![\"Saigon-2019\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Saigon-2019.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s Tet here. Public employees get nine days off, counting an unpaid weekend. Millions abandon cities for their home villages, leaving most of Hanoi and Saigon suddenly unclogged, so crossing the street is no longer a harrowing adventure. Prices are jacked up, including for long distance buses, hotel rooms, meals and even haircuts.<\/h5>\nThe week before Tet, buses arrived in Ea Kly several times a day with returning natives. At my usual cafe, I could see them disembark in the early dawn. The cafe\u2019s owner\u2019s husbands and two oldest sons weren\u2019t among them, however, and it was because they had to work over the holiday, or so Mrs. Ha said, and her daughter was stuck in the Philippines, where she had been employed for five months in a Chinese factory. Since Filipino wages were already low, the 27-year-old was only being paid $173 a month, plus room, board, the experience of living in another country and a chance to improve her English. She\u2019s becoming worldly. The vast majority of people in Ea Kly have never been on a plane.<\/h5>\nHours before I boarded a bus for Saigon, I had coffee with several of our plastic recycling plant employees. We sat in a cool, spacious and fairly well-landscaped garden. Our waitress was a teenager in a white T-shirt, \u201cWest 14th Street New York \/ URBAN CITY,\u201d that was lightly speckled with coffee stains. She had a bemused look on her face that was slightly deranged, especially when she started to goof around. \u201cPlease forgive me!\u201d she\u2019d cackle.<\/h5>\nTwenty-two-year-old Tiny, real name Huong, brought her four-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, who came barefoot. Tiny\u2019s husband had just returned from Saigon, where he spent ten days working as a housepainter, my old trade.<\/h5>\n\u201cSo how much money did he bring back?\u201d another woman asked.<\/h5>\n\u201cNone.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNone,\u201d Tiny evenly confirmed. \u201cHe bought a pair of flip flops for my daughter,\u201d worth just over two bucks, \u201cand a pack of candies for my son.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd nothing for you!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNothing for me.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo why did he even bother going to Saigon?!\u201d<\/h5>\nTiny just smiled. Her young man likely spent all of his earnings on women and booze. Though they live with his parents, they don\u2019t eat with them, for Tiny doesn\u2019t get along with her mother-in-law, a notoriously difficult woman.<\/h5>\nIt\u2019s good to be back in Saigon, but I\u2019d say that about any place, for I can\u2019t remember regretting being anywhere. If I should wake up tomorrow lying on the sidewalk in front of the long shuttered Grandmas Tacos in Gary, Indiana, I would surely exclaim, \u201cMy, it\u2019s great to be back in Jacko\u2019s hometown!\u201d<\/h5>\n![\"Vung-Tau-cafe-2017-600x400\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Vung-Tau-cafe-2017-600x400-300x200.jpg\")
<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n![\"46949127242_953a948d16_b\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/46949127242_953a948d16_b-300x200.jpg\")
<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n![\"33136936138_b5905bce3a_b\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/33136936138_b5905bce3a_b-300x200.jpg\")
<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
Hours before I boarded a bus for Saigon, I had coffee with several of our plastic recycling plant employees. We sat in a cool, spacious and fairly well-landscaped garden. Our waitress was a teenager in a white T-shirt, \u201cWest 14th Street New York \/ URBAN CITY,\u201d that was lightly speckled with coffee stains. She had a bemused look on her face that was slightly deranged, especially when she started to goof around. \u201cPlease forgive me!\u201d she\u2019d cackle.<\/h5>\nTwenty-two-year-old Tiny, real name Huong, brought her four-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, who came barefoot. Tiny\u2019s husband had just returned from Saigon, where he spent ten days working as a housepainter, my old trade.<\/h5>\n\u201cSo how much money did he bring back?\u201d another woman asked.<\/h5>\n\u201cNone.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNone,\u201d Tiny evenly confirmed. \u201cHe bought a pair of flip flops for my daughter,\u201d worth just over two bucks, \u201cand a pack of candies for my son.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd nothing for you!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNothing for me.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo why did he even bother going to Saigon?!