{"id":181901,"date":"2019-01-10T06:57:41","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T06:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=181901"},"modified":"2019-01-14T07:29:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T07:29:45","slug":"provincial-taxonomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=181901","title":{"rendered":"Provincial Taxonomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh \u2013 The Unz Review Jan 8, 2019<\/h1>\n
\"Ea<\/a>

Ea Kly, 2019. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

During a late night layover in Minneapolis a decade ago, I found myself in a McDonald\u2019s. Manning the cash register was a chubby black woman, and the ordering customer was a black flight attendant who was young, thin and pretty, how all American air stewardesses used to look, before the ageism lawsuits. In Asia, they\u2019re still uniformly pleasing to the eyes. Help wanted ads in Vietnam often specify whether they want men or women, and in what age range. In this totalitarian state, people can hire whomever they want.<\/h5>\n
Under the harsh McDonald\u2019s lights, the black women chattered. \u201cYou must have been many places!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cHave you been to Las Vegas?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cMany times,\u201d she smiled.<\/h5>\n
\u201cWow! How about Miami?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been there too.\u201d<\/h5>\n
At the adjacent cash register was another black woman. Looking in admiration at the air stewardess, she chimed in, \u201cHave you been to Hawaii?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cYes, I\u2019ve been to Hawaii. And what about you?\u201d she asked both of them. \u201cWhere have you visited?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cWell, I\u2019ve been to Milwaukee a couple of times, and Chicago once.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve also been to Chicago,\u201d the chubby one said. \u201cYour life is so exciting! I want to go to Las Vegas!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cYou will,\u201d the air stewardess unconvincingly answered, took her Big Mac and walked away. Toiling for minimum wage, the other two looked on.<\/h5>\n
I was reminded of this airport scene when I talked to an Ea Kly woman this week. In her early 30\u2019s, Hien is an employee at our plastic recycling plant.<\/h5>\n
Hearing me talk, she asked me, \u201cAre you from Thai Binh?\u201d All Vietnamese immediately try to locate your origin from your accent. How close are you to me? they want to know.<\/h5>\n
\u201cNo, but my father is from Nam Dinh,\u201d one province over.<\/h5>\n
\u201cI\u2019m from Thai Binh, but I\u2019ve lost my roots.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t go back?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been there just once. The bus ride made me sick. I will never go back.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cNever?!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cNever. I will never go anywhere again.\u201d The mother of three smiled.<\/h5>\n
A Vietnamese would identify with his ancestral province or village, even if he\u2019s never been there. Saigon-born, I still declare myself a person from Nam Dinh or, even more specifically, Bui Chu, as did a Philadelphian I met two years ago on Kensington Avenue. We established a bond.<\/h5>\n
A settler nation founded by immigrants, with thousands more arriving each day, the United States is populated by people who have forsaken their roots. Not only that, they\u2019re reluctant to establish new ones, or prevented from doing so, in their new nation. Thanks to constant demographic upheaval across the land, hardly any American neighborhood, much less city, can retain its social identity for more than a generation.<\/h5>\n
Whitman sang of the open road, Kerouac free jazzed across America and the road movie has become an iconic genre in this seemingly endless land of mesmerizing mirages. Swooning, swaggering and flexing, Americans barrel down their once-well-paved, multi-laned freedom way, towards the always beckoning, sunset-lit horizon, right into an oceanic, paradisal grave, as Chinese belch, fart and laugh.<\/h5>\n
My hamlet, Ea Kly, is actually the United States writ tiny, for it was virgin land just four decades ago, according to the Vietnamese, although the Rade were already here, and it\u2019s now overrun with outsiders. At our recycling plant, we have an old man, Cuc, who was among the earliest Vietnamese settlers. Since Cuc only makes eight bucks a day, one might expect the dark, wiry man to dwell in a simple shack, but no, it\u2019s a well-built, high-ceilinged and reasonably spacious house for two, with a bit of land around it. The flat roof is an ample courtyard with concrete railing, and there\u2019s a side veranda, though held up by just one pitifully thin Greek column.<\/h5>\n
Inside, the furniture is of a heavy wood. Invited into his living room, I stared at a framed photo of some impressive looking man in a military uniform, \u201cWow, who is this guy?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s me!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s you?! I thought it was some big shot!\u201d<\/h5>\n
Laughing, Cuc flashed his many brown teeth.<\/h5>\n
\u201cSo where did you serve?\u201d I asked.<\/h5>\n
