TADIOTO

Mình viết cái bài này về cách lái xe ở Việt Nam.  Có ngờ đâu bây giờ lại còn hơn nữa.

I wrote this article on the motoring insanity, not knowing it would become much much more exciting.

Oh, but for the days…

“Rustic but tastefully elegant, it’s just sexy in the way a raw beauty sends her aura out, make-up-free, naked, and barefooted.”

A nice write up by Any Arena.

“Tadioto, một màn trình diễn tính cách nghệ thuật hiếm thấy.”

Tiếng Việt

Art Omi International Artists Residency calls for submissions for the 2010 visual artists’ residency program.

Located in the hamlet of Omi, in the Hudson River Valley, New York, Art Omi invites 30 international artists and one critic in residence to be part of the Omi community, create new work and experiment with possible new collaborations. The residency dates for 2010 are: June 27 to July 19, 2010.

The selected artists participate to the program completely free of charge. Art Omi offers room and board, a studio space, and the opportunity to participate to a monotype workshop, as well as exposure to the NYC art scene via an intensive studio visits program, and with the opportunity to exhibit the work created during the residency to hundreds of art lovers who visit the center on Open Day Sunday, July 18.

There is no fee to apply. Please help us spread the word by informing your local artists about our program!

More information can be found at our website

Click here for application guidelines and form.

The deadline for receiving applications is Friday December 11, 2009.

Claudia Cannizzaro
Director
Art Omi International Artists Residency
55 Fifth Avenue, 15th floor
New York NY 10003
www.artomi.org

Nice, nice… but I didn’t know about this. Hay lắm… nhưng chính mình cũng không hề biết về chuyện này.

I remember writing the book – and it was published in 1993 in hardcover. Mình nhớ là có viết một cuốn sách.  I had no idea it’s coming out in paperback.  Nhưng có biết là sách bìa mềm lại sắp được in lại đâu?

I’ve signed no contract. I have the rights but, like, who am I? Mình có ký kết hợp đồng với ai đâu. Mình có tác quyền đấy, nhưng mình thì là ai cơ?

Reminds me of the time I was in Saigon, back in 1995 or 1996, and found a copy of the book, photocopied, in my favorite bookstore, just off Dong Khoi.

Nhớ có lần mình tìm thấy một cuốn, chụp bản sao, bán trong tiệm sách mình ưa thích ở Sài Gòn, ngay cạnh đường Đồng Khởi.

It was selling for $10. Bookstore owner was extraordinarily kind: “Ah, you’re the author. I’ll give you a 10% discount.”

That really helps. Really. 10%!? Thank you, thank you so very much. A discount!! For me??!! Whoopie! I’m soooo grateful. Thank you.

Giá bán là US$10. Người chủ tiệm sách quả là người tốt bụng. “Ông là tác giả à? Tôi bớt cho ông 10%.”

Tốt quá.  Tốt quá. 10%.  Cảm ơn.  Cảm ơn ông. Cảm ơn.

People have been saying nice things.  And we definitely are grateful.

Các bạn đã viết những lời thật tuyệt và “tốt bụng.”

And we love it when they are kind, like this.

Or when they’re terrorized by us.  Có khi họ đầy sợ hãi.

The Obama administration is struggling to improve the American health care system.  Across the ocean, the Prime Minister of Viet Nam has announced plans to upgrade hospitals, to the tune of 2.5 billion.  It should help.

Hospital Visit

The woman across the room was going on and on, non-stop.

She sat with her arms around her knees, her filthy feet on the bed, her mouth open wide to show how vexed she was with the gods and with life, and she kept repeating her story—about how her mom had cut down a sacred tree while building her house, and three of her four uncles had died.  And the house had to be rebuilt in another spot.  And still the bad luck hadn’t stopped, and now she was in the hospital.

She wasn’t talking to anyone in particular, and no one was really listening.

It was so hot, I had trouble breathing.  We all shared one lousy ceiling fan that made a mockery of our miserable situation.

The room’s really fit for one person.  But here we have four beds, two patients per bed.  One bed had 3 girls in their late teens.  That’s 9 people – and then 10 sweating family members squatting on mats on the floor, sighing and moaning, or slurping noodle soup as if it’s their last meal.

These are tough days in Ha Noi.  There are times when even a seasoned nomad like me can’t explain why we’ve ended up in a particular spot.  And this spot is unexplainable.

The short woman – the fat one with short legs and huge toes – insisted on getting  out of her bed every five minutes to pace the room, stepping over and around the bodies while massaging her breasts and cursing out the nurses, the doctors, and her husband.

