Around the World Winter 05
Kunming, China
I recently spent 5 days in the PRC checking out a potential new work among ethnic minority groups in the southern province of Yunaan.
Yunaan is the Chinese dynamic equivalent of Mississippi—an ethnically diverse, backward and southern-most state that has always been on the frontier of the Chinese psyche.
The rebellious citizens of Kunming--the provincial capitol--coined the famous Chinese phrase, “The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away.” That’s got to be one of the world’s cleanest takes on cultural confidence in the face of violent and self-righteous powers. What phrase could be more nostalgic for Americans? Or perhaps—someday--more authentically Chinese?
A friend in Kunming picked me up and took me to his house on the back of his locally manufactured bike, a jarring trip that bruised some previously unknown bones in my rear end.
After lunch we headed out to meet some of his colleagues. He suggested I follow him on his “other” bike.
When you’re in somebody else’s house you tend to go with the guidance of your host. That’s true even when the word “other” makes you wonder what might be in store just down the road.
So I risked riding a bike around on my own for the first time in the chaotic traffic of the urban PRC.
The rickety bike rolled over the old asphalt road like a rock bouncing off a corrugated metal roof. I felt each crack and pothole in fundamental parts of my body and I quickly came to appreciate why this was his spare bike. I just wish I’d worn a jock strap and a cup.
Traffic in Kunming, as in most major Asian cities, is an intuitive game of high speed chicken. People on bikes are the most apt to demonstrate their bad karma by getting smashed and crushed. I guess it just goes to show that what morally goes around comes around, especially if you can’t afford a motorcycle or a car.
I survived thanks to some urgent personal prayer (Oh my God!) and the pity of the locals for the clumsy and hapless ‘white devil.’
The country has done a flip-flop since my last trip 5 years ago. Kunming puts some western cities to shame. And the members of the underground church--along with the other Chinese who respect the unseen world--grow stronger and more confident by the day.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
At the tail end of the same trip I also had a chance to visit Vietnam. I was looking for face time with some Filipino missos who’ve made their mark in that rapidly developing country. There is a growing spiritual movement in Vietnam, and a lively church scene starting up among the urban squatter poor in Saigon.
My older brother fought there and I graduated from high school just as Saigon (the old school name for HCMC) fell to the North Vietnamese armies, so I grew up from the time I was little with the war in Vietnam as a constant background to life.
Throughout my stay I had the odd feeling that I'd seen everything in town. I’ve never had that sense of geographical déjà vu before. I guess watching news reports during childhood about a place for almost ten years and then watching movies after that for almost 30 years will play some tricks on your memory.
Saigon is a two-shirt-a-day city. It's 90 % humidity and 90 degrees all day long. I don’t know if you could fry eggs on the sidewalk at noon, but I’m sure you could steam some carrots and broccoli by half-past the hour.
And the architecture is one of the craziest mish-mashes of styles I’ve ever run across. Lots of big metal and glass boxes and butt-ugly socialist realist sculptures do their best to ruin a potentially good urban thing, but on the other hand there are some really lovely French colonial buildings that look like they came right out of a Graham Greene novel. Actually, some of the best of Greene's writing came out of those very same buildings and the people and characters who used to hang out in them, so I guess the order of inspiration should rightly be reversed.
But wow, some of the larger colonial piles can only be attributed to sweaty French imaginations fueled by a hit or two off the old opium pipe. A good number of major public buildings—which date from the early 20th century--look like gigantic wedding cakes covered with the worst kind of decorative frou-frou. There is a definite drag queen quality to these models of flagrant bad taste.
For some of us, these kinds of misguided efforts can be chalked up to disoriented and dominant French colonials who could create whatever they wanted, probably for the first time in their lives. As the history of colonialism makes very clear, great freedoms in a new context are almost always used badly.
