Our itinerary for our full day in Hoi An said “easy day” and we had this single day in the middle of our trip to do as we pleased and talk to each other and experience quiet. Everything about this trip has been amazing, but it hasn’t been easy. For an introvert to be (trapped) in a car with strangers all day, have dinner every night with people who feel the need to articulate every thought and to have one’s time taken from sun up until sun down is exhausting. I’m trying to hold at bay my idiosyncrasies while we are here but here they are magnified and I realize how rigid I am about how I do things at home. This trip isn’t long enough for me to believe that it will necessarily change my behaviors at home, but I will at least be more aware of the fact that there are so many other ways to do things and life continues apace.

We spent our day wandering in the Hoi An markets by the river and ducking in and out of shops. We found what may have been some terrific political propaganda prints but the woman in the store refused to translate for us what they said, I can only assume because she didn’t want to offend us. It’s hard to explain the purpose of my trip to people who only speak a little English so she couldn’t have known we were looking for something that just might be offensive.

As much as people ask if I have children, people talk to Chris about his facial hair and in the market a tiny woman ran up to him and said she would be happy to give him a shave. She said he would look 10 years younger. We didn’t take her up on that magic trick but it has become clear that his goatee isn’t the norm here and we haven’t seen a single Asian man with any sort of facial hair. I am comforted to learn that when my nail women at home comment on my eyebrows it is a cultural comment because women in the market ran up to me with thread in hand offering to do my whole face. We’re both trying not to let any of this affect our relatively healthy self esteem. One thing happened the other day that I hope to never forget and when something like this happens it’s hard to not be happy despite the obvious implications: two little girls saw Chris and I walking down the street and squealed in delight, first jumping up and down and then running up to us and kissing our big stomachs. So dear and also so different from home where children don’t approach strangers.

It’s possible to have a dress made from scratch in the market here. There are big dress books that one can look through, pick a style and then there is a wall of fabric to choose from; another woman told me she could make me a pair of leather shoes to fit my feet while I waited. Too late I realized I

probably should have taken her up on this offer, but we moved on.

We were able, finally, to choose our own food for lunch and had bahn my—Vietnamese sandwiches, and it was nice for us to have a simple lunch-sized meal. We walked up and down the riverfront and in and out of alleyways for the rest of the afternoon and it was good to meander.

Our new tour guide for the area surrounding Hue was Mr. T and he met us at 8 a.m. in the lobby of our hotel. I’m honoring his privacy and not using his name in these posts. Originally, when he saw me taking notes he said that was fine as long as I didn’t work for a newspaper. Later, he asked that I not use his name in any publication of any sort because “people still watch” and he could get in trouble with the Communist Party. Mr. T served as a combat interpreter for the United States Army in 1967 when he was 17 years old. He worked in the Hue region and served the 101^st Airborne Division—the Screaming Eagles—until 1972. When Chris asked him how he was treated after the war, he said simply “I am still alive.” He struggled to find work after the war and carried bags of rice for many years to raise his children, all of whom went to school. Now he is 66 years old which he says is very, very old. He has many stories, some heartbreaking and some heartwarming and on this leg of our journey I think Chris and I would be happy to just sit and listen to him and forego seeing any sites because his telling of his own experience is captivating.

That said, he did bring us by small boat to another UnescoWorld Heritage site: the ancient city of Hoi An, an island village called Kim Bong.  About 150 people live on this tiny island and carve wood. It was named a heritage site in 1999 and that has had both positive and negative results. Unesco gave the village $4000 to boost their economy and create wood carving collectives. Before this happened few people had jobs and now everyone does so that is a good thing. The flipside of being an “ancient village” is that the people are not allowed to renovate their homes and perhaps the word renovate suggests some HGTV project that is not what these people have in mind. In order to repair any damage their homes sustained from flooding, for instance, they must get approval of the government in order to do so. It’s kind of like living in a FLW home in Oak Park and wanting a fancier kitchen than you’re allowed to have except that these people are cooking over fire pits so not JUST like that. The boat trip back and forth from the village was eye opening. We saw ferries on which people were loaded with their motorbikes and also boats full of chickens and other products being carried back and forth. Almost all of the buildings here have shrines right outside the door, including businesses, and Mr. T says that is an area in which the spirits of the dead can stay close to the living and that most homes also have a worship table indoors at which ancestors are honored. Incense is lit everywhere in honor of the dead here.

