Saigon. Starting late summer, it’s going to be home for the next year.

The DF appeal is just one instantiation of a research interest in cities that is more and more crystallizing as my dissertation project, about sensory experiences. Relatedly, for a few weeks this month, my video on Huế, shot last summer and called Shadow of Echoes, played on loop as part of a student-curated show on campus called “Invisible Cities,” after Italo Calvino’s book. It was an interesting exhibit to be part of, to see the various ways people connect themselves to urban imaginaries. I’m returning to VN this summer with camera in tow but this time to Saigon. Hopefully I’ll find some time apart from language drills to shoot around that crazy, hectic place that I might call home in a year.

Meanwhile I’m getting excited for a different trip, coming up in about a month: Mexico City! A dear friend had made the place home for over a year and is soon departing. I have to catch up with her before she leaves.

And speaking of Mexico, A recently blogged on Exodus about the Gabriel Orozco retrospective at MoMA. Here in lil ol’ Beantown, the ICA put on the first-ever survey of Damian Ortega‘s work, also coming out of Mexico City and highly influenced by Orozco.

With work spanning 1996 – 2007, Ortega’s sculptural objects are “exploded, deconstructed, collapsed, and unbalanced.” For example, the above from the Beetle Trilogy, asks viewers to reconsider the vehicle that Hitler originally commissioned as the ideal mode of transport for the Third Reich, allowing for our bodies to weave in and out of the schematized parts that hang from the ceiling. Among my favorites were variations of the glass Coke bottle, blown to anthropomorphized sensual curves and flora-like mouth-blooms. I noted a quote from Ortega that, for me, exemplifies the material considerations he stretches with plastic imagination: “The skin as the border of the body. The wall as the limit of a living space.” These notions also happen to be ones that I’m starting to take up for my own research.

Since I can't include my own video footage of red dragonflies...

In the past week or so I have been working with a “tutor” to practice reading Vietnamese poetry. Although I couldn’t interview one of Hue’s most highly acclaimed (female) poets, she sent me a little edition of her love poems, which included a beautiful essay at the back. I’ve attempted to work it into English and hope to use parts of it for my video narrative. Feedback welcome!

Impressions on Poetry by Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ, translation mine

Poetry is the new amidst the ordinary. Seeing it is difficult, but expressing it is even harder. One only achieves poetry as when an egg is incubated to the point that the life inside it must peck through, hatch open to the world — to vivacity, to physical reality. If one is rash and peels off the shell before its time, then one will never realize poetry but will only be left with dead phrases.

I remember when I was still young, before I attended school, there was a morning when I was chasing a red dragonfly and suddenly fell. When I sat up, my hand brushed against my chest. I was frightened to discover, in my body, there was curious beating. I rushed home, raising my hand to everyone’s chest, listening intently. After making sure that in everyone’s chest there existed the same beating, finally I was able to relax and breathe a sigh of relief… That was the first time in life I realized that I had a heart.

I have lived by that heart, a heart first discovered in a search for beauty — the red of a dragonfly in those naive days. And I could not anticipate that this very dragonfly would be the spiritual light that would lead me to the marvelous, extraordinary world of poetry.

For me, poetry is beauty — always.

One can’t take any particular poem as a paradigm for poetry. Each genuine poet has her own sparkle, none like another. One who has poetic pluck is one who can accept the challenge of time, nothing else. Indulging in poetry, being mesmerized by beauty, is half the achievement of one who writes poetry.

I’m slowly coming to terms with the choice I began with to do an essayistic project (à la Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil) instead of an observational documentary. I’m worried about relate-ability / readability since I want to screen here in VN in the future though. Of course, I think I’ll narrate in both English and Vietnamese and subtitle accordingly, but the form is what most concerns me. Unless driven by a strong, empathetic narrative voice, the piece can be clichéd, flat, impenetrable, or worse, solipsistic. In any case, I am committed to this style now, and perhaps I’ll make my next project in the form of classic doc.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten my hands on photos, finally. Here are a couple (courtesy of PiC) to illustrate my previous entry.