I guess this kind of architectural gender ambiguity could also be interpreted by some as the fruit of a nation of cowardly and effete “surrender monkeys.” After a brief look at these buildings, it would be clear to some that the roots of French pooftah-hood run long and deep. What else could you expect from a people who don’t speak English and who, as Steve Martin once observed, “have a different word for everything!”
Along with most other Americans who come to Saigon, I wanted to see some things associated with the war. So I went to The War Remnants Museum as well as the village of Cu Chi, which is a kind of “living war memorial” about 70 clicks outside of town.
The Vietnamese Communist Party, which still controls Vietnam, opened up the country, and especially Saigon, to greater economic and social freedoms in the 90's. So tourism is a pretty recent experience for people here.
At that time the War Remnants Museum was called The Museum of American War Crimes. For some strange reason, that name seemed to turn off a lot of prospective western visitors.
Fortunately, some budding marketing genius among the cadres came up with a better idea. His catchy new name for the building, War Remnants Museum, apparently spared the sensitive feelings of the visiting lackeys of the capitalist running dogs, and Americans soon began to pack the place out. It’s now the single most popular tourist attraction in Saigon.
It’s the story of local cadre makes good that should go down in advertising history along with Tony the Tiger and Just Do It.
The museum itself is a well told—if pretty unsophisticated--story of Vietnam’s battle for self-determination over many decades as they fought off the Chinese, French, and Americans. While it makes no attempt to downplay the immense destruction and damage that the American military rained down on the country, it also recognizes the courage and humanity of many American soldiers and journalists and photographers. One section of the museum even recognizes countries and movements around the world that supported the country during its worst hours—including the vast American anti-war movement.
The war remnants that gave the museum its name—including lots of American and Vietnamese weaponry—are worth the inexpensive admission price by themselves.
The tone isn’t bitter or angry or boastful. It’s somber and instructive, which struck me as just how a war memorial should be. The best single piece in the museum is a very cool and hopeful metal sculpture crafted out of a huge bomb fragment.
After I left the museum I thought about the warm welcome the people in town gave me and the enthusiastic welcome they apparently give pretty much all Americans. When you see the museum and learn about the 3 million Vietnamese killed and the ruthless efficiency of the destruction, you do wonder how they could have learned to forgive so quickly and so well.
When I think back to our own Civil War, and even reflect on our national reaction to 9/11, I honestly don’t know whether Americans could do likewise if our nation ever experienced that level of apocalyptic violence and damage. Maybe so. But whatever our American propensity for letting go of hostility might be, the whole experience in Saigon underscored for me once again the spiritual potency and importance of forgiveness.
A couple of days later I rode out to Cu Chi through some intensely green countryside. After living my whole life in the arid American west, places like Vietnam still seem almost fantastic to me, even after many years of visiting locations at that sort of latitude.
When we got there I was herded into a ramshackle space along with 30 or 40 other people where we were forced to watch a very old and disintegrating film about the resistance of the “primitive” people of Cu Chi to the American military. It was a kind of shaky super-8 David and Goliath story that moved everybody who saw it. The room was tiny and crowded and had no air conditioning, so I was sweating within 10 minutes. That particular trip turned out to be a three shirt day.
After they let us out of the lecture, we went across a road and entered what can only be called “Cu Chi Land.” The local Vietnamese have created a kind of crude theme park meant to introduce westerners to the realities of the Vietnam War in the kind of language and form they believe westerners understand and are willing to pay to see.
In Cu Chi Land you can climb down into the tunnel network that the local Vietnamese lived in for a decade while they tried to survive constant heavy bombing and American patrols. These weren’t tunnels built for larger westerners—I went down and followed the tunnels for about 50 yards and barely squeezed through.
There were over 200 miles of these kinds of tunnels in the countryside just outside of Saigon. The local people lived largely underground like animals for the many years it took them to outlast the people above ground who were trying to kill them.
