Notes on Nam

Prologue

In the beginning was the Prologue

It was a year of change. It began in Paris – a frozen, fluffy snow-bound Paris; a Paris lumbering through one of its longest and coldest winters in living memory. I knew I had to get out before it froze me with it.

I’d been then for four years, you see, and longed to be free of the City of Light and all of its darkness. Europe was dying, I felt, drowning in rose-tinted memories of former glories. Its future was one of managed decline, at best, and le Belle Epoch c'était mort – and in truth, it was never all that belle.

Another consideration was that I had hit 40 and become a museum piece in a museum city, but I was not yet ready to lie down in rigor mortis. There was life in the old dog yet, I thought – not much, but some.

It’s a grim age, 40. The grim reaper is no longer a fuzzy patch in the distance – he’s a definite shadow, visible in the corner of your eye. If you are over 40 and you look left, as far left as your eyes can go, so far left that the muscles that move your eyeball start to strain, then you will see him: a dark shroud of misty purple. And in the other corner, there stand his giggling accomplices, incontinence and imbecility.

They’re all waiting for you and they will wait patiently until everyone and everything else in your life falls into the void. They will wait until you wait upon the judgment.

All three seem all the more real when you pass the milestone gravestone of 40. If you are over 40, you know that of which I speak, or you have chosen to ignore it; and if you are under 40, then fear it: fear the dying of the light of youth.

I felt age stoop to conquer and the creaking arrival of my stooping dotage, but before my sight grew too dim, I fled east, abandoning Europa; shedding the skin of office creature that had never really fit me; a skin that itched so much that I would have scratched it to ribbons had I worn it any longer.

First came a summer in Beirut, sweating my way through one of its hottest summers in living memory, staring back into civilisations dating back to Rome and beyond: Baalbeck’s Temple of Jupiter, Tripoli’s teeming souks, Beirut’s seven cities, piled one on top of the other: all had seen my lens and felt my pen.

But a single lifespan is nothing in such a place, and when September came, I was glad to be flying away from the Levantine sun and away from the triad conflicts that so plague the Jew, the Christian and the Mohammedan. We who believe in one God are called by this God to die in his name, again and again. Faithful lambs bring to slaughter the terrorsome infidels and nations rise and fall with fearful alacrity.

But I grow wordy and the reader grows weary. Let me fly not into whirling warbling words and instead paint my prose on baser pastures.

I was leaving the Middle East and heading into the Far East. I thought about this, and about the past and the future, and about a dozen other things, as I stood in a queue at Immigration Control in Hanoi’s Ba Noi Airport.

My eyes drooped, thinking only of sleep, and my hands shook from caffeine antidotes to the confused barely-remembered twenty-hour journey. My skin grew moist in the air conditioning that did not condition the air, and I waited for another chapter to open.

In my head, I started my Notes from Nam.

And then, four months later, I was in Ba Noi again, waiting for a flight from Hanoi to Hue, more than ready for a fortnight’s travelling through a land I had already spent thirteen weeks teaching in, earning my daily bread by flogging the language of that most inconsequential of tribes, the Angles.

How unpredictable a thing history is and what great things may come of tiny acorns. If I had been an alien correspondent, sketching notes for the Andromeda Echo in the year of 449, I would surely not have bothered my readers with the exploits of the Angles, who at the time were ethnically cleansing the Romanised Celts from Albion; and nor would I have dwelt on the Viets, possessors of a small inconsequential state tottering around the Red River Delta, dwarfed and soon swallowed for a thousand years by it rapacious northern neighbour, China.

But history is a fickle whoremaster and nations rise and fall on her back like wolves fall to feeding, howling their destiny and gilding the sands of time. But I grow verbose again, don’t I? To grey fact, I nail myself.

The English went on to create an empire on which the sun never set and left a lingua franca far more international than any language that had gone before it. And the Vietnamese, against all the odds, were not assimilated by the mighty Han. They threw off the Chinese yoke, and then the French yoke; and finally, even the Americans were sent packing.

Ah yes, the Americans, who however much we fight against it, play so large a role in shaping our world view; not through State Department memos and Wikileaks, but through the most powerful of their Special Forces: Hollywood.

Vietnam: if I were to ask you to free associate and to name the first ten things that came into your head when I mention this Southeast Asian nation of 87 million people, the chances are that Hollywood movies would probably account for nine of the ten images that formed in your mind. Perhaps you might also mention Ho Chi Minh, but I would happily wager quite a few million dong that media moguls have fully furnished that tiny part of your mind in which Vietnam-related thoughts are kept.

No other nation I can think of lives in such a celluloid stranglehold. Germany is not where the Nazis live; Russia is not where KGB agents plot; Britain is not where Harry Potter casts spells. And yet, Vietnam is still, at an unconscious level, the place where the Vietnam War happened. If I were to poll a hundred Americans or Europeans, could even one identify Thang Long, the founder of millennial Hanoi? Conversely, could I find a single soul who could not identify and place Robin William eponymous movie catchphrase?

‘Good morning Vietnam’, indeed. The morning might be better than good if we stopped mourning a war that ended 35 years ago. I do not mean that we should forget the horrors of that particularly gruesome war, since forgetting a war makes the next war all the more likely. All wars feed on amnesia. I mean that we should move beyond seeing Vietnam through the prism of the war; whether you call it the Vietnam War, as the West does; or the American War, as the Vietnamese do. Countries are more than the wars they have been embroiled in. The Vietnamese do not see America in terms of the American War, nor France in terms of the French War, so why should we see Vietnam in terms of the Vietnam War?

