01.13.09 – Narita Airport, Tokyo, Japan

Yesterday morning Mao took us to Artisans Angkor. It’s a great place, much better than crafts factories we visited in Vietnam. Here the workers have an organization (i.e., union) that owns 20 percent of the company, and the quality of what they produce is clearly better than what we saw in he Vietnamese arts mills. Our guide, Boret (no, not Borat!), emphasized that the workers here are artisans, not artists—they copy; they don’t create original art. It’s the best place to buy stuff that we’ve found anywhere on the trip.

We then went to the market where local people buy food and such and few tourists go. Amazing place, weaving around stalls of dried fish, live fish, dried snakes, beetles, and so forth. Mao says Cambodians like to eat crickets, spiders, and scorpions. I think they are all fried in batter and crunchy. We resisted the temptation to try some.

Next we stopped at the Prah Prom Rath Pagoda where Mao prayed for three days when he was taking his high school final exams. It is a relatively new pagoda and around its inside walls it has murals depicting events in the ten lives of Buddha in which this type of Buddhism believes. The scenes are painted in day-glow colors and I immediately thought that this was the sort Buddhism 60s hippies would have turned on to. Lines from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” kept going through my head.

In the lobby of the Prince D’Angkor Hotel as we were meeting Mao and checking out, Kenny G’s “Forever in Love” was playing. Anne loves the song, so I sent her an email from the lobby to tell her, “That’s us.”

We had lunch at a place to which Mao took us, called “Eat at Khmer.” I had amok in banana leaf. (I wonder if amok weren’t the national fish, whether Cambodia would not have so much run amok.)

Our final stop before the airport was the War Museum. It’s very primitive as museums go—all open air exhibits of rusting planes, tanks, helicopters, artillery, all kinds of small arms and automatic weapons, and every type of land mine. Its appearance notwithstanding, it proved to be a very powerful. This was particularly the case because of our guide, who is now known as “Cat.” The name results from the fact that he seems to have nine lives. All other members of his family were killed in the Khmer Rouge killing fields. He was in the Cambodian Army fighting against the K.R. He was shot several times and had mines explode near him five different times. He showed us various places in his body that have different types of shrapnel, including ball bearings, still beneath his skin. He was blind for several months after one of the mine explosions and now has only 60 percent vision in one eye and none in the other. He lost the lower half of one of his legs to one of the mines. Then, three years ago, his wife stepped on a mine and was killed, leaving him with a three-year-old daughter.

Cat himself is a living museum to the horrors that the Cambodian people have been through. And, as his wife’s death exemplifies, those horrors are not over yet. There are said to be 4.5 million unexploded mines still out there in the country. An average of one or two people a day die from land mines in Cambodia.

The old weapons around the grounds of the museum are mostly leftovers from World War II, many of them Russian. The Chinese were supplying the Khmer Rouge and the Russians supplied their opponents. Many of the items on exhibit were moved to the museum grounds from where they were partially destroyed in battle. Cat told us that skeletons are still inside one of the tanks.

When we arrived at the Siem Reap airport a few days ago, we noticed four Russians travelling together. One was a very tall blonde girl with a much older, overweight man at least a head shorter than she. The age difference was less between the other girl and her male companion. We were to see them again and again throughout our stay in Siem Reap: at Angkor Wat, at a restaurant, at our hotel several times, at the airport again when we were leaving, on our plane to Saigon, and in the Saigon airport. The girls were always wearing very short skirts or very short shorts (to the point where the little Cambodian girls who sold George the bracelets were laughing at the shorts). We joked about them being spies who were following us, but concluded that the older guy must be in the Russian Mafia. At the airport departing Siem Reap, he was wearing a tank top that said, “Better Bodies New York.” He could use one, but the very tall blonde was blowing him kisses and caressing him. Yuk.

While we awaited our departure from Cambodia, I watched the end of the North Carolina-Wake Forest basketball game on a TV in the waiting area at the Siem Reap airport. There was a group of about five people at the next table who seemed to care about the outcome. (Wake won when a desperation midcourt shot by a UNC player at the buzzer missed.) What a world.

I ordered a cup of tea at the Siem Reap airport before our departure for Saigon. The price was $2.50. I gave the man at the counter a $5 bill. He could give me two dollar bills, but had no coins. He asked me to take saltine crackers as my change! I asked if I could pay the equivalent of 50 cents in riel and get three dollars in change. I had a 2000, a 1000, and a 200 rial note. He took them all as roughly equivalent to 50 cents.

Oh, I forgot to mention that when we arrived at Saigon the first time, Trang/Cindy was waiting for us outside with a sign reading “Mr./Mrs. George Bey.” We brought up our wives in conversation with her as soon as we could so she wouldn’t think that we were one of those American gay married couples.