As you walk along the trails in the park you pass through forests of recovering trees and jungle vegetation. About every 30 yards or so you run across one of the massive craters left behind by the constant B-52 bombers runs.
During the following hour or so the guides introduce you to strange and poorly constructed dummies and models depicting Cu Chi’s people building nasty and lethal booby traps and Viet Cong troops outwitting the much better armed Americans.
The climax of this weird re-enactment of the war was a shooting range at the very end of the trail. For a small fee, you can shoot almost any weapon used during the war, including armor piercing machine guns which are so loud they could burst your eardrums from 30 yards away. Obviously, consumer lawsuits have yet to develop much momentum in this part of the world.
The targets at the receiving end of the firing range were large wooden cutouts of colorful African animals that looked they’d been bought at a steep discount from some children’s zoo that was looking to upgrade its look.
I have to admit that I paid a couple of dollars to fire 20 rounds from an AK-47. I proceeded to annihilate a big purple giraffe target.
I immediately felt bad for the damage I’d inflicted, but my pangs of conscience didn't last long.
I'm just grateful that as an American I now know I'm on the right side of history and destiny, and that in some small and symbolic way my target practice was probably advancing God's Manifest Plan for the inexorable spread of republics and stock markets.
You might even say, I'm part of a kind of Manifest Destiny for the world. Hey, how exciting is that! Now that history is really over, and we're just tidying up for the inevitable, there's nothing to do but pitch in. Cool! No need to worry ourselves with confusing books like the Bible. And anyway, haven't we all heard that manifest destiny thing before--it's almost, kinda like, in our genes!
It reminds me of a great line from the comedy Young Frankenstein, when Dr. Frankenstein's son--played by Gene Wilder--emotionally breaks out into a rhythmic football cheer when he finally realizes he is going to choose to repeat his father's hated and foolish experiments in re-animating dead tissue: "De-sti-ny, destiny for me! De-sti-ny, destiny for me!" Maybe we can have folks start chanting that in church.
And God bless those poor dummies and targets on the wrong side.
I recently spent 5 days in the PRC checking out a potential new work among ethnic minority groups in the southern province of Yunaan.
Yunaan is the Chinese dynamic equivalent of Mississippi—an ethnically diverse, backward and southern-most state that has always been on the frontier of the Chinese psyche.
The rebellious citizens of Kunming--the provincial capitol--coined the famous Chinese phrase, “The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away.” That’s got to be one of the world’s cleanest takes on cultural confidence in the face of violent and self-righteous powers. What phrase could be more nostalgic for Americans? Or perhaps—someday--more authentically Chinese?
A friend in Kunming picked me up and took me to his house on the back of his locally manufactured bike, a jarring trip that bruised some previously unknown bones in my rear end.
After lunch we headed out to meet some of his colleagues. He suggested I follow him on his “other” bike.
When you’re in somebody else’s house you tend to go with the guidance of your host. That’s true even when the word “other” makes you wonder what might be in store just down the road.
So I risked riding a bike around on my own for the first time in the chaotic traffic of the urban PRC.
The rickety bike rolled over the old asphalt road like a rock bouncing off a corrugated metal roof. I felt each crack and pothole in fundamental parts of my body and I quickly came to appreciate why this was his spare bike. I just wish I’d worn a jock strap and a cup.
Traffic in Kunming, as in most major Asian cities, is an intuitive game of high speed chicken. People on bikes are the most apt to demonstrate their bad karma by getting smashed and crushed. I guess it just goes to show that what morally goes around comes around, especially if you can’t afford a motorcycle or a car.
I survived thanks to some urgent personal prayer (Oh my God!) and the pity of the locals for the clumsy and hapless ‘white devil.’
The country has done a flip-flop since my last trip 5 years ago. Kunming puts some western cities to shame. And the members of the underground church--along with the other Chinese who respect the unseen world--grow stronger and more confident by the day.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
At the tail end of the same trip I also had a chance to visit Vietnam. I was looking for face time with some Filipino missos who’ve made their mark in that rapidly developing country. There is a growing spiritual movement in Vietnam, and a lively church scene starting up among the urban squatter poor in Saigon.
