Saigon Busted

Well, we made it to Saigon, the big, swirling city that was the terminus of our trip, full of a swarm of motorbikes, buses, taxis, and pedestrians. It’s big and smoggy and quite, well, citylike, especially after our days in the countryside. I am here sitting, typing a letter so that they can film me hard at work. This is all rather ridiculous, but hey, that’s the price of fame. They are a vietnamese film crew of what will surely be the greatest tradgedy of all time. Guy goes to the US to get money to get the Girl, but when he returns with the requisite $30,000 (her father is aparently quite greedy) she has already married someone else. Of course, now he’s a rich man in a poorish country, so maybe he just buys a penthouse. We’ll find out when the movie is released in Arpil. We’ve been Saigoned into being extras on a film set for a day, a random but fitting ending to a trip characterized as much by its random occurences as by the singlemindedness of our treck from Hanoi to Saigon. Though we strayed from the straight and easy road, this city was always our destination, and in making it we have achieved the only goal we set for ourselves. I guess that’s not true, perhaps another was to always listen to the voice of spontinaity, which I think we have done as well. From crashing weddings to bushwaking by the river, this has been a good trip, and I’m ready to go home.

From the Road

This was written a couple days ago. As an update, it's still raining, and we continue on to Hoi An from an unplanned stop in Danang.


I've never updated from the road before, and indeed may not be able to do so. Blogspot seems blocked here at the internet cafe in Hue, but maybe it will work somewhere down the road. What have I to report? So far so good mostly. Vietnam has proved new and interesting, and very different from china. The people, the language the food, everything really. And yet, there are a lot of ethnic chinese around (as demonstrated by the chinese styling on the many graveyards we've been passing) and maybe I'll get a chance to practice my zhongwen on someone down the line. Hue is 600 and some kilometers from Hanoi (where we started this trip) but only by the direct highway. We've been trying to stay off that as much as possible, taking circuitous country roads up into the central highlands--but splitting the difference and coming down to quasi coastal cities (usually around 10 k or so from the beach) at night, mostly because they have hotels. The one night we tried staying at a town with no hotels, they told us to keep driving the 40 klicks to the provincial capital (Vinh) so we did, despite the rain. Tomorrow we head south through Danag to Hoi An, though a mountain pass which is Supposed to be the end of foul weather for this trip. After that we're looking at blue skies in the highlands, and pretty days on sandy beaches. It's hard to complain. We've named our bike Brunhilda, since she is both powerful, and a little surly occasionally. Specifically when shifting gears, but perhaps that's a function of our (my, really) ineptitude. The soreness experienced the first couple days has faded, and now, like putting on a heavy backpack, things feel right. We met some Quebecois yesterday riding all the way to Bangkok (and maybe beyond) but by the sound of it they've been doing nothing but driving, missing out on boatrides through caves, getting lost in small villages, and a couple days ago, driving around 30 k along a beach that looked like something from a scifi movie. But now, my hour is up, and we continue one. To your Good Health. Martin.

Finishing touches

It’s over, I’m done. With work anyway. Today at 3:05 pm CST I officially finished my summer employment, teaching my last class and saying goodbye to all those kids. Some were genuinely sad, and enough of them wished me well that it was a genuinely nice parting. I gave them all my email address (all 200 of the fifth graders that is) and said they could email with any questions any time. I fully expect to get an email 10 years from now asking for help with college admissions. In fact, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get one.

We had a cold stretch last week, and over the weekend especially, but the weather’s back to above freezing. Pretty balmy actually. Still, today it was 71 and sunny in Hanoi, and that’s pretty hard to complain about.

Now it’s the weekend, and time for all those last’s people talk about, last dinners, last concerts, last waltz’s. Lasts. Many of them (the dinner and concert specifically) will be tomorrow, just hours before I head south. The concert should be good. A bunch of my favorite punk bands (punk in Beijing?) are playing, and the crowd is fun and friendly. Should be a good way to say a temporary goodbye to the city.

Thing is, I’ll be back in less than a month (though for about 40 hours it looks like) to get my stuff in order, pack my bags and officially head back stateside. After that…who knows. I’ll be back, sure, though when and for how long I don’t know. I certainly find that I am much less enamored of Beijing than I was last summer. That happens, I guess, described best by a friend of a friend as Getting Over it. I’m so over Beijing, he said, and while I may not be there quite yet, perhaps I’ll end up there one day.

It’s a fun town, dynamic and historic at the same time, interesting to live in, full of events and people of interest, but there are a lot of other cities in the world, and I don’t think I’d mind giving another one or two a run for their money. Why not?

And so, I’ll leave off here, heading out to Hanukah services on the east side of town, looking at all the lights go by, and thinking of red dirt roads lined by trees greener than green. That’s where I’m heading in 35 hours or so, and I’ve got the keys to the highway.

