What I'm doing here; also, Cambodian history

I don’t think I ever really answered that question in the blog! I decided to come to Vietnam (and Cambodia for 5 weeks) because I knew little of the country except for America's involvement here (and I have a fairly limited understanding of that as well). I also wanted to see another side of Asia, as I had already studied Japan and its language. Also, it's just a thrill to live in a dense city for once! In Ho Chi Minh City (aka Sai Gon), I’m taking a sociology class (Contemporary Vietnamese Society), the equivalent of two semesters of Beginning Vietnamese Language, the History of Indochina, and a political science course called “Nation Building After the Khmer Rouge.” History is the one I wanted to talk about in detail here.

Our professor’s name is Michael Vickery, a septuagenarian scholar on Cambodia. From what I know of his background, he’s an American who’s been living in Southeast Asia for at least several decades. On day one, my first thought was “where did they dig this guy up?”: Vickery looks as if he hiked for 2 weeks through the jungle to get to class. Vickery is bald, white haired, and his skin is splotched all over with different skin tones-- you can tell he's been around alot! To every class he wears what I can only describe as a Chinese-style shirt (think this link without a collar; not the one pictured here) along with tan cargo pants and boots. White hair sprouts up through the neck of his shirt and out his ears. He's still got a pretty incredible memory of historical events, though he does make some slips. Probably his best line was while he was discussing a Cham artifact in one of his slides. Vickery said "this piece was found 10 years ago," only to be corrected by our program coordinator who was also present: "you mean 1978."

Still, Michael Vickery is a well-known expert on the history of Cambodia— he’s shown us photos he took in the 1960s of temples when they were still overgrown with jungle. His scholarship on recent Cambodia history is far more controversial: he considers the Khmer Rouge’s genocide to have been far less a product of a radical conception of Marxism and more peasant revolution. He also contests the official casualty count of the Khmer Rouge genocide, placing it at almost half of what other academics consider it to be. Strange when I sometimes think Vickery looks like he's been tortured by several governments! Be sure to check out the reader reviews for his book Cambodia 1975-1983 on Amazon.com.

Vickery is currently advising the defense counsel to the Khmer Rouge leaders and jailers on tribunal right now. I've been told that he once had Duch (the jailer) as a student!

Our class is currently on hiatus while Vickery is in Cambodia for a month, but when the study abroad group I'm part of moves there for rest of the semester, we’ll resume the course and begin learning about the the 1940s onward— and we’ll also get to visit the site where the tribunals are being held! Still, I don’t know if we’ll get to actually see anything transpire. Should be interesting, so I'll report more then.

As for the class itself, just briefly, it's fascinating when we review parts of history Vickery is clearly well versed in, such as the historiography dealing with 7th and 8th century Cambodia, but the classes on 19th and 20th Century have been a drag, even though I was fascinated by those parts of Vietnam: A History (Amazon needs to pay me for all these links!). Most of our readings are from Vickery himself-- as he tells us, everything else that has been written about SE Asia up to the 15th Century or so is wrong! It's great seeing him rip to shreds the other theories about the region, though his tremendous confidence in his own conclusions worries me; less so when he's talking about the ancient Cham empire, but much more when he has talked about the Khmer Rouge!

Where I am

Instead of writing a blog post this week, I thought I'd make a map (using Google Maps) to give people a sense of where I am in HCMC and where I go throughout the city. Click on the icons, lines, or boxes to see descriptions. To use a better interface and see a full list of the places I marked, follow this link.


It's also worth zooming out all the way to get a sense of perspective and to see two of the placemarks that are further out.


View Larger Map

Not “weird,” but “different”: Part II

I had some new thoughts on adapting to a different culture.

I was with my friends Dave and Lauren in Ho Chi Minh City’s Chinatown on Friday, seeing some of the mosques and Chinese pagodas in the area and just generally enjoying the city life. At this point, we’ve learned some basic Vietnamese and are starting to try out some of the local behavior.

Photos— As we’ve learned from our Vietnamese program coordinator Ky, it’s not actually rude here to take pictures of people without asking (Vietnam seems to be, comparatively, a very casual country). Dave is a great photographer and is taking full use of this freedom to take some great shots of people. On the one hand, I understand that he’s not out of line from their standpoint to be snapping away, but I have a hard time breaking with what I feel is acceptable by American standards. I think this is part of a larger problem I’ll have with “doing as the Romans do.”
(Right: One of Dave's photos of a woman on a boat at the floating market in Chau Doc in the Mekong River Delta.)

Litter— Ho Chi Minh City has tremendous amounts of litter in the streets, to the point where it detracts from what would be otherwise beautiful places. I’m fairly repulsed by the normalcy of littering here, even though along major roadways there’s usually a road crew cleaning up. I’ve heard, however, that some Confucian traditions may be playing into how the Vietnamese regard public space. Apparently, in China the concept of public space has arisen only in recent decades, so I’m told [I really need work on finding better citations!]. As a consequence, the public spaces outside homes are treated like something of a no-man’s-land, with less public regard for keeping the streets clean. I’m still stuck, however, on the fact that dirty streets lead to public health issues and less community pride from my American perspective.

