TADIOTO

I’ve had a little accident and haven’t been able to keep this site updated.  I will try in the next days - about hanging out with artists here, and about my accident, which allowed a glimpse into the health care system at one hospital in Ha Noi.  It is also about friends and neighbors I am lucky to have in Ha Noi.

For now, this: 

Since moving to Ha Noi eight months ago, I get asked whether I miss America or not.

I do my friends, and particularly Asian American friends and colleagues: I often saw them and worked with them in the past ten years. We believe in each other, and felt a necessary solidarity, even if sometimes we differ culturally, ethnically, socially and more. Other than that, I miss London, or Essaouira, Morocco, more.

There isn’t an easy explanation for this fact. But the comfort I felt as a San Franciscan was rooted in the fact that as diverse as we are, Asian Americans come together and support each other – we celebrate each other the way birds fly in flocks across a vast sky. We celebrate our own presence in America, and we form communities.

The communities we’ve built are residential and commercial, a physical space such as the Chinatowns, Little Saigons, and Japantowns, from Boston to Honolulu, from Washington, D.C., to Seattle. Otherwise, we group together around common causes, whether it’s about raising our voice in the media, combatting stereotypes, or sharing professional concerns.

America’s landscape keeps changing with the establishment of these Chinatowns, Japantowns, or the Little Saigons and Koreatowns. In these neighborhoods, immigrants from Asia nurture their first steps—and their first dreams—in America, the way Irish and Polish immigrants once built communities and new identities in Manhattan or Milwaukee.

With whatever English and job skills, some immigrants struggle to put together a life in their new land, adopting new customs as they try to maintain old ones. Once known as ghettos, these ethnic districts would often transform into fantasy destinations for tourists, from Ohio or Minnesota, who come looking for the odd gifts, an exotic meal, a souvenir to remember a trip. It is a trip abroad, without leaving the U.S.

Americans stay home. They aren’t forced to be immigrants or refugees. And so there are no Americatowns in Asia or elsewhere in the world. To be sure, America is abroad. There are Hollywood images and Coca-Cola signs at the Singapore malls. Wal Marts and the New York Times in Beijing and Shanghai, a Kentucky Fried Chicken downtown Ho Chi Minh City.But who’s ever heard of an Americatown?

American Peace Corps volunteers stay abroad for a year or two, supposedly immersed in the local community. They aren’t numerous enough to build an Americatown for themselves. The closest one can come to an Americatown would be a shopping mall, an American trade or diplomatic club, or an illusion called Dysneyland. These don’t come with dive restaurants, or sweatshops. They come with a golf course, and Asians seen at such places are usually of the elite class, friends of American businesspeople or diplomats. Otherwise they’re drivers and house-cleaners. They aren’t tourists looking for an American souvenir.

I’ve been to American libraries and cultural centers in a couple of Asian cities. They are run by the US embassy, or the US Information Service: well-appointed, air conditioned chambers of glass and steel. The kind of place where you feel you should be holding a cigar in one hand and a champagne glass in the other. These aren’t so much ghettos, but golden ghettos, the equivalent of the British or French highland resorts in cool and picturesque places dotting Malaysia, India and Viet Nam.

Each year while living in the U.S., I’ve continued to watch the Lunar New Year parade snaking from downtown to Chinatown, as colorful and noisy as Macy’s Thanskgiving Day Parade in New York. And I think, wouldn’t it be great if America could do the same in Asia? Start a parade from Americatown, and snake your way past the main streets of Hanoi and Tokyo, and have floats that would show the best America has to offer. I would think people would come out and line the streets – smiles on their faces. Perhaps they would enjoy American swing bands, Elvis impersonators doing the twist, the way Americans enjoy a Chinese dragon dance, or a Japanese Taiko Troupe. But reality is a difficult thing.

American parades and American cultural sounds in Asia? No such things. Americatowns? None. Just the military bases, with GIs guarding democracy and freedom inside, beggars and sex workers on the outside. And the sounds of air force jets, and troops marching behind barbed wires.