Photos by Amanda Howard

One of the aspects of the city that’s been most captivating is the prevalence of huge banyan trees on sidewalks in which shrines have been placed. Twisting knots of bark and trunk enclose cubes of holiness. Broken relics, amulets, and joss sticks vie with crawling ants for space in the sand and litter. Wish I had ready digicam access to give you a pic. The spaces are highly spiritual. X told me young unmarried girls try to avoid such places, especially at night, since the ghosts that haunt these grounds like such victims. Once captured, the women are prone to illness. My xe om driver (motorbike cabbie) took me around to a few sites to shoot. He said they’re places where lots of accidents have occurred, where families pay homage to the victims.

I’m becoming visually fascinated by uncanny marriages, fusions, juxtapositions of man-made and ‘natural’ elements. Such as these trees. Or a tropical bird tethered at its foot to a tree limb by metal chain. Keeping my eyes peeled for more for the video essay!

Noticing the bizarre (not just exotic) here is not so easy, since it seems like they’ve worked hard to cultivate a sense of a pristine historic tourist city, a cultural city, a beautiful city. Flaming flower trees on both sides of boulevards provide a cool awning that frames the streets. At night, colorful lights flash on the frames of the famous Truong Tien bridge, spanning the Huong River. It’s designed. Coupled with the meandering pace of life (slow…measured…), people idling on coffee shop stools, one easily falls into routine and surface-level experiencing. Still, there’s something to be said for getting the rhythm of this place, especially in traffic. I realized that you have to feel the pulse of drivers here to be able to maneuver in a safe way around the throngs of motorbikes and bicycles and cyclos and cars at intersections. (It’s not as bad as Ha Noi or Sai Gon, but all the same technique…) That means guessing their intentions, their likeliness to swerve this way or that.

For now, I enjoy my spot on the back of motorbikes. I’ve started meditating on them…

Window Grating

I left NYC by midnight flight on Sunday 7th and landed in Sai Gon Tuesday morning, via Anchorage and Taipei. The next day I was on a plane to see a couple of friends in Singapore, as encapsulated in the **Singapore Live** entry from the Sensory Ethnography Summer Journal. There’s a whole lot to think about there, but that’s someone else’s project. After the Great S’pore Adventure I returned to Sai Gon to welcome my partner-in-crime (PiC), the ol’ college roomie. I roped her into being my sound gal for a month. A quick round of family introductions and then we were on a flight out to Da Nang on Sunday 14th.

With just about a day and a half in Da Nang I felt I, too, (according to a friend’s phrase) was chasing my childhood. Though I was born there, all that’s recognizable from the recesses of memory are yellow mandevilla clinging to gates that line the walk to the beach from my paternal grandfather’s house and the green-and-white checkered tile floor that remains despite the home’s renovation over the past few years. On a previous trip back to Da Nang I had noticed billboards advertising a new Korean development along the shore, complete with skyscraper condos, office spaces, and entertainment complexes. I didn’t realize it was still in the works. This time a relative of mine whizzed me on his motorbike past the construction site, where they’ve cordoned off the coast as a temporary parking lot for backhoes, dumping tons of sand into the ocean to create an extended beach. I have a distinct image of my father tossing me as a toddler into these very waters, and for that moment, I was terrified that he’d left me to the will o’ the waves. Now no one has access to Thanh Binh (which translates as “peaceful”) Beach. Right before this drive-by sighting I’d made a visit to my sick great-aunt (Grandpa’s sister), who’d just been discharged from the hospital for a cancer treatment. Needless to say, the ride gave me lots to contemplate.