\u201cRight here. We fought the FULRO. We got rid of them all!\u201d He grinned. \u201cI\u2019m lucky they didn\u2019t send me to Cambodia. If a hundred men went, two came back. They killed us every which way, poisoned our food. I\u2019m lucky.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cSo did you get land here for your military service?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cEverybody got land. There was nothing here. If you were willing to clear the land, the government would give you a plot. I got extra land, though, because I had an uncle who was a colonel.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Injuns vanquished, Cuc stumbles towards the grave in a place boasting nothing more than a dozen forlorn eateries and a newly opened plastic recycling plant. Three times a day, he sneaks into his funky bathroom to down quick shots of rice wine, away from his wife\u2019s frown.<\/h5>\n
Sick of this no-horse town, his three kids have moved far away, and only return during Tet. In Cuc\u2019s living room, their wedding photos angle down, crowding a framed, yellowing proverb, \u201cA father\u2019s labor is mountain sized, a mother\u2019s love an endless stream.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Ten years ago, Cuc parceled off two lots from his land, sold them to newcomers, but now knows he has jumped the gun. \u201cTiming is everything,\u201d Cuc rues, \u201cand each man has his fate.\u201d Long past his days of cradling an AK-47, pop popping away, Cuc stoops a little as he hauls bag after bag of plastic garbage.<\/h5>\n
Three years younger than Cuc, I look ancient enough, at least to the young, pretty women at our recycling plant. The current Miss Vietnam hails from a village just 20 miles away, and I can certainly attest that this area teems with lookers. Surrounded by plastic trash, one asked, \u201cHow old are you, uncle?\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cFifty five.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cBut your eyesight is pretty bad, right?\u201d They have all seen me squint at just about everything.<\/h5>\n
\u201cBad enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cMy father is three years younger than you, but he\u2019s in great shape. It\u2019s because he worked in the field all his life.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Thinking too much doesn\u2019t just wear down the mind, but body, soul and wallet, especially if done in 1984 America.<\/h5>\n
It takes centuries for a place to accrue gravity and resonance, where every stone remembers and every brick speaks, so Ea Kly is still very much an improvised frontier, but as new as this Vietnamese hamlet is, and it doesn\u2019t get any newer, Ea Kly already feels more grounded than any American neighborhood I lived in, whether in Tacoma, Salem, San Jose, Annandale or even South Philadelphia, where I spent nearly three decades. One can easily spend a decade or two in an American place and not know anything about its past characters and anecdotes, so the only shared history one has is made up mostly of tales of exploits by corporate sport stars and favorite scenes from TV shows. Born into alienation, many Americans have never experienced anything but, so they bristle at mere suggestions that life can possibly be less virtual.<\/h5>\n
\"46658579781_a4041a3efe_b\"<\/a>Instead of living locked-in lives drip-fed mostly by distant, brainwashing media, people in Ea Kly are constantly intertwined, whether at home, work or play, so all day long they rub against each other, and stories flow from each. Just parachuted in, I\u2019ve heard confessions from the high school principal, a teacher, a driver, a cafe owner who used to sell insecticides and fertilizers, a wine distiller, a couple with a drink stand and a tiny tailor shop<\/a><\/span>, and a bumbling plumber who\u2019s just as inept at raising cows, etc. Thanks to the last, I was suddenly invited to a beef feast yesterday, for a calf of his had slipped down an embankment and choked on its own rope.<\/h5>\n
Each day, about five of us usually have lunch<\/span><\/a> and dinner<\/a><\/span> at the back of the recycling plant. Sitting on the floor, we share pork, fish and vegetable dishes, though last night, it was rice gruel<\/a><\/span> with boiled chicken. After eating, I\u2019d try to quickly sneak away, so I can type out my frazzled thoughts, such as made up this article, while everyone else watch television. If it\u2019s a foreign movie, then they\u2019re treated to fabulous scenes of wealth and glamor, such as, last night, dashingly beautiful people gambling in a San Francisco casino. (Never mind the fact that there are no casinos in San Francisco.) Next, the flick shifted to equally stunning Tokyo, where a man\u2019s suit costs a year\u2019s wage in dusty<\/a> Ea Kly<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\n
\"32766207528_96d985d39c_b\"<\/a>People here don\u2019t know that folks in these advanced, slicked up places are more addicted to screens, gadgets, thumping noises, porn, pills, binge drinking and dope, and are actually more prone to suicide, for given a chance, many in Ea Kly would jump at a chance to be a manicurist in East St. Louis, or an old farts\u2019 diaper changer in Nagoya. How can a much higher income go wrong?<\/h5>\n
Linh Dinh\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> latest book is <\/em>Postcards from the End of America<\/a><\/span>. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog<\/a><\/span>.<\/em><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A settler nation founded by immigrants, the US is full of people who have forsaken their roots. Consequently Linh Dinh feels more grounded in Ea Kly than anyhere he stayed in America<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Miscellaneous"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=181901"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181909,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181901\/revisions\/181909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}