We left Hoi An and traveled by car up the Central Coast along the South China Sea to the Danang province. I have to say in print that I never in my life thought I would be anywhere near the South China Sea. Dana Delaney fans who were watching soaps in the late 80s will know this area from the American television show China Beach and now I know this area from having actually visited China Beach. It is breathtakingly beautiful, with the Marble Mountains on one side and the sparkling blue sea on the other, and as a result it is being built up now as a resort community. Airplane hangars are still present and empty, which is extremely unusual but have been kept for the possibility of future use. They are surrounded now by golf courses, casinos and resorts and Malaysians, South Koreans and Japanese people vacation here with increasing frequency in addition to it being a disembarkment port for cruise ships. We were lucky to see China Beach from two vantage points, from sea level and from high above. We continued up the coastal road to a pagoda on Monkey Mountain, from which ^th of June according to the lunar calendar and that is a prayer day, many, many people were on their hands and knees, foreheads kissing the stone in front of them to honor the Buddha. The plaza in front of the temple looks down to China Beach from above and it is equally stunning from both points.

towered a 67 meter tall statue of the female Buddha. This is visible from far afield and reminded us of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer (which we’ll have to go and visit next, I guess, to compare). This is the tallest Bodhisattva of Mercy statue in Vietnam and inside a different Buddha is worshiped on each of its 17 stories. The interior was, unfortunately, closed while we were there but we did enter the Linhh Ung-Bai But Pagoda and because it was the 13

There is very much industry and construction in Da Nang and Mr. T believes that in 20 years it will look like Hong Kong. There are buildings going up everywhere so it’s easy to imagine a neon lit city here soon, but, at the same time, there are rows of men six deep standing at what looks like 45 degree angles from the sand hauling in fishing nets by hand. We crossed the famous Dragon Bridge of Da Nang, which I had seen in pictures the last time I had my nails done because my manicurist is from Da Nang. We were there during the day, but at night, the head of the dragon at the end of the bridge breathes fire. Da Nang currently has a population of 1 million people and is growing faster than Hanoi and Saigon. We stopped for lunch there and had My Quang—chicken and noodles.

We continued along to the Hai Van Pass, where we climbed up to what remains of a French bunker just above what remains of an American bunker and from which it feels like you can see the whole coast line and all of the South China Sea. Before we arrived here, many people asked how we thought we would be received because of the war. Now I think that question was asked through the lens of imperialism, by citizens of a super power. It is hard for us to understand what it must be like to live in a country that has had so little autonomy for so long. Also, Chris and I knew next to nothing about the history of this place and now know that the Vietnamese—if they looked back, which Mr. T says they do not—have many people to resent: the Chinese who were here for a thousand years and with whom there is still tension at the northern border, the French who were here for 100 years, the Japanese who were here for only 18 months but in that time 2 million Vietnamese starved to death. The 1954 Geneva Accords separated Vietnam into two countries: North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh and South Vietnam led by Ngo Dinh Diem, divided at the 17^th Parallel. A bridge between the two new countries remained open for 100 days so the Vietnamese people could decide in which country they wanted to live. Mr. T keeps reminding us it was a civil war before we arrived and that we arrived to help the South Vietnamese army protect their country and their democracy from the North Vietnamese Army and it was a civil war after we left.

Mr. T sometimes talks about the war and sometimes talks about what things are like today. For the last 20 years, Vietnam has been the number one exporter of rice in the world and is the second exporter of cashews and coffee (behind Brazil). Their other big industry is rubber and Vietnam is the third highest producer of latex in the world.

