{"id":185406,"date":"2019-03-19T06:45:11","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T06:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=185406"},"modified":"2019-03-25T07:34:03","modified_gmt":"2019-03-25T07:34:03","slug":"the-mekong-retains-erases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=185406","title":{"rendered":"The Mekong Retains, Erases"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh \u2013 The Unz Review March 18, 2019<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Can Tho, 2019<\/p><\/div>\n

I hadn\u2019t been to Chau Doc in nearly two decades, so was definitely looking forward to this trip. Though my wife doesn\u2019t travel well, she came along because she wanted to visit Mistress\u2019 Temple. All over Vietnam, there are Mistress\u2019 Temples, with most dedicated to Guanyin, but the Chau Doc one was built for a found statue whose origin most worshippers are ignorant of, and have no interest in. Scholars have established that it is definitely Cambodian, for the entire Mekong Delta belonged to Cambodia until three centuries ago, a blink in history.<\/h5>\n
By the 17th century, Cambodia was a shadow of its Khmer Empire greatness. Squeezed by more powerful Thailand and Vietnam, King Chey Chettha II decided to side with the Nguyen Lords (who ruled half of Vietnam), and this fateful decision led to Vietnam eventually swallowing up a third of Cambodia.<\/h5>\n
Chey Chettha II\u2019s antipathy towards Thailand can likely be traced to his being taken hostage by them from age 21 to 31. That would piss me off, too. Chettha II exacted his revenge, somewhat, at the legendary battle of Kampong Chhnang, where his troops slew many Thais. Enthroned, Chettha II married a Vietnamese princess.<\/h5>\n
Ah, all these obscure figures and places, but then again, what does Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Antietam or Chancellorsville mean to a non-American or, for that matter, recent American college graduate?<\/h5>\n
Shiloh? Isn\u2019t that, like, ah, a Jewish holiday? At my college, we always celebrate Shiloh.<\/h5>\n
Sovereignty lost, Cambodians in the Mekong Delta became an ethnic minority, and as recently as the 1970\u2019s, some were still trying to evict the Vietnamese, but it was way too late. The Mekong Delta hasn\u2019t just become Vietnamese, but quintessentially so, just as California, taken from Mexico, is emblematically American, but nothing is final, of course, for maps are constantly being redrawn, at least psychically. One can board a plane for a familiar destination, only to land in a completely alien territory. I don\u2019t know what I will see the next time I visit St. Paul, Bolzano or Brussels, for example.<\/h5>\n
The Mekong Delta has its own singing styles, chamber music, blues, folk theater and perhaps Vietnam\u2019s best modernist writer, Ho Bieu Chanh, an author of 64 novels and 12 collections of stories. Marguerite Duras met her Chinese-Vietnamese lover on a ferry in the Mekong Delta. Once colonized, any land breeds an entirely new culture and mythology that erase all that came before them.<\/h5>\n
Beginning in Tibet, the Mekong flows through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia, before reaching Vietnam. In the 90\u2019s, China started building dams on this great liquid dragon, and there are now seven, with an eighth planned for Cambodia. Controlling the river\u2019s flow, China has all these yellow countries by the balls.<\/h5>\n
Porfirio D\u00edaz lamented, \u201cPoor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States,\u201d and the same can be said of Vietnam apropos China. Their easily crossed border has witnessed many invasions, and even the sea off Vietnam\u2019s coast is now claimed by China, so that it can\u2019t even extract its own natural gas. Mexico has reasons for hope, for its beefy, bullying neighbor is already decomposing after merely 241 years, but China is as eternal as any nation.<\/h5>\n
On the way to Chau Doc, we stopped in Long Xuyen for lunch, and the presence of so many itinerant lottery ticket sellers spoke of the relative poverty of the area. The city of 400,000, though, looked much improved from 2001. The roundabout downtown was anchored by an ornamental steel tower that\u2019s crowned by four orange stars, four red flames, four street lanterns and four pseudo clocks, and if that description makes little sense, the sight itself was nearly as baffling, but at least it wasn\u2019t a brutal socialist statue slapped together with chunky concrete blocks.<\/h5>\n
Visiting Chau Doc in 2000, my wife and I stayed with a friend, Mrs. Nga, who owned a bakery, cranking out baguettes. The front room had a picture of Mt. Rainer, wrapped in yellowing and slashed plastic. Cobwebs decorated the upper reaches of each wall. Graciously, Mrs. Nga gave us her own bed, with its thin mattress and homey mosquito netting, so everything was fine, except there was not a bathroom in the entire house. Rural Vietnamese used to refer to relieving oneself as \u201cgoing to the field\u201d [\u201c\u0111i \u0111\u1ed3ng\u201d], so many of them, like Mrs. Nga, never considered a built-in toilet a necessity.<\/h5>\n
During these pre-cellphone days, the outside world only reached remote Chau Doc via video cassettes, so at night, there were these half-lit oases of men watching, enraptured, Hollywood movies, including Vietnam War travesties.<\/h5>\n