Trang embodies the story of Vietnam today. I asked her about discrimination against the mixed race children of GIs and Vietnamese women, as well as about various other prohibitions and persecutions under the harsh Communist rule during the decade following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. Her response was a sentence that epitomizes Vietnam today: “But now—it’s OK!”

Pick ’most any antecedent for “it,” and that assessment applies. It could be the new Vietnamese national motto: “But now—it’s OK!”

As is the case in so many other parts of the world, American popular culture is prominent in Vietnam.  Consumerism is on the rise.  In the cities, a vast array of products is being marketed via billboards featuring women in sexy poses.  These bright, colorful works of marketing art compete on an open market with fading propaganda billboards depicting happy proletarians and exhortations promoting the revolution.  The joyous-worker-and-peasant billboards still hold a sizeable lead in the countryside, but in the cities private enterprise propaganda has displaced most government propaganda, which is sold as collector items from a bygone era at “propaganda art” stores—a sort of Commie kitsch.

Trang thinks her parents’ beliefs in the conglomeration of religion that typifies the worldview of most Vietnamese is silly. Her parents were North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. She’s more what one of her names, Cindy, indicates. Cindy Lauper: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The second morning we were with her, she told George that she and her new husband had had an argument the night before because she had gone out drinking with her girlfriends. The next morning she told us she had a bad headache because the night before she had been to a wedding and then gone out drinking and doing karaoke afterwards.

Trang/Cindy is the New Vietnam, especially in Saigon. (This might be a good place to note that in our first several days in Vietnam—in the northern and central parts—I saw exactly the same number of overweight people as I did women wearing skirts: one of each. There aren’t many overweight people in Saigon, either, but I saw several. No one, though was obese. Just wait until McDonalds gets there!

If anything, this formerly Communist nation has taken laissez faire too far. In deference to their Marxist heritage, the Vietnamese don’t like to describe their current reality by using that vulgar word, “capitalism,” so they speak instead of a “market economy.” (Trang just calls it capitalism.)

Vietnam today is less socialist than the United States.  Indeed, Vietnam is now less socialist than Mississippi.  I’m serious.  At home, we badly need universal healthcare, but we do provide Medicaid for the poor.  And some of our public schools leave a good deal to be desired, but free education is available through high school.  We have Social Security. Not so here in Vietnam, where the poor must pay both for medical care and to educate their children from middle school up and there are small old age pensions only for government employees.

When we flew into Tokyo this morning, I saw Fujiyama’s snow-covered peak, somewhat obscured by the smog or haze. I had never seen it before, having come and gone from Tokyo in the dark the other three times I have changed planes here. A nearly full moon hung above and to the right of the iconic mountain. It would have made a great picture if the haze wasn’t making the mountain appear only dimly.

Here’s something I had never thought of before but saw in the airport here: since Japanese is read from back to front, the binding on Japanese magazines and books is on the right.

Narita Airport is ultra-modern. The toilets (BTW, both in Japan and in Vietnam some of the toilets are the sort of “squatters” we saw in Turkey) are ultramodern. Some of them have built-in bidets and warmed seats. And they have “jet towels”—blowing hand dryers into which you put your hands that have enough force to warrant the name “jet.”

In Vietnam, on the other “hand,” they’re not much into hand drying. The restrooms all have sinks and soap, but few have either hand dryers or towels. People just shake the water off their hands.

A few other random observations:

Imperialism was not entirely without beneficial legacies. Had they not been French colonies, it’s unlikely that Vietnam and Cambodia would have such good French bread.

The beds in Vietnam and Cambodia are hard, but very comfortable and good to sleep on.

Of course we have seen many Asians wearing surgical masks, presumably because they are sick and don’t want to spread their illness. But in Vietnam many women wear scarves over their faces from the eyes down when riding motorbikes. I’m not sure what that’s about, but I’m guessing it’s to keep dust out of their mouth and nose.

On the way over, traveling west, we had a never-ending day. It occurred to me that it would be possible, flying at the right speed, to stay in the daylight perpetually. This might be an option for a rich, eccentric person who was afraid of the dark to always stay in the sunlight. Someone like Howard Hughes.

George had hoped to get away from speaking Spanish on this trip, but we kept running into people speaking Spanish, beginning with Ngoc, our first guide, almost as soon as we got into the car at the Hanoi Airport. He is learning Spanish and was eager to practice with George.

Vietnamese, especially in the north, have such a deep mistrust of the Chinese that they say north is the direction of evil and never face a house in that direction if they can avoid it. If a house or store in a city must face north, a mirror is placed on the front of it to reflect the evil spirits back to the north (China). And to think that the United States fought a terrible war against these people in substantial part because our leaders feared that the north Vietnamese would facilitate Chinese expansion!

Well, that’s about all that comes to mind right now. We have gone two weeks without seeing a single Starbucks or McDonalds. And without hearing anyone tell us that “JESUS is the answer!” It’s a different world out there—but in Vietnam becoming less so by the day.

— RSM