We drove past the former site of Camp Campbell, where it not possible to walk because the United Nations is still looking for landmines there, and made one last stop for the day at the site of Camp Eagle, in use from 1968 until 1972 and then abandoned. It was occupied by the 1^st Cavalry Division, the 3^rd Brigade of the 82^nd Airborne and 101^st Airborne Division. This is where Mr. T served during the war. Nothing is left, it is a quiet place and the land is now used as a cemetery which seems fitting as he stands and looks in the distance and says “here, friends died in my arms.” Each of our tour guides has had a rich personality in different ways and I’m sure there’s a work of fiction in my future about them intersecting in some way, but I’m so glad we have this time with Mr. T. He has been witness to so much and it is a gift that he is willing to share what he has seen with us. 

Chris doesn't really fit in the VC tunnel...

We slept dense, deep sleep and woke in time for a quick breakfast in our hotel restaurant before heading out for the day, which meant we started the day faced with dozens of choices of dishes most Americans would consider dinner fare. Chris discovered a fondness for sticky rice and I’ll need to continue having pineapple jam on my toast moving forward.

Mr. Hung met us in our hotel lobby precisely at 8 and presented each of us with a quite nice portfolio for our travel documents (a bit bigger than the one we currently use which doesn’t always fit all of our documents if we have more than one leg in our journey) and a phone we could use while in Vietnam if at any time we were dissatisfied with our service or had questions our guide(s) were unable to answer. Part of my initial worry about this trip—that nagging anxiety that kept me from sleeping restfully on the plane--was that we would arrive and all of my planning would be for naught… there would be no tour guide to meet us, the hotel arrangements would have been in print only: there is a degree of faith we exercise when making purchases via the internet; it could be a heavy investment in illusion. Now that we are here and it all appears to be real, I couldn’t recommend V’explore more highly. Mr. Hung is an excellent guide.

We are staying close to the center of town and driving through the neighborhood this morning revealed the traffic and congestion and electricity of being downtown. There are 10 million people living in Saigon and there are 7 million motorbikes/scooters registered in the city, as well. Motorbikes are the primary mode of transportation here and this morning it seemed all 7 million were crowding the streets at once. People carry an unbelievable amount of heft with them on the back of their motorbikes… boxes bigger than the drivers, cages of puppies, trees. Mr. Hung mentioned that one must pass a test to get a license to ride a motorbike, which suggests there are some rules of the road to be followed, but they aren’t immediately apparent and crossing the street as a pedestrian seems a death defying act. He said there are three rules: be confident, go slow but keep moving and don’t look back. I amended his list and added a fourth: stay close to Mr. Hung’s side. He said the motorbikes are parked in the street or on the sidewalk during the day but are brought inside overnight to guard against theft. He keeps three (one for himself, his wife and his son) in his living room next to his couch overnight and said that larger families have to fill their living rooms and kitchens with their bikes overnight and it doesn’t leave room for much else. Typically men use motorbikes and women use scooters and women are completely shrouded on the street from head to toe: floppy hats, sunglasses, scarves covering the faces and necks, long sleeves, gloves and pants or skirts down to their ankles, often with socks and sandals or heels. Mr. Hung suggested they looked like colorful ninjas and said many tourists ask him if they are Muslim. In fact, the standard of beauty here motivates women to protect their skin from the sun in order to keep their skin as light as possible so whenever women are outside they cover themselves as completely as possible.

We spent an hour and a half in the car moving outside of the city to visit the Cu Chi tunnels north of Saigon and Mr. Hung presented us with an overwhelming amount of facts and information: during the war, the Saigon Airport tied with O’Hare for busiest because it continued to be a commercial airport while also being commandeered for military use. The Chinese dominated Vietnam for 1000 years before French missionaries arrived in 1857. They were not well received and quickly the French government sent troops to protect the missionaries and then colonized the region. The French influence remains today in the Vietnamese language which uses the Roman characters the French brought with them. There are 29 letters in the Vietnamese alphabet and six distinct tones but combinations of tones make it seem like there are even more. For instance, the word “ma” means ghost, but, mom, grave, horse and seedling depending on the tonal pronunciation. When Vietnam converted to Roman characters at the start of the 20^th Century, it was the first Asian country to do so. The surrounding countries of Cambodia and Laos still use Sanskrit characters brought to them by Indian influence. We also learned—because there is so much we didn’t know about this region of the world—that the term Indochina, which refers to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, is so-called because it is the geographic place in the world where Buddhism from China meets and combines with Buddhism from India creating its own unique brand of Indochinese Buddhism.

