From the moment we hit the ground here, I’m looking into the eyes of every man in his sixties and wondering how he sees me. If he hates my guts. If in another decade of his lifetime he’d have killed me where I stood just because my passport has a blue back with a golden eagle emblazoned on it. Would he have shot my uncles dead if he’d crossed paths with them in the jungle? Did my older friends drop the bombs that killed his entire family? His black eyes give no hints.
It’s an interesting thing to be a guest in country that a government of your father’s generation bombed to perdition with questionable motives.
We watch a beautiful and ancient woman cross the street in the middle of a rain storm. She pulls her long pants up around her knees and gingerly steps through the puddles in her plastic sandals. She is wearing a traditional cone shaped “rice paddy” hat and is grinning from ear to ear without one tooth left in her head. It’s likely she’s lived her whole life in Hanoi.
I wonder these things as I wander the streets here, delighting in so much that is rich and achingly beautiful about this ancient culture.
It’s an interesting thing to be a guest in country that a government of your father’s generation bombed to perdition with questionable motives.
It’s crazy in a lot of ways, too, not the least of which is the traffic patterns. The children notice, straight away, that the steering wheels are back on the “correct” side of the vehicle, but this doesn’t seem to be an advantage. It is a cacophonous blend of horns and hollering, one wheeled, two wheeled, motorized, pushed and pedaled, oversized and miniature, helmeted and hanging on for dear life that weaves in and out, over and around in an intricate dance to which we don’t quite know the steps.
We order lunch and watch as the breath-taking dance continues and no one misses a step:
Hanoi is an assault on our senses, but not an unpleasant one at all.
“You know what I haven’t seen here yet, Mom?” One of the boys muses, “Street dogs!”
And so we haven’t. Not a one, in fact, which is more than a little odd. Gabriel pokes at his chicken meat under a thick layer of avocado mash topped with peanuts and raises one eyebrow. The boys are hoping, not so secretly, to try a dog-kabob somewhere on our adventures. Perhaps they’ll get their chance!
Hanoi is an assault on our senses, but not an unpleasant one at all.
History lessons present themselves around every corner: A visit to the mausoleum where Ho Chi Minh’s body is displayed (embalmed with the help of the Russians.) His homes, where he lived up until 1954 as well as the newer stilt house he had built across the pond that he lived in after that. His bomb shelter, just steps from his bedroom. The beautifully preserved cars that were given to him as gifts from the Russians and the Vietnamese in France.
Hoa Lo Prison, the Hanoi-Hilton as most Americans know it, is sobering. It’s not just the prison that held American Airmen shot down over Vietnam; they were some of it’s last residents. It was a prison built by the French where Vietnamese revolutionaries were held, tortured, and killed. When the Vietnamese took it over, not much changed. It was just the roles that were reversed.
Everything is a first hand lesson in propaganda.
Of course Vietnam is Communist. They achieved independence. They won their revolutionary war. They defeated the American “puppet-government,” and we all know that history is written by the victorious. To hear them tell it, the American Airmen were treated better than the Vietnamese people themselves during their incarceration, including Christmas celebrations and top notch food and medical care. Of course the incarcerated tell very different versions of that story. It was sickening to move from room to room and read the stories of mistreatment on all sides. Vietnamese women and children harmed horribly under the French. US Airmen with blank eyes telling one story while their captors told quite another in the video footage.
I try to imagine being locked in one of those rooms in my own filth for years on end. I try to imagine my Dad, my Uncles, my husband… my sons. It is unimaginable, and yet, it happened.
I try to imagine being locked in one of those rooms in my own filth for years on end. I try to imagine my Dad, my Uncles, my husband… my sons. It is unimaginable, and yet, it happened. It is happening now, around the world, at this very instant. It is a corner of the human heart, the human condition: our capacity for wrong doing, that I simply cannot get my head around having lead the carefully, gently, tenderly treated life I’ve lead. And I know that, that fact, in and of itself, skews my perceptions and my ability to understand.
I strive not to judge because I know that in the truest sense of the words, I cannot understand.
And then… we sit on the side of the road munching down doner-kebab sandwiches in happy food heaven, joking with the sons of the revolutionaries who are cooking for us. They are counting our kids, amazed that we have four, as usual. The wizened, old, toothless crone crosses the street. The rain falls. Horns honk, and here we are, in downtown Hanoi, with our children.
Something occurrs to me when slapped hard in the face with the seething hatred and depth of pain that still lies beneath the surface on the American side of the experience:
I’m very glad that I’m not often judged by the actions of my government or the governments of my country that have passed in the generations before my time. People are not refusing to feed me noodles because of President Johnson’s policies. I hope that the lesson my children take away is the same: that the Vietnamese are people, who serve a government that tells them only part of the story, just like us.
I hope that they learn to separate the individual from international policy. I hope that they learn that in all countries, in all corners of the world are people, just like them, who are trying to cobble together a life out of their dreams and their realities. I hope that they can extend the same grace to the descendants of “enemies” that is extended to us, because it seems to me that that is the ultimate way to defeat the atrocities on both sides: to find a way to reach over and through them, allowing the next generation to build something new.
I hope that the lesson my children take away is the same: that the Vietnamese are people, who serve a government that tells them only part of the story, just like us.
Sometimes, when a person’s been traveling a while, the great joy is in the little things. For me, the most exciting discovery of Hanoi, however, has been a bathtub in our hotel room. There is not much I love more than a nice long bath and a book, so it was no surprise to anyone that after lunch, when the children retired for naps all around, that I headed for the tub. It should be noted that with the presence of a tub one should not assume plumbing.
The tub, it seems, slides all over the bathroom floor and it drains straight out the bottom. Since every bathroom here has a hole in the floor through which all of the shower water and errant veggie sprayer (read that bidet) water finds its way, so there is no crisis. I plugged the drain with a rolled up plastic bag and took a nice, long, cool bath with a bowl full of cherries to keep me company. The only trick is in draining the tub slowly enough that the water doesn’t escape the lip around the bathroom door.
Welcome to Hanoi; this is not the Hilton.
