Arrived in Hanoi somewhere around 10 PM after 24 hrs. of traveling. Still pumped so hope sleep comes easily. The air smells of something tangible – of things growing and decaying – it lies on your skin. Somewhere between the smell of Florida and the tropical greenhouse at the botanic gardens. First impressions are of an architectural mish mash – colonial past, French influenced, discolored stucco surfaces. Perhaps the VM are like the Irish in that they pay more attention to sound than to sight, and have few enduring built monuments. Between the climate and the violent past, it would be difficult to have real permanence in built structures.
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On the plane I began thinking about the native American idea of carrying the ancestors, and all the dead one would have to carry here, and it’s too overwhelming. There was rain before we arrived and the streets were wet – people sitting out on the narrow sidewalks, lots of small shops, many still open, crowded together, everything faced right up to the street. I wish Drew was here to share it. In the narrow hotel of red carpets and dark wood, one flight up for Alia and me, more for the boys.
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6/12
Driving here is like dancing. Weaving in and out, skillfully avoiding the other dancers. Garlands of broken glass on top of the Hanoi Hilton walls that remain. People like fairies, making the mundane necessities of life look elegant.
Ho Chi Minh’s tomb is full of guards making corrections to every one in our group (take hands from pockets, remove sunglasses, button shirt) as though we were going to meet our maker. All heads swivel towards his lighted, entombed body (some say wax figure), a moving ritual. People crowd together on the balcony walkway around Ho’s stilt house. A pilgrimage for people from the countryside, like this trip is for me.
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At the temple of literature, the oldest university in Vietnam, are tablets engraved with the names of the scholars who passed the examinations, engraved stones on the backs of carved turtles, who are known for their longevity. A far cry from our paper diplomas in an age when buildings are built to last 20 years. We all must now be “life long learners”, we cannot be masters of anything for more than six months.
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On the temple grounds is a reflecting pool. Our guide, Hiep, suggests that perhaps water is always part of temples because of the necessity for balance: yin and yang, water and earth. And that, practically, water reflects light into the interior of dark buildings. When asked about the highly symmetrical structures, his response: symmetry = order. The grid as image and structure is one of the ideas we’re working with: grid and fractal, not order and disorder, but rather two different kinds of order.
At the war museum, there are weeds among the deserted tank treads. A persistent people, struggling through the cracks like weeds, determined. The conditions of life are hard and need all their wits at every moment – a little like living in the wild. For Americans who have become so accustomed to a comfortable life, it is a difficult challenge. I believe we must be considered stupid here, a bit like overfed cows who have become complacent. (A short digression – case in point – something I wanted to buy, there are several in the display case. When I ask the price, $4.00. I choose one after some deliberation and examination, and hand it to the girl, and she tells me “THIS one is $6.00”. I say OK. She wraps it up and we both smile. Her smile: I made an extra 50% (stupid tourist). My smile – aren’t these wonderful, polite people, and such a beautiful object, I hope he will like it.” I don’t begrudge her the money. Only in retrospect did I realize that I had been taken. But I do feel silly and unprepared, out of touch with the level of energy and awareness necessary to survive here.) Back to the war museum. Parts of bombs, pieces of tanks, planes, etc. strapped to a palm tree in a kind of crazy quilt assemblage. One could almost believe that postmodern discontinuity was a product of wartime mentality. The disconnect between everyday reality here and the political decisions being made in Washington was so vast that it really amounts to a kind of national psychosis. Most of us can only imagine the conditions that tore these impregnable machines to pieces.
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After lunch we go to Bat Trang, the pottery village. In a building with a small footprint but 5 floors, we go to the top to watch the pottery being made, and I can’t help but think that it would be pleasant to spend one’s days dipping the beautiful white pots in slip, watching the reflective surface dry, drawing borders on the square plates, painting on the thrown pots using the movement of the wheel, feeling the breeze, chatting with one’s fellow potters. Their repetitive movements are mesmerizing. Lithe people and the poetry of pottery.
photo: Ron Boyd
We walk down to the river to see and shoot, and Leif stays longer, so the rest of us congregate on the stoop of a closed shop to wait in the shade, an absolute necessity in a country where an hour in the sun can soak your clothes completely through. When the proprietor returns, she says we’re welcome to stay and invites us in, so to be polite I go, and buy two ceramic ladles. Although I didn’t really want them, they now represent that connection, and I will think of her when I use them. Every moment is so packed with significance, it’s a temptation to close my eyes to shut out the demanding newness .