Like so many conflicts that lead to so much death, the roots of the Vietnam War are complex and deep. The 1954 Geneva Agreement expelled the French and divided North and South Vietnam into two separate countries. Mr. Hung asked us to remember that it was a civil war and that 90% of the people in Vietnam at the time had strong ties to both sides in the war. Like our own Civil War, it was not uncommon for families to be divided geographically between the north and the south and to find themselves fighting on opposite sides during the war which lead to an emotional devastation different than the political one. There were also other tensions in the region: it mattered a great deal whose communism a country followed. Cambodia for instance was under Chinese rule and Vietnam was under the rule of the Soviet Union and this created conflict between the two neighboring countries. Ultimately American involvement was driven by the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the South Vietnamese have a different attitude about the Americans who fought here than do the North Vietnamese.

The Cu Chi Tunnels represent the longest tunnel system in all the world and were created and used by the Viet Cong in order to combat American and South Vietnamese troops. Using the tunnels it was possible for a very few soldiers to appear to be a much larger group because one man could fire on their enemy from one tunnel opening and then dash underground and fire from the opposite direction making it seem that a platoon was surrounded. Each VC soldier was issued a rifle and a hoe to fight and to dig and their days and nights alternated between fighting and digging. The tunnels were narrow—wide enough only for one man at a time to move through in a crouch—and women took the displaced soil generated by the creation of the tunnels and moved it bomb sites where there was so much displaced soil it was easy to masquerade a little more. In addition to building the tunnels, the area was also booby-trapped with several different types of traps, many of which were also poisoned using snake venom. The tunnels are in three levels: the first is only 10 feet deep, the second 20 and the last 30 feet below ground. In order to foil American military dogs which were used to scent out the tunnels, the VC collected the cigarette butts of American GIs and mixed them into Gillette shaving cream and sprayed that mixture at the base of the entrances and air holes. When the dogs came by, they only identified American GI scents and not VC so did not alert their masters to the tunnels. There’s no question the VC were clever in these guerilla tactics and Mr. Hung showed us how they repurposed American weapons against American soldiers… cutting open undetonated bombs in order to make use of the combustible gun powder within and melting the metals into tools for booby-traps among other things. We went into the tunnels but only for a very short segment and I’m glad because it was overwhelming in more than one way. It was a tiny space and dark and extremely hot and required me to crouch and Chris to practically crawl because he’s so tall, but it was also painful to consider the literal depths people will go to in order to protect themselves and in doing so harm others.

After the tunnel tour, we stopped for hot green tea and a regional treat: boiled strips of tapioca dipped in ground salt, peanuts, sugar and sesame. It was delicious and while we ate, Mr. Hung told us about how his mother would send him this comfort food when he was in a Communist prison for six months 29 years ago. He later learned she was only able to do that because she sold her wedding ring in order to afford extra food to send him.

In the car on the way back to Saigon, Mr. Hung talked both about his own history and contemporary politics in Vietnam. He considers himself lucky because he was a star basketball player in high school and in 1979 when he was a senior, students were mobilized to fight in the Cambodian War. Because of his athleticism, he was able to continue playing basketball and was not required to fight. His English is excellent because he learned it in school. When he was a student, it was required that everyone learn English and French in addition to Vietnamese. That changed in 1975 when speaking English was considered a sign of capitalism and Russian was a required language instead. That has changed again with the “door opening” in 1989 and now more people speak English than ever before. He considers that the time from 1975 until 1989 was filled with nothing but propaganda and talked a bit about censorship during that time. Radio was censored but Mr. Hung’s father found ways to listen to BBC and VOA underground so his family had access to Western ideas and culture. He loves music and sang a lot of bits of songs when we were together with him. He would sing Cielito Lindo when he was young but he told people it was a Cuban song and not a Mexican one. Today, he says things are different. While the technical name of the country is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and it is a monoparty system with that single party being the Communist Party, he described the country like an egg. The shell—so thin but surrounding the whole—is Communism. There are 92 million people in Vietnam and only 4% of them belong to the Communist Party. The yolk is all the people who live inside the shell and the yolk is Capitalism. He did say they are still watching. You’ll have no trouble if you visit an anti-Communist website on the internet but you’ll have a great deal of trouble if you post comments on that website and the trouble will be surprisingly immediate. Currently, the Vietnamese people are allowed access to Facebook and YouTube and the same unwritten rules apply there.

