first trip to Vietnam—anywhere in Asia in fact—a year ago, and he met his future wife in Nha Trang. He was in Vietnam on that first visit for one month. Now he has been here less than a month and is married to her, and they will be returning to Portugal in four days.
She wants to see my country, he says.
I hope the adjustment is easy, I say. I would bet she will miss her family and others here, I also say.
She can be with them by e-mail and telephone, he says.
All the time we talk, and before that, she has been sitting beside him in silence, a grim, almost sad look on her face. I imagine that to have met someone like her so quickly, as a first-time tourist, and to have so rapidly moved on to marriage, she can only be thinking of the riches to send home to her family.
I would bet good money she was a bar girl, a hooker.
I think the man is mad and has not a clue what he is in for.
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The children only go to school three hours a day in Saigon, because that’s all the money the government has. They’re getting half the education they could be getting. But some of the children, because of their forward looking parents who have money, go to school all day. They get instructions on the piano and violin, learn Chinese characters, or English, or subjects not taught or poorly covered in schooling that only go until 11:30 in the morning.
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On the streets where tourists congregate in District One in Saigon, some of the woman peddle their minor wares with their very young children. And they use them shamelessly. They point to them frequently, the idea being that the money is for them and how could you possibly refuse to buy something from me? The cleverest of these street peddlers have their very young and cuddly son or daughter waddle up to a foreigner and place a small package of gum or Kleenex in front of him.
I find these women utterly disgusting.
Stickman's thoughts:
I got quite entranced by this submission and thoroughly enjoyed it. I do not know how you manage to produce so many high quality submissions, I really don't. Such prolific quality is rare.
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