The stretch from Long Xuyen to Chau Doc used to be particularly beautiful, with verdant fields to one\u2019s left, and a river to one\u2019s right, with the mostly miserable shacks that lined it not detracting but adding to the picturesqueness. If one doesn\u2019t have to endure it, poverty can be charming or even sexy.<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>In 2019, these shacks are almost entirely replaced by solid, concrete houses, and the buildup mars both sides of the road. The Vietnamese first called their southernmost third Deer Field [\u0110\u1ed3ng Nai], but there are certainly no deer left, much less tigers, though an image<\/a><\/span> of the fearful beast still guards many temples. Men come, mess up the land, then lie beneath, and after many a summer, croaks the poisoned swan.<\/h5>\n
We reached Chau Doc without an argument, a rare achievement, for my wife doesn\u2019t travel well. An extremely meticulous person, she must micro manage every detail of each second, so the numerous surprises of being on the road often frustrate if not infuriate her. At home, she\u2019s always cleaning and putting things in order. For two decades, my wife has clipped my toe nails, for she simply doesn\u2019t trust me to do it right. I\u2019m a frightful pig in her eyes. I also suspect that she must control what she can since our lives have been so uncertain, thanks to my writing pursuit.<\/h5>\n
Many American men have the opposite problem, I know. When I visited a white friend in North Carolina a while back, I found him always washing the dishes, while his girlfriend lazed on an armchair. Ringed by assorted garbage, including used condoms, their messy bed would be shunned by a hobo, and no, my friend was not \u201cwhite trash,\u201d but a PhD-educated transplant from Connecticut. His girlfriend, too, was an academic. She never cleaned on principle.<\/h5>\n
The center of Chau Doc is but a mile from the Cambodian border. In 1978, the Khmer Rouge crossed into nearby Ba Chuc and massacred 3,157 Vietnamese civilians, so there\u2019s a macabre memorial there, complete with skulls in glass cabinets and photos of impaled women. Like each man, a nation only remembers the wrongs it has suffered, not those it inflicted.<\/h5>\n
The main road into Chau Doc is a wide boulevard flanked by hideous modernist sculptures. The marriage of glib abstraction and bureaucratic decision making has resulted in millions of steel and stone monstrosities blighting vistas worldwide. I cringed. The Khmer Rouge would not have put up with this.<\/h5>\n
To accommodate increasing throngs of visitors, Chau Doc\u2019s Mistress Temple had been greatly enlarged, I soon discovered, with even an entrance fee for each four-wheeled vehicle. Supplicants arrive with tons of food each day, and since a stone sculpture can\u2019t eat any of it, these bags of rice, roast pigs and all sorts of fruits are resold, with the proceeds supposedly going to Buddhist charities.<\/h5>\n
A while back, I wrote about the general elegance of Da Lat<\/span><\/a>, as manifested in its architecture and dress. Chau Doc was the exact opposite, for everything was particularly tacky, garish or clownish, even by Vietnamese standards. The people, too, appeared unusually coarse, but perhaps these are exactly the types that would flock to worship an alien statue, crudely painted.<\/h5>\n
Inside a small shrine the size of a dog house, there was just a stone chunk that didn\u2019t resemble anything, yet it attracted a succession of austere worshippers, each with incense sticks held high over his forehead. They had no idea what they were praying to. It didn\u2019t matter.<\/h5>\n
Roaming through Mistress\u2019 Temple, I photographed many outlandish scenes, making for an intriguing set, I thought, one of my recent best, then I noticed a No Photography sign. Too late! Plus, the security guards there didn\u2019t seem to mind. I had done my work, with even the Mistress herself captured.<\/h5>\n
On the way back, we stopped in Can Tho<\/a><\/span>, the chief city in the Mekong<\/span><\/a> Delta. In 1999 or so, I saw a few queers sashay near the Ho Chi Minh statue by the Mekong River. Sitting near me, a man exclaimed, \u201cHi-Fi!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cHi-Fi?!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u201cYes, they\u2019re gay.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Hi-Fi, you see, sounds like hai ph\u00e1i, meaning two genders. Stereo sexuality. I learnt a new slang.<\/h5>\n
Can Tho features prominently in my novel, Love Like Hate<\/span><\/em><\/a>. I wax, \u201cBefore 1975, the richest families owned vast tracts of land and lived in colonial-era villas built in a style that was a hybrid of East and West. Tucked in tropical gardens leafy with coconut, mango, plum, durian, jackfruit, guava, papaya, custard apple, banana, betel nut and lemon trees, each of these solid brick houses boasted a spacious porch with square columns. The high ceiling of the front room was often painted in pastel colors with bucolic scenes evoking somewhere in Europe. It was the rococo, Mekong style. On the floor were cool floral tiles, ideal for the hot weather. The furniture was made from teak, ebony or rosewood.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>Can Tho in 2019<\/a><\/span> is nothing like this, needless to say. Now, there\u2019s a 30-story, five star hotel where most of the waiters and bartenders<\/span><\/a> have college degrees, with at least a decade of English lessons behind them. A suspension bridge, opened in 2010, eliminated the once-iconic ferry crossing, with its festive, messy array of eateries and itinerant food vendors at each end. Gone too are the tiny shrines to an underwater dragon [th\u1ee7y long].<\/h5>\n