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An evening of music and food, both amazing and rich,
Two days into the trip I give up on dates and complete sentences in this log. We go at such a pace, that to digest will have to wait for some future moment, perhaps on the plane home.
Here in Hanoi there are straight-sided buildings waiting to be completed by a neighbor, having front and back only, waiting for context and making no demands on the space to either side.
In my room is a tray of fruit: Small fat bananas, full of flavor like the people. Compactness intensifying their charms.
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We visit Halong Bay, “one of the natural wonders of the world” the guidebook says. Limestone formations jutting up out of the water. Here they are thought of as the coils of the dragon (sea serpent). Within the huge caverns carved out by water, the walls we can reach are damp to the touch, and the scale of time becomes overwhelming. It’s easy to understand how the Hindus think of time as wheel: one of Brahma’s days equal a hundred million cycles of one million years each (numbers may not be accurate). That sense of time is perhaps also a reflection on the fact that village life changes very little over time. One of the caves was a huge resonant chamber filled with flitting and chirping cave swallows. Another series of caves was filled with rock formations wrested from the limestone over thousands of years by the water, many of the formations with its own story.
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photo: Leif Krinkle
When I go down to breakfast in the hotel: the clock has stopped in the room where I sit. My time is 7:51, its time is almost 1. Three holes for winding are there in the face. What do they control? Past, present, and future.
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While in Hanoi we see the Water Puppet Theater. Apparently this is now just for tourists, although at one time it was a living rural tradition. To the accompaniment of musicians and narration, puppeteers perform in thigh-high water behind curtains. Vibrantly alive marionettes on sticks float, wriggle, and jump through the water, Each scene uses a different cast of characters: swimming children, mother duck and ducklings, fishermen, a phoenix couple, the emperor and his attendants, etc. They are brilliantly colored, and hinged to move in the water. We are thinking about its relevance to our work, to the water imagery of rivers, the reflective quality of water and the way it modulates and bounces light. This will turn out to be something our Vietnamese collaborators are also thinking about.
We are thinking about a website which might follow the paradigm of “concentration”, the game of memory in which you try to choose two of the same objects from the images on a grid. Some of these objects might be: a bowl, bicycle, basket, hat, gravestone.
6/14
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In our first meeting with Minh Ngoc and Thao to discuss the piece, we go down to the river in Hue to a little café (small plastic chairs we would think of as children’s furniture) and Thao sketches for us their ideas. The work will be in 3 acts (movements):
1) Living in peace, struggling against nature
2) Violence from others, the coming of war, disintegration
3) Reintegration, reconstruction (only partial)
The main symbolic element is the Vietnamese conical hat, and water. One of Minh’s friends suggested blue jeans as the symbol for America. The main theme is the difficult struggle to stay alive and whole, and people’s indomitable spirit and will to overcome. In the beginning, this seemed to apply only to Vietnam, and it may still, but the US soldiers, many of whom felt torn about fighting, also had much to reconstruct and overcome. Indeed, our sense of ourselves as a country was profoundly changed by the Vietnam/American war, which ripped us apart and has taken many years to recover from. We are thinking about how we might elucidate and reinforce these ideas with visual and audio interactive elements, about the tension between live and screen (and the possibility of trading off between them), about how to use our own vocabulary of electronic techniques to replace and improve upon classical theatrical staging and lighting. Also, how to introduce the paradigms and metaphors we have been thinking about, and the question of visual style: using videogame-style graphics, advertising and image synthesis to suggest the abstraction of violence and conflict, the sylization of violence and our subsequent distancing from it. Also, creating a sense of immersion, movement, and passage with the river and street footage we have. Introducing the visual symbolism of the grid and the fractal – all these need to be worked out, as well as the interactive techniques we will use to trigger changes in visual and sound.