Someone would open the bathroom door, and the smell of urine and blood made you want to puke.  There were water puddles on the floor, and people would wipe their plastic sandals on a towel that looked like it’d been soaked in engine oil since 1972.

It’s shocking to see how people just carried on sitting, talking, waiting in this hell hole.  After a while, I realized I too had come to accept this whole ugly mess; you just get used to the smell, the filth, the whiny voices, and you know hospitals like this one is the only choice for these women.  Most of them come from towns and villages where there aren’t any such services – they’ve packed up and come to the capital, to have their stomachs and whatever illnesses looked after.  I’m the only man in the room, visiting a friend and sharing a little of their misery, and discovering what to them is simply normal.  Life is just the way it is.

The woman across the room has been talking non-stop for half an hour now, and the three girls were taking turns singing along to some annoying tune blaring out from a cell phone.  Two of them were actually embracing each other on the bed.  It’s as if the 40-degree heat and humidity in the room didn’t even register with them.  They were wearing short shorts and there were lots of legs between them – but don’t you boys go get excited; it was more grotesque than erotic.  Turns out all three have irregular, or dry, menstrual periods, and they were here for exams.  It just looked like they were on holiday.  Maybe that’s how they deal with a condition they don’t quite understand.

The rest of the women had some trouble inside their wombs, or were waiting for an abortion.  We were on the fourth floor, where complicated cases were kept waiting.

Fat one was bitching about not getting as many drugs as the rest, that she was a second class citizen, and the last abortion had gone smoother, and this time she wasn’t giving anyone any envelope, no more money, no more bribes.  The others began comparing the amounts they’d given to the nurses and doctors.  Some gave 500 thousand dong, some 300, one added up the amounts between the nurses and doctors and it came to a million and a half dong.  It didn’t seem she was getting any better services.

Someone was complaining about the costs of things.  Outside the hospital, there are hundreds of people selling fruits and xôi, sticky rice with fried onion, or green beans and shredded pork.  Across the street, people are spread out on sidewalks, selling congee and pillows and drugs and mats and beef noodle soup and toilet pots.  A pillow or a mat costs 30 thousand dong, less than two dollars.  A bowl of noodle, or congee, 12 thousand.  Less than a dollar.  Bottled water, 5 thousand.   Then there are phone calls to their husbands sitting at home, or out on the streets having a beer.  It all adds up, and these are miserable people, working on the fields, or perhaps eking out a living from selling incense sticks or vegetables in the morning, and some sundry items at night.  How could they afford the drugs and services, and how can they afford missing a few days of work to stay in the hospital?  And then I thought, with such a terrible life, how would they have time for sex, how could they get pregnant?

The abortion clinics were actually downstairs, and it was even more crowded.  There were women sitting along benches on the veranda, fanning themselves with medical papers and ultra sound results, or holding their stomach.  I noticed a few had a man with them, but most simply didn’t.  Once I caught a glance at one of the waiting rooms – about twelve beds, two women per bed, waiting for an abortion.  It’s no surprise that Viet Nam has one of the highest rates of abortion in the world.

I hear about a lot of international organizations coming to Viet Nam – and dealing with a multitude of social issues, from women trafficking, to corruption and HIV/AIDS prevention.  I hear of few dealing with abortion.  It is a difficult issue that the authorities, schools and parents can’t talk about and confront.

Here though in the hospital, some people on these floors are matter of fact about it.  At around 50 to 70 dollars, a stay in the hospital and an abortion would be cheaper than raising a child for 15 or 20 years.  Others simply blame fate, bad karma, or appear to suggest that pregnancy, related complications, or an abortion, are simply a part of life.

Downstairs, a mother comes out of one of the rooms, and turns to many of the dull-faced women fanning themselves on the worn wooden benches, “Next life, be sure to be a man.”

The only man around was a thin guy with a shifty expression, sneaking into the nurses’ bathroom to shower and wash his clothes.  There were people sitting on every step of the staircase, eating chips and fruits, throwing plastic bags and Styrofoam cups all over the floor.  No one seemed to be bothered, no one cared.  Rats were crawling up and down the railings and the windows, crawling into rubbish bags and sniffling banana peels.

Later, it’d rained, and it was getting dark.  The hallway was poorly lit with just a couple of short neon bulbs.  The women in the white hospital gowns floated silently past my door, their black hair unkempt, dirty.  They looked like ghosts.

These are tough days in Ha Noi.  In my home, like the American soldiers and the French before them who’d had to accept defeat in this country, my air conditioners kept giving out – they were nothing against the heat.  But still, it’s where I can breathe a little. In the hospital, you can’t breathe.  The air is like lead, and the situation for these women continue to horrify you.  Yet, they manage, they accept, and they live with it all.

