First in a series.

Vietnamese jazz hands. The multipurpose hand gesture, hands open and raised and swiveled repeatedly at the wrist. Means a bunch of things, including: I don’t have it. It doesn’t work. I don’t want to. I can’t. I don’t know. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. And more. I started out imitating it as a joke, but I’ve found myself using it for real lately. I have a feeling that it’s going to be permanently incorporated into my body language, no matter where I am. It’s just so useful, and kind of fun to do.

Shortly after the protests in Burma started, I emailed a couple of friends I made there, but I hadn’t heard anything back until now. I just got this message:

Hello Tom,

I am so glad to get ur mail. In Burma, gov don’t allow to use
Internet. If so i am very hard to communicate with all of my friends.
I remember you. Yes. Not good condition in Burma. REALLY BAD. I am so
appreciate to remember me and send an email to me. U have been really
kind to me. I have no words to express how am happy to get ur mail.
They killer and they killed even Monks. I think they are evils. I am
fine and safe. But I have lost my ambition to go to [another country].

I feel small. I like to die in these days. I try to encourage myself. I hope
i am getting recover now. Thanks for sending me and remembrance. I
hope we can get in touch by email. . .

Burma breaks my heart. More to say on everything. Today is the 12th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention, by the way. Rallies have been/are being held in cities around the world. Not in Vietnam, of course.

Vietnam, on its way to full membership in the global community.

Admitted to the World Trade Organization. A seat on the United Nations Security Council.

And now, most importantly, Vietnam has its very own celebrity sex tape scandal, featuring Huang Thuy Linh, 19, star of the teen soap opera Vang Anh’s Diaries.

When news of the sex clip infiltrated the gloomy corridors of state-run television–I picture their headquarters in a windowless, concrete citadel–the mandarins at the helm pulled their dusty, comically oversized plug on the show. Clearly, Vietnam is clamoring for nudity. How long can the will of the people be subverted?

The naked and the nude.

Last night I drove past a man who was walking into heavy traffic wearing nothing but sandals. Even weirder, he had a wad of money stuffed in his mouth, the dong bills spilling out like pink and green tongues. At first I thought, crazy, but as I sped away I began to wonder if there was something else going on. Was this a one-man protest, maybe? (Which, in Vietnam, would be truly crazy.) Or perhaps it was some kind of forced public humiliation, like a punishment for trying to steal money from the mob. I don’t know if organized crime even exists in Vietnam, but the scene looked like it could have come straight out of a Takeshi Kitano film.

This was in fact the second case of public nudity I’ve witnessed here recently. A couple of weekends ago, I saw a Western man–a rather, er, endomorphic Western man–on the sidewalk completely naked, just chatting away on his cell phone. I was across the street with some friends on a crowded bar patio; he was standing in front of a hotel–a nice hotel–absorbed in his conversation, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to be fat and naked on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. After a few minutes, however, when he finally noticed the crowd of onlookers gawking, he started to ham it up and began performing in ways that I still wish I could un-see. Movie reference point: early John Waters.

Twice might be a coincidence, but three times will constitute an official trend. Mondo Vietnam? Communist Gomorrah? Will keep you posted.

Yangon, May 04, 2007.

Too much to try and catch up on in one post. It’s been a hectic month for me here in Ho Chi Minh City. Yes: subtly, almost imperceptibly, I’ve stopped saying “Saigon” and have started calling the city by its gray and many-syllabled official name. Ho Chi Minh City. It’s just that I hear most Vietnamese say it that way. I don’t mean humorless party functionaries or war-hardened ideologues (not that I’ve met any), but just people I know, people who are too young to have ever called the city by any other name. Ho Chi Minh City. It sounded so alien and clumsy to me when I was first arrived, but say anything enough times and it starts to feel familiar, to become second nature.

I marvel at human adaptability. What’s in a name? What’s in a place? Time and again while traveling I’ve been struck by how easily one can get used to a new city, or a remote mountain village, or a beach, or an entirely new country, all the time meeting people and leaving people, being alone, being together. On the one hand there is an almost perpetual sense of dislocation, on the other, a remarkable capacity to latch on to things and make them familiar, to make a home of wherever you are. There is something very revealing about the human wiring in all this movement, I think.

And now, from movement to its opposite. Getting settled; working, finding a place to live, opening a bank account, riding a motorbike every day. Oh, how we get used to things. I buy sandwiches and iced coffee and bags of fruit and lotus-seed drinks (delicious!) from street carts without even getting off my motorbike now. I ride in monsoons wearing a blue plastic poncho.

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