My older brother fought there and I graduated from high school just as Saigon (the old school name for HCMC) fell to the North Vietnamese armies, so I grew up from the time I was little with the war in Vietnam as a constant background to life.
Throughout my stay I had the odd feeling that I'd seen everything in town. I’ve never had that sense of geographical déjà vu before. I guess watching news reports during childhood about a place for almost ten years and then watching movies after that for almost 30 years will play some tricks on your memory.
Saigon is a two-shirt-a-day city. It's 90 % humidity and 90 degrees all day long. I don’t know if you could fry eggs on the sidewalk at noon, but I’m sure you could steam some carrots and broccoli by half-past the hour.
And the architecture is one of the craziest mish-mashes of styles I’ve ever run across. Lots of big metal and glass boxes and butt-ugly socialist realist sculptures do their best to ruin a potentially good urban thing, but on the other hand there are some really lovely French colonial buildings that look like they came right out of a Graham Greene novel. Actually, some of the best of Greene's writing came out of those very same buildings and the people and characters who used to hang out in them, so I guess the order of inspiration should rightly be reversed.
But wow, some of the larger colonial piles can only be attributed to sweaty French imaginations fueled by a hit or two off the old opium pipe. A good number of major public buildings—which date from the early 20th century--look like gigantic wedding cakes covered with the worst kind of decorative frou-frou. There is a definite drag queen quality to these models of flagrant bad taste.
For some of us, these kinds of misguided efforts can be chalked up to disoriented and dominant French colonials who could create whatever they wanted, probably for the first time in their lives. As the history of colonialism makes very clear, great freedoms in a new context are almost always used badly.
I guess this kind of architectural gender ambiguity could also be interpreted by some as the fruit of a nation of cowardly and effete “surrender monkeys.” After a brief look at these buildings, it would be clear to some that the roots of French pooftah-hood run long and deep. What else could you expect from a people who don’t speak English and who, as Steve Martin once observed, “have a different word for everything!”
Along with most other Americans who come to Saigon, I wanted to see some things associated with the war. So I went to The War Remnants Museum as well as the village of Cu Chi, which is a kind of “living war memorial” about 70 clicks outside of town.
The Vietnamese Communist Party, which still controls Vietnam, opened up the country, and especially Saigon, to greater economic and social freedoms in the 90's. So tourism is a pretty recent experience for people here.
At that time the War Remnants Museum was called The Museum of American War Crimes. For some strange reason, that name seemed to turn off a lot of prospective western visitors.
Fortunately, some budding marketing genius among the cadres came up with a better idea. His catchy new name for the building, War Remnants Museum, apparently spared the sensitive feelings of the visiting lackeys of the capitalist running dogs, and Americans soon began to pack the place out. It’s now the single most popular tourist attraction in Saigon.
It’s the story of local cadre makes good that should go down in advertising history along with Tony the Tiger and Just Do It.
The museum itself is a well told—if pretty unsophisticated--story of Vietnam’s battle for self-determination over many decades as they fought off the Chinese, French, and Americans. While it makes no attempt to downplay the immense destruction and damage that the American military rained down on the country, it also recognizes the courage and humanity of many American soldiers and journalists and photographers. One section of the museum even recognizes countries and movements around the world that supported the country during its worst hours—including the vast American anti-war movement.
The war remnants that gave the museum its name—including lots of American and Vietnamese weaponry—are worth the inexpensive admission price by themselves.
The tone isn’t bitter or angry or boastful. It’s somber and instructive, which struck me as just how a war memorial should be. The best single piece in the museum is a very cool and hopeful metal sculpture crafted out of a huge bomb fragment.
