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saturday april 30, 1am - ho chi minh city, vietnam we arrived yesterday. flying into the former saigon was terrible. as we descended images of bombs exploding the ground, defaulitation and burning kids running from US torched villages ran through my mind. they came like a torrent over and over again. text from josepth conrad's, "heart of darkness" scrolled bottom up, brain-page by brain-page as if the mekong were a tributary into the net. i couldn't believe i was coming to this place. IDRC had booked us into the most expensive hotel in the city. a single night was worth more than both our per diems (allowences) put together. we stayed one night. our hosts, the centre for science & technology information (CSTI), booked us onto another hotel which we moved into today. the empire is a government run hotel found in the midst of the cities busiest prostitution markets. nice place. but we're only minutes from the centre where we'll be spending the entire monday at. last night i took to the city square. culture shocksville! it was pumping. motorised life streaming in and out of the square in all possible directions. motor-bikes, 75cc in almost all cases, are the favoured transport. bangkok has a pretty amazing bike culture - bikes ooze through every opening in the traffic. here, cars are in the minority. two t h i n g s caught my eye: 1 huge fonts. yeh, big big font servers fashioned into billboards hung to any available building space. every major company in the country must be there. 2 street kids. there's plenty around. you've got to persistantly ignore them overwise you'd be easily over-run. its hard. it was bloody hard to ignore one girl, at least 4 years old, tapping on my leg. i was being haggled by a cyclo rider at the time. i looked down. what looked up was a disaster. one eye was fused shut and pussy. the other had tears running from it. she was crying. her right arm had a horrendous scar. she hadn't been washed ever by the sight of her. i couldn't believe what i was seeing. like all the kids she pointed to her mouth, then her belly. i turned to the cyclo guy and asked him if there was a place where she could be fed. he laughed and continued to promise me the ride of my life. i just walked away. after i'd walked about 5 metres i stopped and looked back. she was running alongside a fairly well dressed middle-aged guy towards me. i thought, shit! i'd done something way bad there by leaving like that. but they turned into a shop where i saw her hand him some money. a poverty pimp!!! i wanted to sick up. soon a couple of other kids entered and pretty much went through the same scenario. a young woman traditionaly dressed stood at the front of the store smiling as if it were a demolition sale or something. when she noticed me standing there all twisted up, i moved on. later in the evening i returned to the square to capture it on vid. did a lousy job. still getting used to the machine. but i had a great time bouncing about and through the lawless traffic still trying to get over the fact that i was in vietnam. all the architecture in the square is european. the peoples committee building looks like it could've been built by the french. i know nothing about architecture other than what i like, and what i don't. some of these buildings i like. they're inviting, spacious. they don't impose themselves on people. many of them, as in phnom penh, are draped with fairy lights giving the whole square a dream-like feel. on the way back to the hotel i walked through the centre of the square. an attractive, well dressed young woman got up from a bench, walked towards me and just slung her arm around mine and said hallo. whats with this? i asked pointing to her arm. she just smiled and kept walking with me. i thought, perhaps she wants to get away from some guy and any minute now the square's going to be a mess of bodies. then a filthy, bedraggled guy, about 20, turned up from nowhere and asked me whether i wanted a girl. this guy was her pimp??? this face from a trash-can with a black rat for tongue was *her* pimp??? while he gave me a rundown of services i peeled her arm (it felt like a birds wing - delicate and soft) off mine and again, just walked off. i hated myself for doing it - i couldn't get over the fact that this young shit was a pimp, and, and... anyway, i hadn't got a few metres further when a group of teenage kids, all smiles and gouchy clothes approached me. they asked could i load their camera. they seemed nice enough. about 3 girls with their boyfriends out for a lark. i loaded the camera, gave it back and was about to walk off when one of the girls wanted a photo of her taken with me. sheesh!!! the camera didn't work. oh oh! i stuffed it somehow. i couldn't tell if they were pissed off, or what. i tried to explain in broken english that i didn't know what was wrong with it. they eventually walked off. THEN, this guy wanders up trying out his english. he needed a bath real bad. but he seemed nice enough so i stuck around. he'd had one year only of schooling. he earns about 15 000 dong (US$1.50) a day apparently peddling people around the city. this gets him his food at the markets and thats about it. we talked for around 15 minutes when this other guy shows up. he wasn't as friendly