I don't think I ever thought that i'd be in a rowboat in the Mekong

Mr. Hung picked us up at 8 a.m. to travel out of Saigon to the Mekong River. It’s about an hour and a half by car and he spent that time telling us about the area. It is 40,000 square kilometers and mostly flat. While it is a gamble to live and grow crops in the north of Vietnam because of typhoons, it is easy to do so in the Mekong Delta where it is possible to get three crop cycles in each year. 12 million tons of rice is exported from this region each year, and people also support themselves fishing primarily for catfish and tilapia and growing fruit. The river itself is very long; it wends through China, Tibet, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Its tributary in the city is the Saigon River and currently it has a lovely river walk. Mr. Hung says that 10 years ago the Japanese government financially assisted the Vietnamese with a cleanup of the river, evacuating the slums that had grown up around it and expanding the road along it. As a result, now there is only a small area of slums along the river toward the edge of the city.

It is currently monsoon season, though Mr. Hung says that is not what it is called in Vietnam. While the people along the Mekong River do experience flooding during this time of year, they call it instead “the floating season” and they appreciate the gifts the weather brings. There is a great respect for the flood: the waters clean, fertilize and promote growth.

There are several delicacies in the region and he forewarned us that if we saw Rice-Field Rabbit on a menu in the Delta, we should be aware that term is slang for rat, but we should also be aware that rice-field rats are quite different from city rats because they are clean, plump and have only ever eaten rice throughout their lives. He also told us snake wine takes like cognac despite being made by soaking a king cobra, cobra, rattlesnake, sidewinder and viper in rice water with herbs for 100 days. They call it Vietnamese Viagra because of the boost it is known to give men. Something Mr. Hung made clear throughout the day was that there is very little wasted in production here in Vietnam. Every part of the coconut has a use and a re-use. Every part of a grain of rice has a use and a re-use. The husks are used as cooking fuel and fertilizer. Almost every bit of land is purposed and repurposed as well. Rice farmers will often farm ducks because they can exist on the same plot of land and eat bugs and their dung fertilizes the ground making it a rich place for the rice to grow.

When encountering people near the Mekong, Mr. Hung says their first question is often “how old are you?” because this helps them know how to refer to you with respect. People who are older are called uncle or aunt and people who are the same age are called brother or sister. Up until about 10 years ago, the word for Russian was synonymous with the word for foreigner because Russians were the only visitors here. As a result sometimes now people will refer to tourists as Russians by accident.

Travel is an excellent teacher and so many of my assumptions are being challenged. Remembering how sick I felt on the six hour drive from Oaxaca City to the coast and how terrible the dirt roads were traveling from Antigua to Pana in Guatemala, I purchased Dramamine for this trip only to discover not only roads but nicely paved toll roads. Along those toll roads are rice farms and here and again we saw graves. Mr. Hung says that everyone in Saigon is cremated not because there isn’t an emphasis on ancestor worship but because there is no room for bodies; however, out in the country families often bury their dead at home in the garden where it is easy to tend to them.

When we arrived to the Mekong, Mr. Hung brought us on a boat across the river. As soon as we climbed on, he got out a machete and whacked away at coconuts so that first we could drink the water and then—whack, whack, whack again—we could scoop out the immature gelatinous coconut fruit from the inside.  While it was clear he had done the same thing many times before, it is disconcerting to have someone whack a machete blade at the floor of a rickety wooden boat that supports you. The river is brown now because it is the floating season but he said that it is typically a brilliant green. It has water hyacinth growing everywhere and is filled with both ferries and fishing boats. The vegetation is lush and we took the boat across the river to the island village of Ben Tre where we spent several hours on Dragon Island. First we wandered through coconut gardens and Mr. Hung showed us grapefruit trees, cocoa plants and lemon grass and the he brought us to an outdoor kitchen where a woman was making a coconut treat similar to a crepe that was delicious and another that hardens and is similar to a waffle cone in an American ice cream shop. We went on to what was essentially a jungle factory producing coconut candy, essentially a soft caramel made from coconut water and sugar. We also tasted coconut wine which is wine in name only and more like grain alcohol.

We rented bicycles and toured the villages of Quoi Son, Phu An Hoa and An Khanh that way. Later in life when people ask me “have you been to…” I might not know that I have because the names of these places are hard to anchor in my brain. The lanes on Dragon Island were narrow and we shared them with pedestrians, dogs, motorbikes and cars. Despite the fact that Mr. Hung was in the lead, often on his phone and he never once yielded to another vehicle, there were several moments I suspected would be my last as motorbikes zoomed past on my left and right. We stopped for sugarcane juice and saw how the cane was squeezed time and again until absolutely dry and we stopped to see a business that spun rope from the thread in coconut shells. It was lovely to see the homes in this part of the world and to see, much closer than we had while on the highway, graves in front gardens in the Vietnamese jungle. We ended our ride at small tea shop that served local seasonal fruits and there we tried rat hair fruit, dragon eye fruit, jackfruit, grapefruit and pineapple. Rat hair fruit is so called because it is a reddish brown color and has hairy tendrils around its outside and dragon eye fruit because when you suck the meat from the pit what is left looks like… a dragon’s eye. They’re rather literal in their naming of things here.

