Saturday, September 17, 2011

The Lure of the Exotic




ex·ot·ic   [ig-zot-ik] adjective

1. of foreign origin or character; not native; introduced from abroad, but not fully naturalized or acclimatized: exotic foods; exotic plants.

2. strikingly unusual or strange in effect or appearance: an exotic hairstyle.

3. of a uniquely new or experimental nature: exotic weapons.

4. of, pertaining to, or involving stripteasing: the exotic clubs where strippers are featured.


Webster is too clinical for me. Exotic has danger implicit. It has romance. The air is heavy and moist. There is a little mold forming under things. You feel different. The air is charged. The mind is altered. And, yes, it is not native.

I feel alive in Saigon. The danger here is not the danger of the past. No more war. No more malaria. Now the danger is more about motorbikes than mortars. But, grown men find it difficult to leave the curb. It becomes an act of faith. Step off the curb. Walk slowly and steadily - no quick or jerky movements. Watch the traffic but don't fixate on any one motorbike. Step up on the opposite curb and Voila...

The romance is palpable too. Think Catherine Deneuve in Indochine, Jane March in The Lover (above), or Do Thi Ha Yen, the girl who plays Phuong to Michael Caine's Fowler in the film adaptation of The Quiet American. It's hot. It's tropical. It's juicy. It's sensual. The Vietnamese women are among the most beautiful and stylish in the world.

The tropics are steamy. A drop of sweat on the upper lip. Dark patches under your arms. Orchids growing in vacant lots. Buildings mottled with mold and peeling paint. In a year or two underbrush becomes a canopy. Sometimes it feels like you're trying to breath underwater.

Why would anyone find this alluring? It's hot, noisy, smelly, uncomfortable, disease ridden and occasionally dangerous. But... it's truly exotic.

Friday, September 16, 2011

The Wall


In the 1970's and 80's I was living and working in Berlin. And occasionally in those years I would make a wrong turn while looking for an unfamiliar address and end up facing The Wall. It was always disarming. I was living an ordinary life - except that I couldn't walk, bike, or drive out of the city without running the East German gauntlet of checkpoints, blockades, and restricted rest stops. Life seemed normal enough - get the kids to school, go to work, shop at the local supermarket, hang out in trendy bars and cafes, and run in the Grunewald with the wild boars. That part was a little sketchy sometimes, but for the most part it seemed like a normal life. Then there was The Wall.

Right now I'm sitting in an American espresso bar across the street from the US Consulate in Saigon. I'm watching the traffic ebb and flow as 6 million motorbikes move people around in some sort of system that I still don't understand though I've been observing it for 2 1/2 years. Things look normal, but like The Wall in Berlin the Consulate is a reminder that everything here is not entirely normal. The Consulate sits on the same ground as the US Embassy did on April 30, 1975. That was the date of the fall of Saigon and the incredible panic and chaos as Americans and South Vietnamese struggled to exit as the NVA made its final assault and entered the city. I'm about a block from the site where the picture of the last helicopter lifting off the roof of a building with people hanging onto the skids (taken just after the one above).

The NVA stormed the Embassy grounds and destroyed most of what was there. By then the Americans and some of our loyal friends were safely aboard ships of the Seventh Fleet lying off the coast. I have friends here who have never seen family members since that day. I have one friend whose mother left him to go back and get another relative. The people at the airport put him on an airplane for Guam and the mother never made it. 17 years later, he got a call, routed through Canada (there was no contact between Vietnam and the US). It was his mother. Neither he nor his mother had any idea if the other was still alive until then. He was in college at San Jose State and his mother was running a tour business for the government. They are reunited now and he runs his mother's successful private tour business. Good story. But, not all of the stories are that good.

The Embassy grounds were repatriated in 1995 when Vietnam re-deeded the property to the US. The Consulate was rebuilt and diplomatic relations between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the United States resumed. I attended a ceremony celebrating 15 years of those relations last year and listened to speeches by diplomats of both countries extoll the virtues and successes of this relationship. As someone in the State Department recently said of Iraq "mistakes were made." The diplomats here didn't say that. I did.

I feel privileged to be part of the reconciliation process, but I keep running into The Wall, whether it's in Berlin, Saigon or Jerusalem. Maybe someday I'll make a wrong turn in Baghdad and see The Wall.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Evil, Evil; Man Was Not Meant to Fly...

One of the low points of my Marine Corps years was a week of Winter Survival/Escape and Evasion Training in a gruesome place called Pickle Meadows. For half of the week we were in the wilderness hunting for food (mice and porcupines mostly, after the rabbits teased us to near madness) and trying to evade "aggressors" whose mission was to capture and place us in a simulated POW camp. It didn't matter if we managed to evade the dread aggressors - and my team did. In the end everyone was thrown into the POW camp.

In the camp the enemy couldn't really torture us, but it was hard to tell the difference at the time. The temperature was near zero degrees and we were forced to remain awake and on our feet for two days. The whole thing was supposed to give us an idea of what it would be like to be captured and endure extreme discomfort while refusing to answer an interrogators questions. The worst part was being jammed into a pine box about the size of a large golf bag for refusing to give the interrogator anything but name, rank, and serial number. At first it seemed bearable but that lasted about 5 minutes. Then it became the incredible shrinking box - a real-life Edgar Allen Poe torture device. Every bone pressed hard against the ever shrinking wooden box - forehead, elbows, knees, ankles, hips, knuckles, you name it, it hurt.

The current equivalent of the incredible shrinking box is an economy seat on a full airplane crossing the Pacific Ocean. It may not kill you but there are times it feels like it will. Sixteen hours in that seat is an eternity. The air is as dry as a popcorn fart and the seats are designed for dwarfs. The food is rarely edible, and service is never on the Nordstrom model. Asian airlines have seats designed for Asians. My last trip on Japan Airlines I sat side-saddle for six hours because with my butt against the back of the seat my knees still penetrated four inches into the seat in front of me. American carriers give a little more legroom and a lot less service. Forget Social Security and Medicare, if there is one entitlement program that needs adjustment it is the salary and benefits package for fat old flight attendants who snarl when asked for water and won't get out of their rest seats mid-flight because their contract ensures them a "rest period."

I may be sexist in this regard, but Asian airlines do know how to do it. On the flights from Seattle to Seoul and on to Saigon last week the Asiana flight attendants were young, alert, attentive, solicitous, and genuinely interested in satisfying needs. They weren't gorgeous but they were attractive and so similar in body type, hairstyle, makeup,and uniform accessories that it was difficult to tell them apart. And - they never ever stopped patrolling the aisles. I was squirming in my seat for fourteen of those hours and they never stopped smiling or asking if they could bring me something. They weren't serving Ambien or I would have opted in. During the ordeal I read the NY Times until it disintegrated in my hands, watched four movies, read parts of three books on my iPad, ate four meals, drank 6 glasses of wine, slept for several hours and we were still 800 miles from Saigon.

Until I learn to astrally project myself from one side of the Pacific to the other I'm pretty much stuck with air travel. I have no personal experience birthing a child, but I'm told that there is a sort of amnesia that takes over and the pain of childbirth fades so that the race can continue to reproduce. It must be similar for Pacific air travel. I have crossed the ocean 14 times in two and half years. I'll do it again in December but sometimes I think the great outdoors at Pickle Meadows was a lot more fun than I remember.