Friday.05.28.04
[ ] - quoc viet - -@_.com @ 10:14pm
from inside the small room the rain sounds like a roar of voices. tiny voices, big voices, crying sad voices. a clanging of metallic purity penetrates the glass doors and i hear the tapping of metal on metal, a boy somewhere, tapping to let people know he can run and get them a bowl of soup in this drenching rain. a woman with a conical hat pushes a shoddy looking cart down the street, water tumbling down. it is like a symphony, the rain and the clanging of the metal, so clear and resonant i pull in a breath of air with a gasp. my stomach is knotted, i’m dizzy, and the world seems to change at a phenomenal pace. i had read a journal entry of the moment right before the plane landed in Saigon, in a notebook, and it was so different. where had i gone? i ended the entry with “life’s not life without a fight”, and in response to myself i wrote another entry today, proclaiming i’m still fighting. to attest to that, my body is telling me something’s up, the 10 hour workdays peeling my mind dry. yet, i love it. target markets, conical hats, break-even analysis, calls for trash, Vietnamese-american chatter and glimpses of my past. how did i get here?
in the chinese district my uncle points out the fact that the chinese have been here for centuries, have assimilated yet kept their language and customs. vietnamese words mix with chinese characters and the smell of roasting pork hits me hard. like chinatown, nyc, except 5 times as large. inside the restaurant a rough sized woman stamps her feet firmly with each step, lurching forward to take our orders. her dark eyes bore into me… i am falling…. falling.. and then some vietnamese, some chinese, and an old woman slowly shuffles in. a bag to hold the lottery tickets she is selling hangs close to her stomach. my mind swims out and i think about the company, about making a new beginning, about hitting it big so something can happen. about one day being able to give $1000 in cold hard cash to the small dirty child with the plastic bucket used for begging, just because i can, just because the thrill of the insane is what makes life worth living. something, anything. the leisure days of sipping coffee have been replaced by frenetic rushes towards something amazing, something i never quite understood. i have $200 in my bank account, a nagging feeling that in 10 years i may not be alive, and always the dreams of tomorrow. i want to keep this blog updated, i want to tell everyone the insane shit i’ve seen and thought, the things that have happened. but i can’t. even if i had time, it’s all lost on what-ifs and situations that would be misunderstood for all who cannot see this. vietnam is not what you think it is, it’s not even what vietnamese-americans think it is, people who have lived here for so long. because i watch my family and friends return and they are no longer connected to this, to the dirt and brightness and grime and to hard truth. there is no reality but the one that people here are living. i have the faint feeling my parents, and countless others, have lost that reality when they left Vietnam. i never grew up here and it’s coming back to rip me apart, make me face who i would’ve been, what i could never be, what i would never want to be. i have this blue packet of paper that says i was born in the US and that i’m an American citizen. i’m going to take this piece of paper, and everything that’s inside my foolish brain, and i’m going to fucking do something. because i can and they can’t, because i have and they don’t. because frankly, there is little else left to do.
i research and write business reports and plan for profit, and i give everything in my pockets to beggars. i spend money in the fancy districts, and then i eat with the locals with whatever i have left. i am a fucking contradiction, what i’ve always known myself to be. you can’t feel truth because truth is, in itself, a contradiction. you have to accept that everything you believe is false, to even begin to realize the amazing reality of this world.
the ragged vietnamese pop music comes out low and without bass but in my mind i’ve got the melody of a sad song sung decades ago, from a time when bombs dropped and people sold their souls to save themselves. from where my history calls me, a place i can never reach.
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