\u201d<\/h5>\nTiny just smiled. Her young man likely spent all of his earnings on women and booze. Though they live with his parents, they don\u2019t eat with them, for Tiny doesn\u2019t get along with her mother-in-law, a notoriously difficult woman.<\/h5>\nIt\u2019s good to be back in Saigon, but I\u2019d say that about any place, for I can\u2019t remember regretting being anywhere. If I should wake up tomorrow lying on the sidewalk in front of the long shuttered Grandmas Tacos in Gary, Indiana, I would surely exclaim, \u201cMy, it\u2019s great to be back in Jacko\u2019s hometown!\u201d<\/h5>\n<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cSo how much money did he bring back?\u201d another woman asked.<\/h5>\n\u201cNone.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNone,\u201d Tiny evenly confirmed. \u201cHe bought a pair of flip flops for my daughter,\u201d worth just over two bucks, \u201cand a pack of candies for my son.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd nothing for you!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNothing for me.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo why did he even bother going to Saigon?!\u201d<\/h5>\nTiny just smiled. Her young man likely spent all of his earnings on women and booze. Though they live with his parents, they don\u2019t eat with them, for Tiny doesn\u2019t get along with her mother-in-law, a notoriously difficult woman.<\/h5>\nIt\u2019s good to be back in Saigon, but I\u2019d say that about any place, for I can\u2019t remember regretting being anywhere. If I should wake up tomorrow lying on the sidewalk in front of the long shuttered Grandmas Tacos in Gary, Indiana, I would surely exclaim, \u201cMy, it\u2019s great to be back in Jacko\u2019s hometown!\u201d<\/h5>\n<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cNone,\u201d Tiny evenly confirmed. \u201cHe bought a pair of flip flops for my daughter,\u201d worth just over two bucks, \u201cand a pack of candies for my son.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd nothing for you!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNothing for me.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo why did he even bother going to Saigon?!\u201d<\/h5>\nTiny just smiled. Her young man likely spent all of his earnings on women and booze. Though they live with his parents, they don\u2019t eat with them, for Tiny doesn\u2019t get along with her mother-in-law, a notoriously difficult woman.<\/h5>\nIt\u2019s good to be back in Saigon, but I\u2019d say that about any place, for I can\u2019t remember regretting being anywhere. If I should wake up tomorrow lying on the sidewalk in front of the long shuttered Grandmas Tacos in Gary, Indiana, I would surely exclaim, \u201cMy, it\u2019s great to be back in Jacko\u2019s hometown!\u201d<\/h5>\n<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cNothing for me.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo why did he even bother going to Saigon?!\u201d<\/h5>\nTiny just smiled. Her young man likely spent all of his earnings on women and booze. Though they live with his parents, they don\u2019t eat with them, for Tiny doesn\u2019t get along with her mother-in-law, a notoriously difficult woman.<\/h5>\nIt\u2019s good to be back in Saigon, but I\u2019d say that about any place, for I can\u2019t remember regretting being anywhere. If I should wake up tomorrow lying on the sidewalk in front of the long shuttered Grandmas Tacos in Gary, Indiana, I would surely exclaim, \u201cMy, it\u2019s great to be back in Jacko\u2019s hometown!\u201d<\/h5>\n<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
Tiny just smiled. Her young man likely spent all of his earnings on women and booze. Though they live with his parents, they don\u2019t eat with them, for Tiny doesn\u2019t get along with her mother-in-law, a notoriously difficult woman.<\/h5>\nIt\u2019s good to be back in Saigon, but I\u2019d say that about any place, for I can\u2019t remember regretting being anywhere. If I should wake up tomorrow lying on the sidewalk in front of the long shuttered Grandmas Tacos in Gary, Indiana, I would surely exclaim, \u201cMy, it\u2019s great to be back in Jacko\u2019s hometown!\u201d<\/h5>\n<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
<\/a>I\u2019m glad to see old faces. I drop by Mrs. Yen\u2019s cafe. For Tet, she\u2019s going to Vung Tau<\/a><\/span> with her two grown children, a daughter who works in a factory and a fat, good-for-nothing and likely retarded son who sits around all day, talking big to his buddies. What will he do when she dies?<\/h5>\nShe\u2019ll pay $160 for two nights in a 3-star hotel near Back Beach. It\u2019s a rip off, but that\u2019s Tet for you. Mrs. Yen is a most lovely and gentle person. Charging 43 cents for a cup of coffee or can of soda, she makes money a few pennies at a time, with many of her customers the employees at a box making factory across an alley. One joked, \u201cThe service is slow here, and you don\u2019t get to look at a young, pretty girl, just an old one!\u201d<\/h5>\nSix months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
