A relative of mine called me up with a proposal. Can you write a short article on your thoughts about your video project and impressions of Hue for a photography magazine? Um, sure… It was to be in English, was to include a brief meeting with a journalist who’d take a photo of me for the publication, etc. Now this relative is notorious for finding ways to make a lil spare change through various art-related activities. On this trip I’m trying to re-align my mentality with regard to issues of trust in Vietnamese social transactions, so I decided not to question it too much. So I spent a morning whipping up a piece, avoiding wordy or complicated prose, in order to save the journal’s translation department some headaches.

Now I’m sitting in the meeting with the guy (who’s actually from a commerce and industry mag, not photo journal) and he wants me to explain what anthropology is. And what my thesis work was about. My bumbling Vietnamese surely didn’t impress him. I tried to say that my project this summer wasn’t directly related to anthro but was instead about following artists and poets to talk to them about drawing inspiration from the Hue landscape. “Poets make me allergic.” Oh. Just a bit before, somehow five cans of 333 beer appeared on a tray on the coffee table. With the yeast loosening his tongue, he started on a diatribe about how it’s extremely hard to tap into what is “really Hue.” That was a reaction to my saying that I had been in touch with a few artists who were not originally from Hue but instead have called it their home and have now become “Hue people.” Sure, I wasn’t going to “know” Hue in the way that someone who’d been born and raised on the soil would, I wanted to retort. But social propriety kept me restrained. Next came a rant about how newspapers aren’t really following anything meaningful. People are too driven by material needs, the “dollar.” Maybe it’s your fault. Who knows if it’s all this influence from America and the West, driving people to just think about the bottom line. Then some pontification about what would make a good film, revealing the complexity of Vietnamese-ness. He cited Scent of Green Papaya. My previous attempt to explain my own project and the influence of Chris Marker (which included showing him a 4-min YouTube clip of Sans Soleil met with the response, “But what is the main point? Summarize for me the main point.” Hmm. Memory, time, Tokyo, letter were all the words I could find.

Like any good negotiator he took matters into his own hands and gave me my assignment. Just write for me about your impressions of Hue as a returned Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese). Ah ok, easy enough. End of transaction.