Happy Holidays.
Martin.

Catchin' Up

I’m so friggin urban right now. Metropolitan even. Really. I’m sitting in a café, with my laptop, wearing banana republic pants, a landsend shirt, and a tie. I kid you not. In my defense, I will say that the pants were purchased at salvation army this summer in New York, so I could attend a swanky upper west side cocktail party. And the shirt is hand-me-down. And the tie has sheep on it. And I’m not wearing my scarf inside. I have it over the back of my chair, along with my svelte, minimalist, llbean fleece. It’s still ridiculous. I’m a far cry from the scruffy, carhartt wearing moxie that many of you know and tolerate, if not love. The reason? I got to school an hour and a half early, having misremembered the instructions my office gave me. I thought I might…it seemed early, but I figured better safe than sorry, and I can always go to the café. They don’t have daylight savings in China. That would be too easy. Instead, they changed the time that school starts in the afternoon last week. It’s 20 minutes earlier now, so it’s not quite dark out when we finish around 5. Makes sense, right? Hardly. Out west, in Xingjian, they have to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning to get to school. I think it’s rather silly, and pigheaded of Beijing. It’s not even like they’re backward. They USED to have daylight savings time, and then decided they didn’t need it anymore, presumably because it was bourgeois or something like that. Bourgeois like wearing banana republic pants with a pale green landsend shirt. You can tell I’m a little sensitive about this.

I realize that in the past paragraph, I’ve referred to school at least 3 times. What school you may be saying? Didn’t you work for the TV station, that pinnacle of journalism, China Central Television? Yes I did. But when I returned from my seouljourn (a combination of sojourn and soul journey—the last pun on the city, I promise) I found my schedule drastically reduced. I’d always been part time. But part time used to mean 4-6 shifts a week. As of November 11th, it meant 1-3. This was not enough. So, when I ran into folks I knew at a concert that night, I asked if they knew of any teachers who had just quit their jobs. I had a job on Monday morning, and it was in my neighborhood. That’s the way Beijing works, that’s one of the reasons I love it.

So, whom do I teach? I teach about 250 kids altogether. 5 sections of 5th grade, an after school classes of 4th graders and 2nd graders, 3 classes of 1st graders a week, and an hour and a half with some 8th graders to top it off. It’s a lot of kids, and though I know their names in the context of where they sit, beyond that I’m pretty lost.

It’s great fun though, really. I think I talk too much and don’t play enough games, but it’s really fun to have a captive audience. They’re also, most of them, really sweet kids. I’ve gotten a couple presents already, and, were I to tell them I was leaving before the day of, would probably get many more. Some of them figured it out already, when I brought my camera in to school, but they were mollified when I said I wasn’t leaving just yet, and that I promised to tell them before they did. Their former teacher, a woman named Sarah, did not. Though I never met her (she left the day before I got my job after all) this lowers my opinion of her fairly extensively.

I must admit that I like my fifth graders best. They’re old enough to sit reasonably still and pay attention…but still young enough that school is cool. My 4th graders I like the least, they’re brats, and the fact that class is on Friday afternoon doesn’t help. The first graders are highly cute…but generally don’t have a clue. We jump around a lot to try to keep things simple. H was a fun letter. Put your hand on your head. Put your hand on your heart. Take off your hat. Hop. Hide. Hop. Hand on your hair. Hair on your heart. And so on. The junior high kids are fun too. Their English is really good actually, so we mostly just hang out, talking vaguely about figuring the grammar exercises out together. It was pretty embarrassing when I had to teach them modals…and didn’t actually know what a modal was. But we have a good time, and they make fun of my cell phone a lot.

Which brings me to another aspect of life as an urban 20something. Text messages (called SMS outside the confines of our great nation) now make up a large part of my social planning, surpassing email by at least a time and a half, and the actual act of speaking by, well, lets not even talk about that. That said, I still haven’t mastered the art of SMS speak, so I tend to spend a lot of time laboriously typing things out. This is made harder by the fact that my lcd no longer lights up (the kids make fun of the phone with good reason) but makes me feel better about myself, as if I were that guy who insisted that using a typewriter was better than using a computer on moral grounds.