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Perhaps we can work into the piece the idea of the hat from Hue – the hat that has cut outs of poetry embedded so that when you are working and look up, you will see a poem. The poetry embedded in everyday life, silhouettes morphing from one set of letters to another language.
In Hue, we visit the Imperial Citadel, the forbidden city. Having seen similar, but Chinese, structures on TV, I am not prepared to be so moved. Much of the compound has been destroyed by bombing and neglect, but the entry pagoda is beautifully restored. Inside, the emperor’s seat is truly alone, on a platform surrounded by Baroque columns. The entire location must have been chosen by a geomancer as it vibrates with unseen life.
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The DMZ, one of the most heavily bombed areas of the war, the dividing line between N and S Vietnam created in 1954, is a symbolic place that looked like any other. Two sides of the river almost identical but for the war memorial on one side.[to top]
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It takes an act of will to imagine what must have happened here. What happened to us was that, during a downpour, we climbed into a makeshift shelter at one end of the footbridge with three children. The oldest, who looked 8 but was in reality 12, stood outside in the rain holding a cover over the entrance to keep us all dry. Finally he was persuaded to come in. We shot video of them and played it back, which delighted them. Hiep did some card tricks and played a game of cards with the oldest boy. It was the kind of significance in everyday events that children find in playing with the pigeons at the zoo. Their parents want them to notice the large, rare, important animals but they are more fascinated by what is right in front of them, accessible, interactive, present.
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6/18
There is a striking mix of traditional and contemporary. On a boat in the middle of the Mekong river, 3 people on cel phones. Behind them, a wooden rowboat with a fisherman using a net, and a little further, on the bank, a hut made of palm fronds. It is easy to slide into eliminating from the images I take all references to electricity, cel phone towers, all difficult and contradictory elements.
Scars are healing here, but the memory of the American war is kept front and center. Visiting the Cu Chi tunnels confirmed my sense that what the Americans wanted to establish here was a certain kind of order – perhaps this could be represented by the grid. What they found was like water – like fractals – it flowed around their inflexible constructs. Implements for inflicting wounds on US soldiers made of US bombs and shrapnel. They are a vigorous, determined, clever people. Somehow the doctrine of reincarnation hasn’t made them passive, as it seems to have done in India.
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The Mekong delta is a series of wide, muddy rivers in flat country. We don’t go near the banks, so have only a sense of slow progress through an interminable, watery desert. I wanted to go here because it was one of those place names that still holds power from the war time. We heard it frequently on the news, like Da Nang. But the place has moved on, healed over, it only existed as our image of the place for a very short time and then it returned to itself. Most people, we’re told, are fond of Americans, at least in the south. Hard to imagine, what with the destruction we’ve wreaked. But people smile and are friendly and helpful.
I find myself wanting to shoot “authentic” images of Vietnam – water buffalo, sampans with no motors (most are motorized), really a tourist’s image. Not tractors (which do exist, although not plentiful) or barges dredging the river. But the mix of old and new is what gives the country its potency. It was our (America’s) mistake to begin with, to think that this was a simple place, just because people were working with simple tools or plowing with water buffalo.
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We visited the Cao Dai temple, the one mentioned in “The Quiet American”. Endlessly patient, white-clad women (why are women always entrusted with the most trying jobs?) shepherd tourists into the appropriate places – tell us in their language (or possibly it is English, but so heavily accented as to be indistinguishable from Vietnamese) to remove our shoes, our hats, show us where to mount the stairs, where to stand, explain about the 9 stages of growth that is central to the religion (invented in 1929). We arrive a bit before the start of the mid-day ceremony, which involves the music and prayer common to most religions. (In retrospect, this leads me to appreciate the level at which our experience was choreographed that was not so apparent at the time. Our hosts went to great lengths to give us a complete picture of life, history, art in Vietnam.) The large structure is filled -- people’s dedication is palpable, the space resonates with it. In the back, where I go to stand in order to better record the musicians, is a small space filled with men in white (the other men, down below, are all in bright, solid colors). Later I learn that this was the area for those in mourning, and hope that my camera and presence was not distracting or intrusive.