Six months ago, I profiled a domestic servant, \u1ef4. Since then, she had bought herself a fancy phone for $345, on credit, which promptly got ripped from her hands a month later, as she stood yakking in some alley. Bereft, she must keep making those payments. For Tet, \u1ef4 has spent over $200 to buy her dead father an artfully crafted papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 car, two chauffeurs, fistfuls of fake dollars and a \u201crental house,\u201d so he could derive an income in hell, where even \u1ef4 admitted the wife-beating drunk belonged. Pious, she burnt.<\/h5>\nThinking he was going back to their home village, \u1ef4\u2019s 17-year-old-son got a stylish haircut, complete with blonde highlights, which looked great with his gold chain, then he changed his mind, for the trip would more than bankrupt the factory worker. As a returning city dweller, he would be expected to give all of his relatives money or gifts, and to pay for drinking bouts with old friends. The same dread likely prevents Mrs. Ha\u2019s sons and husband from showing up in Ea Kly during Tet.<\/h5>\nSometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
Sometimes, the kids don\u2019t come home because they can\u2019t stand their parents. Eleven months ago, I wrote about a woman who just had an eye operation. This morning, I saw her sitting in the shade, by three cats, so I paused to chat. Just out of earshot, a shirtless old man glared in our direction.<\/h5>\n\u201cDo you remember his dog, the big one?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSomeone poisoned it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cA neighbor, certainly.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s exactly what I think,\u201d she grinned.<\/h5>\n\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cOnly a neighbor would be so irritated by a dog to poison it. Did he bite?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, but he barked at lot, even at night. It kept people up.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s enough.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cAnd he never tells the dog to shut up. Instead, he yells at people who complain.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cThat would do it.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cWhen he was younger, he used to be pretty nice, but now he\u2019s cranky all the time. After he got sick, the doctor said his personality would change, and it\u2019s true, he has changed completely. He yells at everybody. When motorists honk, turning this corner, he yells. No one likes him.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cDoes he have a wife and kids?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cHe\u2019s my old man.\u201d<\/h5>\nI wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
I wasn\u2019t sure I had heard right. \u201cHe\u2019s your husband?!\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cYes. It\u2019s very hard to live with him. I suffer a lot, little brother. He used to chase women and left me all the time. He was a soldier in the Fake Army,\u201d what the current regime called the ARVN. \u201cNg\u1ee5y\u201d is fake, and not puppet, as it\u2019s always translated.<\/h5>\n\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cWas he jailed after the war?\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNo, he was only a sergeant.\u201d<\/h5>\nHer three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
Her three children hate their father, so never visit, not even for Tet, though one daughter dutifully brings over rice and other groceries each month. Two of the old woman\u2019s sisters also contribute $43 a month, each.<\/h5>\nFinding a willing listener, she continued, \u201cIt\u2019s just my fate, little brother. I owe him a debt from a past life. My family had picked out a decent man for me. He was good looking, successful and an only son, but my husband ruined my girlhood,\u201d a euphemism for taking her virginity, as in rape, \u201cso I had to marry him. Back then, that really mattered.\u201d<\/h5>\nMy, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
My, my, so many cheerful Tet stories. In Saigon, I also see Vu, the manicurist who works in Ferguson, Missouri, ten months a year. Though I\u2019ve written about Vu and his alcoholic housemate before, I get a fuller picture this time.<\/h5>\n\u201cBusiness has slowed down. There are days when I make hardly anything.\u201d The scrawny, dark and sometimes stuttering man chuckles. \u201cYou know, Linh, a couple times, we had a customer who refused to pay, but when the cop came, he wouldn\u2019t arrest her. He just said, you know, \u2018You should try to pay these people,\u2019 then let her go! The cop was black, and the customer was black.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cSo he was biased.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s, ah, right. It wasn\u2019t like that before. Even the whah, whah, white cops have become useless. They don\u2019t want to arrest black people any more.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