What social planning, one might wonder. Are you not a social recluse, doomed to stay in and watch pirated DVD’s? No more. I wouldn’t call myself the must invite member of every party. But I do know people, and end up meeting up for dinner or at some happening with regular irregularity. Last spring, when faced with the prospect of a fake college cocktail party, I ran downstairs, hid in my basement, and called my friend from New York. She told me how to dress, what to talk about, and even offered to make me a fake New England prep school identity. I thought that was a little much, but taking the clothing and conversation advice to heart, went up and didn’t make a complete ass of myself. Now, I do ok, and even picked up a Chinese cell phone stalker last weekend. I talked to her for a while, and though slightly confused when she asked for my number, gave it to her. Since then, she has send me three messages, the latest of which, I quote forthwith:
yes, if you are free, you call me, have a good time

It’s rather flattering…but I don’t want to encourage it…especially because I thought she was kind of snooty at the time anyway. And, to top it off, some chick was hitting on me in the subway on Tuesday. Her opening line was pretty good, I’ll admit. I was sitting there, reading my anthropology book about the English, when she slid over, saying “excuse me, I see that you are reading…. I wonder, what do you do when you find a word that you don’t know?” Slightly taken aback, I responded, “well, I know most of them and the ones I don’t I generally pick up from context. But, I dunno, if one catches my eye I might go home and look it up later.” Things went on fairly mundanely from that point, until, apropos of nothing, she came out with, “I think you are cute, yes?” and while I tried to look politely thankful for the comment, continued on, “but I think you are too young” and got off the subway. Go figure.

This has, in essence, been my life of late. My folks were around for thanksgiving, which was good fun. I got kicked out of my bed onto the couch, but having automatic company for dinner was a nice change. It’s also the principal reason it took me so long to get caught up. Specific stories elude me at the moment, so we will leave at that, and the month of November will be considered closed, unless I remember something truly worth telling. I’ve updated the blog a bit, thanks to the google partnered beta, so now you can look at my photos without clicking on the link, though I think they would be easier to navigate on the flickr page if one wanted to browse extensively. I’ve got a little over a week left in the Big Dumpling, before I head south for most of January. And then, it’s back to the kid’s table, going to school in midland Maine.

In Which Martin Makes it Back to Beijing

Nothing much of not happened between my evening out and my trip home. Sure I walked around, saw some temples and palaces, breathed deep of the Korean air, and generally got my fill of Seoul. But not much of it is really newsworthy. I mean, I guess it depends on perspective. Back then I probably could have written a nice essay about it, but here in Beijing, a month or so on, it has faded into the happy mists of a good, if quiet, time had.

That’s not quite true. There was one fine event, the evening before I left, that is worth noting. I was walking back to the hostel, enjoying the rather brisk evening, seeing what there was to be seen, and I came upon a strange sight. The street I was walking along was split by a river (once an open sewer, now a delightful urban waterpark) and in the middle, on a platform over the water, were 20 women dressed in bright colors, moving in formation and beating drums. In the middle, and seeming to run the show was a pompous looking man with a small gong. I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed worth finding out.

Eventually the drumming and shuffling stopped, and an mc stoop up on a temporary stage. He jabbered for a while, and then introduced a singer, who began singing (as, I’ve found, singers tend to do) while all this was going on, there was a bustle of activity on the bridge. Lights had been strung up across the space, ironically between two lighting fixture stores on each side of the river, and the drumming women had put down mats on which to sit. The guests of honor, distinguishable by their dark green suits and impressive breast pocket floral arrangements, stood around and looked awkward, and then suddenly, as if my slight of hand, there was an enormous buffet spread out, and all the onlookers that had gathered swooped down upon it like so many hungry ducks at the Boston commons.

I opted to take photos instead of fighting my way into the fray, but everything worked out well in the end, as an elderly couple, noticing my lack of food, made a big deal of feeding me what they had taken (two heaping plates), and offering me a healthy swallow of soju to wash it all down. It pretty much made my night.

Next day, I took the ferry back to china. The ferry was, admittedly, one of my reasons for going. It’d been on one international ferry before (the one between Denmark and sweeten), but that was small potatoes compared to this. The trip took about 16 hours altogether, but I must admit, I spent a good number of those reading the DaVinci Code and sleeping. In that order. There were two other foreigners on the boat, one English and the other Canadian. Both were fairly unsavory in the way that middle-aged foreign guys living in Asia and keeping a woman often are. So I mostly sat on the couch, and inhaled the delicious ridiculousness that was Dan Brown. A tipsy Korean businessman on vacation came over and sat down on my couch (only wrinkling his nose slightly—I’d been wearing the same clothes for a week at this point, socks included) and introduced the 35-year-old women in his tour group. They didn’t speak any English or Chinese, but he assured me they thought I was cute. I wasn’t cute. I was smelly, scruffy, and greasy, but I smiled magnanimously, and said well thank you very much. Then they all left to go sing Karaoke and I finished my book and went to bed.

An attempted dawn awakening did not work by virtue of personal slumber, so I didn’t get out on the deck till we were well within sight of Qinqdao harbor. It was still a laborious 2 hours in, and then somewhat laughable customs later; I was back in china, home, where I could talk to people.

After an afternoon spent wandering around Qingdao, and an interminable 7-hour train ride back to Beijing, I really was home, and so were my brothers and my Da.

We'll get caught up one of these days.