We left the bicycles at the tea shop and took a row boat along a water palm creek back to the river. That experience may just be the Christmas card picture this year, but who knows what the rest of this trip will hold. In some moments it has been hard to reckon our experience here with the settings we’ve been given by American films about the war, but on the boat on the creek, it was easy to imagine what it must have been like for American GIs here 40 years ago. At the same time, the reality of it was absolutely serene.

We transferred to the a bigger boat when we reached the river and had lunch on Phoenix Island (there are four: Tortoise, Phoenix, Dragon and Unicorn—I’m not sure if when they were named the Vietnamese people believed tortoises to be magical creatures or if they believed the phoenix, dragon and unicorn were real but there is an incongruity here in ttohe names). Lunch on Phoenix Island was unbelievable, as all of our meals have been. Mr. Hung didn’t eat with us, just deposited us at a table and left us in the hands of a waiter who brought course after course, each bigger than the last. The first thing he brought was a plate with a bamboo stand designed to hold an entire deep fried elephant ear fish upright so you can see all of its glory. It might be a little smaller than a football, but not much, and there is table service as the waiter soaks rice paper, then wraps cucumber, pineapple, and parts of the fish in it and I say parts because I don’t mean to suggest he filleted the fish. He just scraped skin and flesh and bones and all into it so: parts. It was delicious. The combination of the pineapple and cucumber was refreshing and clean tasting and the fish was a sharp contrast. Our second course was prawns with ground salt, chili of some sort and peanuts. The third was beef soup. The fourth was an omelet with shrimp and mushrooms. The fifth was sticky rice and something like tortilla chips but made from rice and sweetened. The people who know us know that we are good eaters. We’ll eat a lot of whatever we are given but we cannot keep up with the volume and frequency of these meals and all of the dishes that are served at each one of them. I feel guilty leaving so much behind on every meal table, but I haven’t been hungry since we boarded the plane.

After lunch, we took the boat back to the other side of the river and drove back to Saigon. Along the way, we listened to Mr. Hung as he told stories and answered our questions. We asked about the poor in Vietnam and how veterans are treated. They do have very poor people, he told us, and they collect in shanty towns along the rivers in Vietnam because there is constant access to food in those areas. The Buddhists organize a volunteer corps of teachers to try to improve the lifestyles of these people and some avail themselves of the opportunity and others do not. The volunteer teachers also work with veterans and there are vocational centers specifically for vets to attend for job training and they are given priority when it comes to job placement.

While education is free in Vietnam, Mr. Hung indicated that the national budget for education is very small so class sizes are big (50 students to a class) and parents are asked to pay a great deal of money each year, sometimes monthly and there are special assessments if the school needs a new copier or air conditioning. All too familiar. He said that hospitals are also overloaded and sometimes there are two patients for every bed. If a patient agrees to pay cash for their medical care, they receive more immediate attention. Mr. Hung’s wife cooks food for indigent patients.

The last question I asked Mr. Hung before we parted ways was to let me know what I could tell my students about American involvement in the war. He told us that propaganda throughout the Communist Party was dense about “American henchmen” having invaded the country but to expand his answer he gave us a short history lesson about the relationship between the two countries dating back to WW2 when Japan invaded and occupied Vietnam and the loss of life was catastrophic, so when American pilots were shot down Ho Chi Minh delivered them to the Chinese government instead of the Japanese. He also indicated that the first of Ho Chi Minh’s armies was trained by the OSS. Ultimately, he believes that the South Vietnamese would always be grateful that the Americans came to their side in the war against the north when it seemed no one else would.

We said our goodbyes to Mr. Hung late in the day—he was a dear and wonderful tour guide and I would recommend his services to anyone traveling in this part of the world--and we waited in the coffee shop at our hotel for another visit from Mrs. Chi so we could complete the payment for this tour. Afterwards, we walked around the neighborhood, braving crossing the street for the first time without Mr. Hung, Mrs. Chi or Mr. Hao by our sides and wandered through the night market. Every evening in this neighborhood people set up tents and sell all manner of goods in the street. Markets are surprisingly similar from Panajachel to Merida to Saigon, but there is an electricity and energy to the market being held at night and in the middle of a major metropolitan area and in a street that is not closed to through traffic. The rains came and people bustled to cover their wares with plastic tarps and we headed back to our hotel to get some sleep in preparation for our flight to Buon Ma Thuoc the next morning. Who knew there was an airport in Buon Ma Thuoc? Who knew there was a place called Buon Ma Thuoc?

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.