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The most moving experience has been the tunnels of Cu Chi. The memory of what America did to Vietnam is kept alive here, recounted anew to each generation of schoolchildren, displayed for tourists, who can fire a gun on the shooting range for $1. Why? To have a more real experience of war than a videogame can provide? Why? We first see an indoctrination tape explaining the ferocity of America’s firepower and will to destroy this area of orchards and friendly people. How many tons of bombs were dropped (bomb craters are still visible). How completely agent orange defoliated (we are surrounded by 25 year old jungle, everything older is dead). Most moving, chilling, dreadful are the traps. Our guide demonstrates various designs from bamboo poles fixed vertically in the bottom of a pit to clever devices with metal or bamboo spikes that impale and incapacitate rather than kill. The idea: busy as many soldiers as possible with taking their injured comrades back to the infirmary. The tunnels were begun in response to the French, and were later greatly expanded for use against the Americans. The Americans who were then bombing the peasants in the district. With all our military might, we were not able to overcome a determined group of people working with primitive tools, who used our bombs and the shrapnel they produced against us. This was the hardest part of the trip, the location where we were really face to face with our past, with the actions of our government, with the consequences of our country’s insanity. It was hard to swallow, hard to breathe, hard not to cry.
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We spent quite a bit of time traveling from place to place in a rented van, and noticing things along the roadside:
- small cemetery plots are frequent, scattered among the rice paddies. Each gravestone, some brightly colored and most far more elaborate than in the US, is oriented in a different direction according to the age at death. Unlike the war cemeteries, where even in death the soldiers march in straight rows, giving up their individuality to the fighting (dying) unit.
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Peasants doing the backbreaking labor of planting rice in achingly green fields, irrigating by hand and using wooden plows behind their sweet-faced water buffalo.
- plastic bags on sticks. Minh Ngoc’s explanation: “the lazy man’s scarecrow”.
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- cell phone towers, although they are notably absent from most shots, being unromantic.
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- bicycles on which the riders are miniscule compared to the enormous burdens of every conceivable item they carry.
- people selling everything from small roadside stands.
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- houses huddled as close to the road as possible – dogs, babies, chickens all playing inches from fast traffic.
- small stores, stalls really, in which the entire inventory of each thing is displayed in symmetrical rows. Obviously, we are meant to be impressed by quantity, and more is more.
- the incredibly beautiful, graceful, colorful people who smile graciously and seem to harbor no ill will towards us. Most dressed in western style clothing not really appropriate for this climate – tight-fitting, nylon or polyester fabric, no longer the traditional loose-fitting pants and skin-protecting long sleeves in natural fabric that breathes (silk).
- tall, thin houses which take up as little of the (expensive) land as possible, painted in the most imaginative and striking color combinations.
- whole families on motor scooters, wearing face masks to keep out fumes and dirt, hats and long gloves to keep out the sun.
It is impossible to describe the merciless impact of the heat. Heat and humidity that resolves into rain periodically. How could one ever get used to it? It saps your strength, makes you dizzy and lethargic, soaks you clothes through with sweat in half an hour. Hats, sunscreen, gallons of water, moving from one pool of shade to another are only partial and not very effective remedies. Only admiration for a people who can tolerate this climate with so much energy and tenacity.
Hiep, our guide, interpreter, caregiver, teacher, interpreted not only language but also culture, history, legends, behavior. He is an intellectual and a philosopher but calls himself a “humble refugee”. Since much of his life was spent in the US, he understands what we need to know, what our misunderstandings and needs are. He allows us to concentrate on keeping our eyes open, on the work, rather than on the details of getting around in a vastly different country, for which we are profoundly grateful. He is an old soul, generous and thoughtful.
photo: Ron Boyd