After I left the museum I thought about the warm welcome the people in town gave me and the enthusiastic welcome they apparently give pretty much all Americans. When you see the museum and learn about the 3 million Vietnamese killed and the ruthless efficiency of the destruction, you do wonder how they could have learned to forgive so quickly and so well.
When I think back to our own Civil War, and even reflect on our national reaction to 9/11, I honestly don’t know whether Americans could do likewise if our nation ever experienced that level of apocalyptic violence and damage. Maybe so. But whatever our American propensity for letting go of hostility might be, the whole experience in Saigon underscored for me once again the spiritual potency and importance of forgiveness.
A couple of days later I rode out to Cu Chi through some intensely green countryside. After living my whole life in the arid American west, places like Vietnam still seem almost fantastic to me, even after many years of visiting locations at that sort of latitude.
When we got there I was herded into a ramshackle space along with 30 or 40 other people where we were forced to watch a very old and disintegrating film about the resistance of the “primitive” people of Cu Chi to the American military. It was a kind of shaky super-8 David and Goliath story that moved everybody who saw it. The room was tiny and crowded and had no air conditioning, so I was sweating within 10 minutes. That particular trip turned out to be a three shirt day.
After they let us out of the lecture, we went across a road and entered what can only be called “Cu Chi Land.” The local Vietnamese have created a kind of crude theme park meant to introduce westerners to the realities of the Vietnam War in the kind of language and form they believe westerners understand and are willing to pay to see.
In Cu Chi Land you can climb down into the tunnel network that the local Vietnamese lived in for a decade while they tried to survive constant heavy bombing and American patrols. These weren’t tunnels built for larger westerners—I went down and followed the tunnels for about 50 yards and barely squeezed through.
There were over 200 miles of these kinds of tunnels in the countryside just outside of Saigon. The local people lived largely underground like animals for the many years it took them to outlast the people above ground who were trying to kill them.
As you walk along the trails in the park you pass through forests of recovering trees and jungle vegetation. About every 30 yards or so you run across one of the massive craters left behind by the constant B-52 bombers runs.
During the following hour or so the guides introduce you to strange and poorly constructed dummies and models depicting Cu Chi’s people building nasty and lethal booby traps and Viet Cong troops outwitting the much better armed Americans.
The climax of this weird re-enactment of the war was a shooting range at the very end of the trail. For a small fee, you can shoot almost any weapon used during the war, including armor piercing machine guns which are so loud they could burst your eardrums from 30 yards away. Obviously, consumer lawsuits have yet to develop much momentum in this part of the world.
The targets at the receiving end of the firing range were large wooden cutouts of colorful African animals that looked they’d been bought at a steep discount from some children’s zoo that was looking to upgrade its look.
I have to admit that I paid a couple of dollars to fire 20 rounds from an AK-47. I proceeded to annihilate a big purple giraffe target.
I immediately felt bad for the damage I’d inflicted, but my pangs of conscience didn't last long.
I'm just grateful that as an American I now know I'm on the right side of history and destiny, and that in some small and symbolic way my target practice was probably advancing God's Manifest Plan for the inexorable spread of republics and stock markets.
You might even say, I'm part of a kind of Manifest Destiny for the world. Hey, how exciting is that! Now that history is really over, and we're just tidying up for the inevitable, there's nothing to do but pitch in. Cool! No need to worry ourselves with confusing books like the Bible. And anyway, haven't we all heard that manifest destiny thing before--it's almost, kinda like, in our genes!
It reminds me of a great line from the comedy Young Frankenstein, when Dr. Frankenstein's son--played by Gene Wilder--emotionally breaks out into a rhythmic football cheer when he finally realizes he is going to choose to repeat his father's hated and foolish experiments in re-animating dead tissue: "De-sti-ny, destiny for me! De-sti-ny, destiny for me!" Maybe we can have folks start chanting that in church.
And God bless those poor dummies and targets on the wrong side.
posted by Wordcat at 5:02 PM
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