TADIOTO

to one’s blog: I didn’t expect a blog would keep me so buy. Maybe it’s just me not knowing how to upload items, and fonts and images all go wrong.  Nonetheless, none of that is a good excuse to abandon the blog altogether.  But I also thougth if I wrote so much about Ha Noi, I would likely reach for things I didn’t quite understand, hadn’t processed too thoughtfully. And of course, I’d end up mentioning all the things people do that frustrate me - missed appointments, promises not kept, goods delivered to the wrong address on the wrong dates, red means blue, etc…, and I’d end up forgetting the pleasant parts of life in this city.

Those who know Ha Noi well know this: the moment you think you understand Ha Noi, you find out it’s something else. You have it all wrong.  Nevertheless, this I can say: Ha Noi is a popular spot.  In the last months, I’ve had multiple, numerous, frequent, etc, visitors from New York, Paris, San Francisco, Beijing, Manila, Singapore, Hawaii.  I’m half-expecting someone to show up from Mars - in fact Wayne Karlin, who came from Maryland, insisted he saw a UFO while he was standing on the balcony of the apartment in the Pacific Building off Ly Thuong Kiet Street.  Whatever, Wayne.   
Other than Wayne Karlin, literary visitors included the poets Suji Kwock Kim from New York and Ly Doi from Saigon.  Then there were Rachel Chanoff from the Sundance Institute, Mariam Thuc-Uyen Beevi, film and lit professor from UC Riverside, Viet Le from University of Southern California and Jason Picard who’s in town researching literature post 1954.  Many of us gathered and saw the film “Silk Dress of Ha Dong,” and the discussion afterwards left us wondering again what is taught in history classes here. 
Ly Doi brought me a chapbook from poet Vu Thanh Son, who was a colonel in the secret police.  Somehow he fell in with a bunch of young poets, whose group is called “Open Mouth.”  He started writing poetry, and since left the party and the police, and is camping out in South America.  Here are some of his poems; I did a rather quick translation: 
SELF PORTRAIT
 
In the end they threw me in the trash
along with torn towels full of oil and grease
fallen hair, rusted tin cans,
empty beer bottles, tampons, dead rats, cockroaches…  
They say such things and I
are all useless and empty. But that’s not true.
I know how to walk a straight line,
how to do summersaults.
I know how to cry, how to say beer, beer, beer, beer.
I am a toy.
You just have to wind me up.  
 

A THOROUGHLY SEMENLESS POEM 

A thoroughly semenless poem
Devoid of saliva, blood, or sex
No smell of corpses
No damp tears
Or horror
All you need to do is bathe yourself clean and eat no meat
Before reading it solemnly
In a respectful atmosphere
Then we can hear buzzing flies
Popping water balloons
And many people breathing their last.  

THE CITY 

In this city of eight million, where a person has just about a square meter of space in which to move about on the streets, you have to be quite adept to avoid the person in front spitting–a national sport–saliva into your face; where shitting, poetry and lovemaking are no longer private 
I often wake up with the sense that someone is watching me.  And like a person waking to realize all the doors of his house have been opened, I jump up to check the things I still own and those I have lost: from dreams, ideas, ideology, death, to my penis. 
Maybe it is time I ask someone to measure my sleep to build a door and a lock for it. 
  
 
AN EXAMPLE 
 
When I don’t know what to do with my sadness, I chew it.  The way I would chew a gum.  Leisurely, without hoping.  First I chew on the right. Slowly.  Bite. Grind. Running saliva.  I smell a soft scent.  Then I chew on the left, lightly, caressing the way a cat plays with a mouse.  Sometimes I blow it into pink bubbles of different sizes; when they break they make a noise, the sound of all climaxes of satisfaction.  Or I pull it out and tie it around a finger like a noose with which to hang someone.  When the sadness becomes tasteless and odorless, I spit it out, carefully wrapping it and throwing it into a trash can.  So I wouldn’t step on it.  So no one would step on it. 
  
 
THE ART OF GARDENING 
 
I learned to create dreams
from a gardener.
From early morning,
scissors in hand,
I cut and style them,
to make them into a tower, a globe,
shape them into a dragon with eyes made out of red plastic balls
or a deer, an elephant…
then I hang them on my walls;
they become alive and real
under the sun light. 
Before I go to sleep,
I watch with pleasure my ideas
clipped neatly into squares. 
   
Hope you like those.  I will post more, once I translate them.  But Tini Tran is in town, preparing to take off for Beijing where she will be joining the AP Bureau - after a year at Harvard.  Congratulations, Tini.  Her former colleague from the San Jose Mercury News, Truong Phuoc Khanh, is about to show up, and my sister has been here from California. Tomorrow my uncle and aunt from Maryland will show, with my cousin from Hue.  Everybody is here.  That keeps me busy, but I’ve been busy with building a house in the mountains too. Here are pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/photos.php?id=723780164

So my apologies for not staying in touch via Tadioto, but I will keep posting things.  Last night I made it to Thuy Hang’s exhibition at the Viet Art Center on Yet Kieu.  I hope I can post more about such events. Until then, enjoy this photo (details) of one of Hang’s scupltural pieces: 
 

Hasta la vista, for the moment.