We stopped at a rubber plantation on the way back to the city. Rubber trees are like maple trees in that latex drips out of them the same way syrup drips and it is collected much the same way. Instead of tapping a tree, grooves are cut into the bark and the latex seeps out that way. Until 1975, Michelin owned all of the rubber forests in Vietnam; since 1975, they are owned by the government.

Mr. Hung brought us to the Palace Hotel for a buffet lunch when we returned to Saigon and there must have been fifty choices. We had spring rolls and pork with noodles and dumplings and stews and porridges and sweet soup and were stuffed. During lunch as we talked, I realized the flaw in my fellowship goals. I wanted to come here to learn about the Vietnamese perspective on the war to better teach my students but now I know I’ve been foiled by my own assumptions because, of course, there is no one Vietnamese perspective and Mr. Hung drove that point home.

After lunch we went to the Reunification Palace, which is the sight of the former Presidential Palace

built by the French and bombed during the coup against Diem (Mr. Hung says “Everyone knows CIA kill him.”) then rebuilt in the 1960s and renamed in the 1970s when the goal was reuniting North and South Vietnam into a single country. It was there that we saw the radio room where the last telegram of the war was sent: “Communists arrived already. We surrendered. Goodbye.” On the night of the fall of Saigon, when the Vietnamese listened to the radio to learn what was happening every station was playing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” They later learned this was a signal to the Americans to evacuate. About so many of these things Mr. Hung says “I never forget.”

As overwhelming to me as the Cu Chi Tunnels was our trip to the War Remnants Museum. Before we went, Mr. Hung warned us that it was full of propaganda and upsetting to some people. There were four galleries, each with a different theme: Historic Truths, Requiem—Photo Collection of the U.S. Aggressive War in Vietnam, Aggression—War Crimes and Effects of Agent Orange. The museum walls are covered with photos and the captions leave nothing to a person’s interpretation. It’s an excellent lesson in language: what effect does it have when the Viet Cong is referred to as the Liberation Army when, from Mr. Hung’s perspective, the Americans were attempting to help liberate the South Vietnamese from the VC? Still, the photos reveal a devastation in which we took part and they left me saddened by the disregard for human life that emerges during war.

We ended our tour with stops at the Saigon Post Office—designed by the famous French architect Eiffel and the Cathedral of Notre Dame for which every stone was imported from France. It was no small irony that when we stopped in the plaza there to look at the CIA building everyone would recognize from the iconic photo of Americans loading into a helicopter on the roof following the fall of Saigon that there was a man begging for money with a sign (in English) that said he was an Agent Orange victim and in need of help.

Mr. Hung deposited us at our hotel eight hours after he picked us up and shortly after Mrs. Chi and Mr. Hao from V’explore picked us up to take us to dinner to make us feel welcome in Vietnam. We went to a traditional Hue restaurant offering dishes popular in the middle of the country and we had plates and plates of family style dishes including tiny rice gelatin cups with shrimp, steamed rice paper with shrimp, fresh spring rolls, vermicelli soup with beef, fried spring rolls with noodles, beer and tangerine juice. The instructions are to put fish sauce on everything and enjoy. Mrs. Chi served each of us which made me uncomfortable at first but then Mr. Hao broke the tension by having a good laugh about how at least she didn’t have to do the dishes since we were dining out. Her eyes got wide when Chris said that we both cook and wash dishes in our home. She said it was a lot to do in Vietnam that women are now in the workforce and still are responsible for the household chores.

It was a good long day full of information and new experiences and possibly we’re still reeling from the plane and then the other plane because we were both sound asleep within minutes of getting back from dinner.