More than anything, two themes follow me in my thoughts: paranoia and networks. My time in VN so far has been cushioned by the incredible support of my extended family and their networks. Simultaneously, everyone (family in both the States and VN) has warned me time and again about theft and the dangers of unknown evils. I haven’t fully unpacked the rationale behind these persistent exhortations to be careful yet but am slowly developing ideas. In these new urban spaces, where everyone is physically proximate and crammed!, the network of the extended family has a strong presence at the same time that a wall of mistrust is erected surrounding casual social interactions in the physical space of the city.

Ostensibly, Hue would offer me relief then. It’s considered a more quiet, gentle city than Ha Noi, Sai Gon or even Da Nang. I luckily found a lovely 3-BR house with gardens, tucked in a little alley, for rent for 2 months. It’s right next door to a big market, pictures of which I’ll post sometime. My uncle (Mom’s younger bro) and his wife have been extremely attentive and helpful in getting PiC and me settled. He helped us get a bicycle for everyday errands and then negotiated a motorbike hire service with two men to help us get around the city with our equipment and to “protect” us. Even here people seem to think a bodyguard is necessary.

I could protest. I could refuse the coddling. But I decided instead to accept the family’s gestures of concern. This way, the network continues to function. For example, I have had to rely on an aunt (Mom’s cousin) here whose recently-deceased husband was in the police force. Through their connections, I had a meeting with the Deputy Director of Hue’s Foreign Affairs Office to ask for his help in acquiring a work permit for filming. One of my first work-related encounters with bureaucracy, I quickly became (internally) irritated at the show of procedural sternness. He yapped on at first about how I had to be affiliated with an umbrella organization, then after some explaining on my uncle’s part that this project was not yet my dissertation work, he urged me to draw up a document explaining my exact itinerary and contacts and the thrust of the research and filming I was doing, including details about my place of residence, identification, etc. All this red tape is to be expected, but I was a bit unsettled and frustrated when he said the footage would have to be reviewed and the office would have to issue me a certificate of permit before I leave the country. I am not used to surveillance. Overall I think it was good practice to establish myself as a researcher here, and ultimately I don’t think there will be too much of a problem in terms of materials that would be liable to censorship. Still, just last weekend one of the most prominent pro-democracy lawyers here was just arrested in Sai Gon on charges of “colluding with foreign reactionaries to sabotage the Vietnamese State.” He has defended a number of dissidents and advocates for a multi-party gov’t…

So I haven’t started shooting yet. Settling in to the house and taking care of paperwork has taken a couple of days. PiC and I plan to walk around tomorrow and get our bearings. Grandma’s sister here is involved with the Hue Poets Society. Her deceased husband was Chairman of the Society at one point. She’ll dig through their old publications for me and put me in touch with some writers soon.

Still, I started to think about what it is about being in a relatively unfamiliar setting that inspires transformations in values, routines, etc. Something in it undergirds the allure of the twenty-something round-the-world-backpacker culture. (It’s on my mind as I’m currently surrounded by it at a computer station at a hostel in Singapore.) Length of stay matters. Familiarity with language matters. Reasons for engagement matter. But I think in any case people experience a sense of rejuvenation at one time or another. I certainly feel it, having spent a couple of days back in Viet Nam. This time, in addition, I am beginning to find comfort in my own new way of relating to being in the country. The parental warnings about theft and corruption, bordering on paranoia, I can now push aside to a practical distance in order to engage by my own terms, to apprehend the experiences at more of my own discretion.

With that said, I am overwhelmed. I can imagine how people coming back from the field year experience writer’s block. I understood it conceptually before but now felt it as I rode along on the back of a motorbike, the throngs whizzing past me. I had just come from my cousin’s place, home to a thirty-something couple with lucrative jobs at multinational companies. They have a driver. And iPhones. Then out on the streets there are the newspaper peddlers with sun-dried, sorrowful complexions. I had just skimmed an Oxfam-generated report about the ongoing challenge of urban poverty. Income disparity and class differences will be ever more apparent. How to navigate among and within these worlds as an ethnographer?

Sai Gon Traffic