After a whole day crammed into the inferno that passes for a hospital room, people were stopped being so friendly with each other.  They stopped sharing fruits and tea, and complained about the bathroom, and fought to sit or stand as close as possible to the one fan.  Still, some kind of bond was forming between them.  At least, the patients are unified against the nurses and doctors.  They are tired, and hot, and impatient with the patients.  Or maybe they don’t think they’re earning enough money to work any harder.

The patients, as frustrated as they are, manage to find a measure of friendliness with each other.  At one point one of the three girls was going home.  Her mother invited two people in the room to the daughter’s wedding at the end of the year.

You’d think, having gone through the experience, people would stay away from talk of marriage, of having a child and raising a family.

It astonished me to see how they just carried on – and seemed sincere as they said goodbye to each other.  Companions during a short sojourn in a horrid hospital room, they had kind words for each other.  “Hope it goes well.  Good luck.”

Someone joked.  “We’ll just see you again.  Here, in a few months, or next year.”

Somehow, the women managed to laugh – a dark sense of humor to get them though another tough day.

“Go home safely.  Goodbye.  We’ll miss you.”

I wrote this for a Ha Noi magazine, back in April and May of this year.   It was part of a series called “Confessions of an Accidental Modern Vietnamese  Nomad.”   Or some such pretentious title.  Here goes:

What happened to April?  I mean, I hadn’t even thought of a good trick for you for April fool’s.  Zip, it was gone.  Now it’s May.  Joke’s on me.

Actually, April fool’s is a time for mourning.   I was thinking of Trinh Cong Son, Viet Nam’s most well-known composer.  Born in Hue in 1939, he died in Saigon on April 1^st, 2001.  Thousands lined the streets for his funeral.

Trinh Cong Son continues to touch millions decades after he penned countless love ballads.  He also woke millions in the 1960s and 1970s to the horror of war – he was even accused of making people fall asleep, tuning out, turning off, because he described the destruction of war in his songs with such a direct and deft touch.

Bodies afloat on rivers,

Drying on the fields,

Lying on the city’s roofs,

Under temple eaves,

On deserted porches, in the cold rain:

Next to the old and frail

There are those still innocent.

Which of these is my little one,

In these graves

By the beds of corn and potato?*

They say Trinh Cong Son took all the suffering of the people in the entire country and put it inside him.

I see a touch of remorse in the moment of separation

I see the faces of the loveless:

some lives remain naïve, others,

on the path of love, arrive at their goal.

Wonder how in the heart there’s still trust

in these dying words.**

Trinh Cong Son’s songs tore me apart.  And yet, like all of my friends, all the people I knew in my youth, I carried them in my head like a monk’s mantra.  As an adult I travel with his tapes and recordings, and no matter where I am he takes me back to Viet Nam.  For many years, and still today, I am translating the lines that become sentimental and corny in English, but his songs are universal enough, or maybe people can relate to the despair in his words.

Neither foolish nor blind, I’ve exhausted all words of joy.

I hear sighs underneath the winds of fall and winter

And regrets quietly drifting away.

There were tears when we kissed,

Canyons where we buried our first love,

Such heavy steps for so modest a fate.

Cups of wine wait at the bar in night’s darkness,

Friends are pale like the sick,

Laughter and sobs, vast.**

April is also a terrible sadness – it marks when I and thousands of Vietnamese left home after the Viet Nam war.  We’ve lived with it for nearly forty years.  And here’s a confession: I’ve made a living off that war.  I’ve written countless essays on the topic, been on numerous TV and radio programs, got quoted in many newspapers, all about the war.  I’ve been involved in writing books and movie scripts.  I’ve been paid well enough, by publishers and school programs and libraries and magazines.  They wanted war.

In all these years as we Vietnamese live with family separation, with memories of those who died during the war, with traces of trauma that affected our lives abroad, we did all we could to remind people that Viet Nam is not a war.

For people outside, the words Viet Nam simply mean a war, a metaphor for bad decisions, for bad American foreign policies.  We kept saying Viet Nam is a nation, a culture, a people, laughter as well as sadness.

Still, every April, we Vietnamese in America got busy – we’re invited everywhere.  “Tell us what it was like, tell us how bad it is.  We wanna know…”  There were veterans, writers, history students.  They wanted war.

They wanted to see us through a lens that refused to see the Vietnamese as anything but victims of war, and perhaps relieve them of whatever guilt.

Sure, it was important, but the more we talked, the more we realized it didn’t stop anybody from going to war, it didn’t help to avoid mistakes.  People are still being killed, bombs and mines continue to explode.  Families are still being destroyed.

Of late, I’ve discovered I have a new topic.  Instead of war, I could write about whores.  Forgive this politically incorrect indiscretion.