Diet — I had thought that I’d be able to just accept eating meat while in Vietnam, but in the last week it’s become more and more difficult to continue doing so because of my reservations about the use of animal products. It doesn’t help that my diet is now more out of my hands as my homestay gets underway! I think I may attempt to go vegetarian by the end of the week, and it may be somewhat feasible with egg and cheese dishes and fresh fruit always close at hand. However, I've had something of a mental block doing so: after so long being a vegan, I see all animal products as being morally equivalent. So, if I'm eating cheese, I feel like there's not really a jump to eating meat as well!
(Right: Fish farm in the Mekong River. We're in sort of a floating structure in the middle of the river.)

All told, I was hoping that while studying abroad I’d be able to adapt to this new culture, but I’m surprised to find myself resisting like this. Our sociology classwork has been helping me with this dilemma tremendously, however. One concept that helps is that of participant observation, which entails “subjecting yourself, your own body, and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physically and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation, or their work situation, or their ethnic situation.” So now, instead of feeling like some kind of ethnocentrist for sticking to my cultural norms, now I just feel like a poor sociologist!

Primer on the Vietnamese language

A couple of friends have asked about the Vietnamese language (tiếng Việt), so I thought I’d write a little bit about it.

The easy part: since the French came to town, the Vietnamese language has been written in the Latin alphabet (esp. since the 20th cent.). Since Vietnamese came into its own from the Mon-Khmer languages in about the 15th Century, it had been written in Chinese characters. Though Vietnamese isn't based on Mandarin or Cantonese, apparently about 40% of the language (esp. technical terms) are the result of cross-pollination. The Latin alphabet makes learning the language a little easier, and it's easier to limp through situations because of it.

The hard part: The alphabet includes accented and unaccented characters (a, ă, â, b, c, d, đ, e, ê, g, h…), sometimes with other accents piled on top, which represent the 6 tones of the Vietnamese language (ă could become ằ, ẳ, ẵ, ắ, ặ ). Pretty intimidating! Moreover, there are North and South Vietnamese distinctions in pronunciation that I don’t always catch, and some consonant combinations make much different sounds (tr comes off more as a ch, i.e. for tea, Trà sounds more like Chà, but it's a little more complicated than that).

Below: Picture of the Vietnamese keyboard

Below: Picture of the Vietnamese keyboard when a vowel (in this case, ă) is pressed, triggering the tone-input layout.

It also sucks when you’re ordering food, and you know exactly what you’re saying, and everyone else at the table knows what you’re ordering, and the waiter looks at you completely blankly! So, my goal for the semester is just to be able to sound out words.

My conclusion is pretty much that the Vietnamese language is designed to confuse foreign invaders. Kind of like how the Japanese don’t have many street names.

If there’s an upside to learning this language, it’s that it encourages me (and other students) to put lots of effort into adopting a more local accent, and not unemphatic American tone that you hear in every language class back in Arizona. It is a little demoralizing, however, to be able to speak pretty good Japanese with my Vietnamese teacher (who taught in Japan) while I still can't carry out a conversation in Vietnamese!

Hẹn gặp lại! (See you later!)

Not "weird," but "different"

The theme of week one in Vietnam was not “weird,” but “different.” There are many things I’m trying to wrap my head around in Vietnam (more on those later), and I find myself and others who I’m with have an impulse to call the inexplicable parts of Vietnam “weird.” Maybe there’s no harm in some minor phraseology, but I feel like the word carries a judgment that whatever is inexplicable by American standards must be wrong, or at least undesirable. So, my goal has been to accept the reality that I’m in a new country, a new continent, and to start accepting that things here will just be different. Since about two weeks have passed since I came to the country, some of my initial shock has worn off. Still, here’s some of what made me think of not “weird,” but “different”:

• Buildings. Apparently property taxes in Vietnam are, or once were, levied based on street frontage (I am still researching this more). As a result, on any block you'll see over a dozen extremely narrow buildings squeezed up against each other. On the edges of HCMC, I even saw a few 15-foot wide, 50-foot long, and 5 story tall buildings with two very blank side walls glaring back at me. Despite lacking a certain aesthetic (by any standard!), at least the growth of Vietnam’s cities isn’t leading to precipitous drops in density. I was just reading earlier this week about how Vietnam’s arable land is being chewed up by cities, while around 70% of the population still relies on agriculture for a living. That’ll be a transition to watch!

• Meat. This was one 'different' thing I saw coming, especially considering the diet I left behind in the US. Still, the idea of eating duck fetuses and blood cackle takes some getting used to. The latter is a dish of congealed pig’s blood cooked into tofu-like cubes. It's dark blood-red, and has the recognizable taste of pork despite its soft texture. I also had chopped snake and snake wine the first week. To be honest, I find myself trying to outdo the omnivores (though I'm one too now) by eating everything without flipping out!

• The lack of pedestrians in Ho Chi Minh City. Even in a dense city like Ho Chi Minh City (pop. around 7m) you won’t actually see many people traveling on foot. There’s no rapid transit (subways, rail, bus rapid transit; there are local buses, however), which makes getting around the city without a vehicle much more inconvenient. That's not to say that the sidewalks are empty though. The fact that literally 90+% of the city gets around by motorbike means that the sidewalks are always piled up with parked bikes along with street food vendors. On a related note, HCMC is getting me to change my perspective on freeways after seeing a couple of rush hours in a city without them!

So is anything weird?

Yeah, I think so. While gender roles appear to be softer in a large city like Saigon, I have a hard time adjusting to a place where women are expected to handle domestic affairs and the deck is stacked for men when it comes to courtship. Hopefully I'll get a firmer grounding on the situation in Vietnam once my sociology class starts in another week and when I start my homestay.