\u201cNot after the riot. It\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d<\/h5>\n\u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d<\/h5>\nAs for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
As for Vu\u2019s housemate, the 62-year-old drunk makes $100 a day, under the table, cooking in a Chinese restaurant. He drinks daily, sometimes with a Vietnamese coworker. Together, they\u2019d drain three cases of Heineken as they slur through a string of sappy songs. Paying just $350 a month for rent, the drunk can send a thousand a month back to Vietnam to support his 35-ish wife and their two kids. His previous wife, he had divorced in California. He has four grown children from that marriage. Going home for Tet, he\u2019d stay and sate, finally, for three months.<\/h5>\nAs his youngish wife does whatever with whomever the other nine, he works that wok with two hands, knees the gas lever, splashes in soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and MSG, then returns to his ghetto home to guzzle, warble and slump on the kitchen or bathroom floor as he wets himself, again.<\/h5>\nThe main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
The main aim of Tet is to gather the family for an extended reunion, and most Vietnamese still manage to do that. Wandering through alleys, I pass countless houses where boisterous parties are being staged, often with karaoke singing where a handful of popular Tet numbers are variously butchered. Food and hell money offerings are left on low tables to petition and placate the spirits. Already prone to gambling, Viets use Tet to indulge in card and dice games, with people also betting on cock fights. Enormous sums can be lost.<\/h5>\n<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
<\/a>When a dragon and lion<\/a><\/span> dance troupe is hired by a family<\/a><\/span>, the drums<\/a><\/span>, gongs<\/a><\/span> and cymbals beckon neighbors to come watch a free show<\/a><\/span>, and the kids<\/a><\/span> are especially mesmerized<\/a><\/span>. A Monkey King<\/a><\/span> chases a terrified boy. Carrying another man on his shoulders, a chubby, shirtless dude walks on broken glass<\/a> <\/span>as a young woman grimaces. Of course, many people simply pass by, minding their own business. Similar stunts are already seen year-round at funerals<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s no big deal to stumble onto a sword swallower or some guy balancing a motorbike on his forehead as you go get some pho. In Vietnam, the bizarre is often inserted into the quotidian.<\/h5>\nIt is the Year of the Pig. With its rotund, gluttonous shape, noisy eating, wallowing in mud and seeming insolence, the pig is a larded symbol. In Wu Cheng\u2019en\u2019s Journey to the West, there\u2019s a striking pig character, Zhu Bajie, with a long, red and gaping snout, ending with a mouth smeared with slop. Lazy and lusty, Zhu Bajie is nevertheless endowed with a long list of magical powers, including the abilities to see through substances, shorten vast distances, flatten mountains, turn night into day, scale the highest mountains, dive into the deepest oceans, lift enormous boulders, turn paper into money and adults into children, all those things, in short, that modern man, the ultimate pig, has managed to do.<\/h5>\n<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\nAesop has a pig fatten on barley, then slaughtered, which prompts a stupid ass to refuse the leftover grains, for he fears the knife, though it\u2019s not meant for him.<\/h5>\nOrientals and Germans devour pigs, while Semites shun them, and in the Bible, the prodigal son reaches his nadir when he\u2019s forced to be among pigs all day long.<\/h5>\nJewish Art Spiegelman depicts Germans as cats, Jews as mice and Poles as pigs. Jewish Kafka allegorizes Jews as jackals<\/a><\/span>.<\/h5>\nNone of the above pig samples are as familiar, perhaps, as the term \u201ccapitalist pig,\u201d first coined in the 1920\u2019s by Communists. In Orwell\u2019s Animal Farms, however, the revolution itself is pointedly led by pigs, who end up just as brutal, predictably, as men, for there\u2019s a pig inside each sentient being.<\/h5>\nTo have pigs supplant men as the best hope of mankind is the sickest historical joke ever, and it\u2019s far from over.<\/h5>\nInstead of piggy banks, we have pig banksters. Who are our biggest pigs, and what should we do about them?<\/h5>\nPig enough, I pig out when given a chance<\/a><\/span>. My pig days are winding down. Welcome to another Year of the Pig.<\/h5>\n
<\/a>In Vietnamese, a pornographic film is called a \u201cpig film,\u201d for naked humans resemble pigs, a perception that\u2019s more apparent in the Orient, where men tend to be hairless and round<\/a><\/span> edged.<\/h5>\n