Another icon, the thatch hut, is becoming scarce. In this region\u2019s constant scorching heat, a cool thatch hut is quite suitable, actually, plus it is super cheap, but among the drawbacks are its tendency to leak during storms, vulnerabilities to termites, break ins and flames, size limitations and short lifespan. In place of thatch huts and the equally quaint wooden houses, one now finds concrete clad homes of up to six stories that flaunt a mishmash of Western architectural features. Even when grand and comfortable, most of these are rather hideous looking, for they manifest a rootless, borrowed aesthetics not even half-digested.<\/h5>\n
Duras, \u201cThere are no seasons in that part of the world, we have just the one season, hot, monotonous, we\u2019re in the long hot girdle of the earth, with no spring, no renewal,\u201d or one can say that each morning is renewal and spring, with lush plants and birds chirping, though by noon, it\u2019s oven hot, a daily ordeal. Without autumns and winters, the Mekong Delta is deprived of ready metaphors for decline and death. Never gloomy, it is a world where even the most abject desperation is brightly displayed in a beautiful, cheerful sunshine.<\/h5>\n
My late father\u2019s first law office was in Can Tho, and as a young, successful attorney, he had a large stone plaque made to announce his business. \u201cEverything went downhill after that,\u201d he would tell me, laughing. \u201cIt was too much like a grave marker!\u201d What a silly old coot, I would think, with his superstitions!<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>I\u2019ve sought out a master musician in My Tho, attended a wedding<\/span><\/a> in Cai Be<\/span><\/a>, scrutinized nameless<\/span><\/a> graves<\/a><\/span> near Sa Dec and consulted a shaman in Vinh Chau, so I have some history with the Mekong Delta, and I\u2019ve seen it changed. With words and photos, I\u2019ve striven to preserve some of its current peculiarities, before they\u2019re all washed away, just like a woman\u2019s remains in my novel, \u201cReduced to a grayish white powder, the dead woman\u2019s soul merged into the muck and flow of the Mekong<\/span><\/a> River, a giant anaconda muscling its way toward the Pacific Ocean, overstuffed with half-digested cats, human beings, rats, toothless combs, toothpicks and rusted pull rings from exploded hand grenades.\u201d<\/h5>\n
Back in Saigon, I started to process my photos, starting with those of Long Xuyen, with Chau Doc, the most crucial to this article, saved for last. The photoshopping would take several days.<\/h5>\n
That morning started normally. I got up before dawn to read the news and answer emails, then went out for quick breakfast, with the walk itself a head clearing exercise. Returning by 8:30, I was eager to, finally, fine tune my Chau Doc photos, but the entire folder, to my surprise, had disappeared from my desktop. I scoured my hard drive, but it was nowhere to be found.<\/h5>\n
Even minor losses sting because they point to our impotence, futility and irrelevance. I kept fidgeting with my computer while thinking, hard, about what could have happened, before finally calling my wife, who said that, yes, she did clean my laptop that morning. Everything must always be spotless, you see, and that\u2019s how all of my Chau Doc was accidentally shoved into the Recycle Bin, then permanently deleted.<\/h5>\n
Of course, the most logical Vietnamese explanation is that I got exactly what I deserved for daring to point my Fujifilm X100F at the Mistress of Chau Doc, and I\u2019m lucky my blasphemous camera didn\u2019t explode in my unbelieving face!<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>With its canals, creeks, swamps and, of course, nine branches of the eponymous river<\/a><\/span>, the Mekong<\/span><\/a> Delta is dominated by waterways<\/a><\/span>, and on these, there often float duckweeds. Adrift, tossed about by currents, unable to determine their destination and essentially homeless, these duckweeds symbolize men in many Vietnamese poems, songs and sayings.<\/h5>\n
Before being flushed into the sea, we all bobble<\/span><\/a> down this mother of water<\/span><\/a>.<\/h5>\n
Linh Dinh\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> latest book is <\/em>Postcards from the End of America<\/span><\/em><\/a>. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog<\/a><\/span>.<\/em><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

The Mekong Delta hasn\u2019t just become Vietnamese, but quintessentially so, just as California, taken from Mexico, is emblematically American. Nothing is final<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185406"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185414,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185406\/revisions\/185414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}