The smell of Napalm in the morning is long since gone and the apocalypse is no longer now.

The Brackish Waters of the Introduction

A Portrait of the Artist as a Teacher, Do Son, and the Slaughter of the Bulls

If Vietnam is not the Vietnamese war, then what is it? That is the question.

And who, you might ask, am I to address it? If you do not pose this question, then you should do so. The world is full of prating experts and every scruffy backpacker fancies himself a skilled anthropologist. Every grunt is a guru: every bum a Diogenes.

And every word hack thinks himself a writer. I am one such delusional: at times, an inventor of worlds; at times, an unreliable correspondent; which is to say that I veer between fiction and travel writing, never quite sure which side of the road offers best traction.

In either case, I am as yet a feeble tapper in the ether and the world has not sat up to take note of my ramblings. It was the failure of my fourth novel in a row, detailing the comic misadventures of a quixotic knight-errant-cum-vampire, that made me decide to return to travel writing; to return to an earlier form of failure. And so, with the strength of my invincible arm, I have channeled my thoughts into this Diary of Sorts, into these ‘Notes from Nam’.

But what was I doing in Vietnam in the first place? Travel cannot be funded from the proceeds of books that have not been published.

It was work that brought me here, or rather work that allowed me to come here. As a teacher of English as a foreign language, with all the requisite qualifications and experience, and then some, I am fortunate in being able to choose my environment. It frightens me to think that less than a handful of generations ago I would have been born a peasant, spent a weary toilsome lifetime sucking potatoes, and then died within a dozen miles of my birthplace.

However, being born in the right place at the right time in the right socio-economic class, I have been able to spend my working life living and teaching in a variety of countries, trying (and perhaps inevitably failing) to understand cultures that are not my own.

In fact, I’m not at all sure I understand my own culture either, Dublin being so complex a conundrum that any fool who tries to understand it will find himself doomed to suck the pen or to suck the bottle, or both.

To bring my ignorance to its most base and basic level, if a four-year psychology degree taught me anything, it was that I do not even understand myself.

And there is your guide and narrator in a nutshell: an over-educated ignoramus of many things at many levels.

But my passport has many stamps. Let me detail my resume. I have shed skin in the following locations: Spain (6 years), China (1 year), Russia (1 year), Thailand (2 years), France (4 years), and shorter periods in Hong Kong, Dubai, India, Sri Lanka, Beirut, and elsewhere.

But what was I doing in Vietnam?

I came here on a six-month contract for a ‘special project’: Project 165. It all sounds rather ‘Bondish’, doesn’t it, or perhaps even a little Orwellian, but the reality is quite mundane.

I was, in fact, one of seven English teachers in the Vietnamese government’s programme to improve the English skills of high-flyers in its Civil Service in order to be able to send them abroad to learn from experts overseas. Project 165, or VP 165, aims to send 1,500 people abroad by 2015 in order to: … improve the quality of leaders to meet the requirements of the period of promoting the industrialization - modernization of the country.

Since the Vietnamese Civil Service is approximately a million members strong, I imagine there was a great deal of competition to secure a coveted place on the course, which meant a much more motivated student that is customary in the English classroom.

The ‘school’ itself was also far from ordinary, and perhaps the word ‘school’ is not really appropriate. The ‘classrooms’ were part of a ‘military base’, but this too is another misnomer; conjuring up, as it does, images of boot camps and bugles.

I shall call it Base 222 A, since I cannot find the real number on Google and fear its true identity may be classified. It was designed as a sort of ‘holiday home’ for the military, which could also be used for military conferences. There are lecture halls, dorm facilities and canteens; and rooms that are used as classrooms, but were clearly not designed with that original purpose in mind. Since I do not wish to whine and since the reader has not interest in hearing me do so, I shall not list their failings, aesthetic or practical.

What is more noteworthy, I think, is the role the military played in providing educational facilities for the Civil Service. In the West, we think of the military as being an institution solely concerned with the business of killing people, and of securing funding to conduct research into developing weapons that will kill more people faster; but in Vietnam, and in China, the military has expanded into other business pursuits, in a way unthinkable in the west. The teachers’ accommodation, for example, is a villa in a compound of luxury villas that are rented out as holiday homes to the elite, both public and private.

Let us call this ‘222 B’. This naming by numbers does make one question the marketing talent available to the military and highlights the dangers inherent in attempting to move from one profession to another.

However, one must always be wary of judging other countries according to one’s own standards. If this ‘entrepreneurial army’ is how the People’s Republics of China and Vietnam see fit to help finance their militaries, then who am I to condemn the idea? I do not condemn it; and in truth I do not fully understand it, like so much of Asia. It is to me what Russia was to Churchill – a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

I could talk at great length of Project 165, and even greater length of the role of English as a Foreign Language within it, but this would be to talk shop; and if the reader has not already lost interest and fled elsewhere, then he would soon do so were I to continue in a similar vein, lapsing into the acronymic obscurity of CEF A2’s and IELTS 6.5’s, and all the other thousand natural shocks that EFL flesh is heir to.

So, let me just tell you that the military compound (henceforth called ‘the school’), and the military hotel complex (hereafter referred to as ‘the villa’) are both located in a small coastal town in North East Vietnam called Do Son.

This was my home for most of my six months in Vietnam; and by the end of it, I was quite the Do Sonite. Even though my reader, however well travelled you may be, is unlikely to ever set foot in