I’ve discovered you can make “war” rhyme with “whore.”  I wrote a song with the line “George and Wayne once shared a whore.”

George and Wayne are friends, one a writer, the other a poet.  They did share the Viet Nam war.  But it’s just simpler to write about them sharing a sex worker, and I could be living off whores—becoming a pimp of sort.  I could talk about doors, and floors, and shores.  Not wars and horrors.

In Viet Nam, people seem to have moved on.  The end of April is a celebration for the government, and people can have a day off work.

And then May 1^st comes around.  It’s time to honor the workers of the world. But as we revisit that old slogan, Workers of the World, Unite!, perhaps we should consider Workers of the World, We Apologize! You’ve gone through bad times, you’re still being exploited, and your lot isn’t really improving.

In America, where workers are being laid off by the thousands and losing their homes, celebration of workers happens on Labor Day – in September.  May is instead Asian American Heritage Month, and libraries and newspapers and universities run programs and articles about Asians living in America.  Sure it’s a celebration of their presence in America.  We have the month of May, but then we become invisible for the rest of the year.  It amuses me that when May comes around, I’m asked to come to universities and libraries, and write for newspapers, and they’ll want to hear about the war again.  If not, they will ask me to talk of lanterns, dragons, and kitchens.  TV programs will be about golden temples, lotuses and Zen, and Secrets of Eastern Empires, and red silk.

We’re asked to ignore the high-powered Asian woman working as a lawyer on Wall Street, or the economic analyst in Congress, or a cop in Arizona.

I’m no longer having to face such vexing images and memories.  One thing I certainly like about living in Ha Noi is the fact that few talk about the war, and May is just May.  Time is not marked by these tired histories, and it passes in different ways.

A friend was visiting last week from the San Francisco.  We went up to the mountains in Tam Dao.  Sitting in the quietness away from Ha Noi, we revisited the 20 years since we’d known each other, and we talked of future plans.  “I thought I’d be done with these projects in my life by the time I turn 60,” I said to Trung.

“No, you will carry on until you’re 80,” he said.  “Too many ideas, too many dreams.”

Unfulfilled.  Trung didn’t have to say the word – but it stayed in the air like a giant balloon.  But with all the travels, the war, the books, the stories I’ve dealt with, I’ve been busy.  I always thought by the time I turn 60, I would have had enough.  Time to be content, to let go.

For a while Trung and I stayed in the cold misty air, each of us silent.  I sensed he was, like me, thinking of all the months of April and all the months of May that have gone past.  And in my head, the sadness of Trinh Cong Son returned.

Inside my heart the sound of the long horn hastens

I count each passing hour in my bed of illness

Remembering the few times near pretty cheeks and lips. **

Once there was April, and then May.  And all that happened.  And all the talking.  Now, in the silence of the mountains, we know it’s almost too late.  But, still, we imagine better months of April and May.

*Song for the Bodies, by Trinh Cong Son, transl. by NQD

** Drifting Away, by Trinh Cong Son, transl. by NQD

We’re pleased to host a reception for the Italian Embassy to welcome journalist Beppe Severgnini, author of Italians – Around the World in 80 Pizza

18h30 – October 22, 2009 at Tadioto – 113 Trieu Viet Vuong, Ha Noi – Tel 2218 7200

Welcome to the website for Tadioto – we’d been an alternative space for the arts  in, Ha Noi, since 2008.  We’re  now at 12 Truong Han Sieu.   Bạn đã vào trang mạng của Tadioto, một địa điểm sinh hoạt nghệ thuật tại Hà Nội. Mời các bạn ghé thăm chúng tôi ở số 12 Trương hán Siêu.

Visit this website to read about our activities, our comments, our blogs, etc.  Hãy vào đây để biết thông tin về các sinh họat nghệ thuật tại Tadioto, đọc blog, v.v..

Visitors to  Tadioto in Ha Noi viewed our exhibitions, checked out the bar, had  coffee with friends, and met interesting people. Khách của Tadioto từng đến xem triển lãm, ghé quán bar, uống một cốc cà phê với bạn bè, và có các cuộc gặp gỡ thích thú.

Các bạn cũg đã đến Tadioto dự những buổi thảo luận, trao đổi, biễu diễn, hoặc tổ chức các buổi tiệc và sinh hoạt đặc biệt.  Our friends have participated in our talks, workshops and performances, or organized fun receptions or special events.

We appreciate  your comments.

Hãy chúng tôi biết ý kiến.

A friend from Beijing sent this link, describing it as “a hilarious waste of time.”

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/

I just glanced at it, but items #91, 45, 44, and 11 caught my attention.

Of course, the list goes backwards.