looking. he just glares at me like i killed his mother, or something. the other guy continues to talk. he tells me he's 28 and that he's from a family of 7. a third guy turns up. suddenly i'm surrounded. i look across the square to where the police are and they're asleep. shit! i tell the first guy that i don't like this and want to know whats going on. he tells me he has an english teacher. all three of them are shorter and lighter than me. i figured that if if they went for me (i had my camera bag slung around my neck) i could easily fight my way out and wake the police at the same time. i decided to just walk off. as i did, the other two guys split almost immediatly whilst guy number one walked with me. he said, "sorry but i got something to tell you. i give you massage for one hour for 15 000 dong." shit!!! not interested, mate. "i take you round the city and give you massage. safe and clean. very clean. i can also do for you..." look pal, i'm not interested. we pass a couple of policemen. they look on amusemed. "you meet me here tomorrow night?" no!. "you meet me at this corner". NO!! he stopped and watched me walk off. its by no means a unique story. this sort of thing happens in just about any city. its happened to me plenty of times. but whats different here is that this lot were all so poor you wonder whats kept them alive. the only person that appeared on top of it was the pro with wings for arms. what price freedom! sunday, may 1, 8am yesterday was independence day. the city, if not the entire country was out celebrating. probably the last independence day free of free markets. though the gates have been opened the flood waters of capitalism are yet to rise. along the roadsides people go about their business as they've done so for perhaps a few hundred years or more. ox are still used in the provinces along with hand-made machinery for all manner of work. bricks and other earthenware are manufactured in a straw and cane industrial area - natural fiber assembliges, the tallest buldings in the provinces, that would burn at the strike of a match. what will become of these "technologies" with the demand for increased productivity? and that increase will come. the desire for the west is strong. but tolerance for the west is tepid amongst some. saturday we spent the day at vung tau, a seaside town about 100k's out of ho chi minh city. our hosts, CESTI, had organised for miss bui thu hien from "pc world", a popular magazine now translated into vietmese, to accompany us with a driver and air-con car over the weekend schedule they'd planned for us. we aimed for the beach. my first look at the indo china sea. thousands of people were heading the same direction. motor-bikes laden with goods and people, sometimes four to a single bike. huge buses over-flowing, and the occasional car jostled for space on the road. no marked lanes, no right or left. never mind the danger it was easier to overtake into oncoming traffic. it seemed one required more skill to stay alive than on the road. our driver took more chances in that drive than i've taken in my life. anyway, we got to vung tau thats the main thing. but then we had the beach to contend with. i'd never seen so many people on a beach. the beach must've been a good 4 kilometres long with about 100 metres of sand for sitting on. we got to a row of deck chairs and sat to watch beach vietnamese style. the kids were the best. their delight at being pushed about by the water was infectious. it was one of the few times i'd smiled on this trip. what a grouch! as we sat there one by one people came by begging, tugging at our shirts, tapping on my boots, thrusting plastic cups in our face. then others came selling fruit on bicycles and other strange wheeled contraptions. we were bad customers. we bought nothing. people were so dissapointed. foreigners are known for spending lots of money, for buying things, perhaps anything. we weren't good ambassoders for the west. then very quickly things got nasty. we were beginning to attract too much attention. like bees to honey more and more beggars came to taunt us. most were amputees and very bitter. eventually one by one they left but no sooner had they gone when another arrived dragging himself along the sand. he demanded money. lots of it. he knocked my boots with his cup getting angrier and angrier. he then took to yelling at miss hein accusing her of being a whore and making lots of money off us. then another guy appeared and sat next to me. he made a sound from the the corner of his mouth like a hiss and spit. he didn't ask for money. he demanded it. he didn't like me one bit. the amputee dragged himself behind us and began hitting miss hein with his one good hand. she was getting embarressed and quite upset. i turned and yelled at him, then turned to the other guy and glared at him. i wasn't about to be intimidated. the amputee became so bitter he started throwing sand at miss hein. at that point i got up. the other guy jumped up then left immediatly when he realised i was looking way down at him. a throng of women appeared to calm the whole thing down. we were about to leave when the women brought a man from the car park to drag the beggar away. they apologised and left us with lemonade. jagdish and i wanted to leave but miss hein assured us that everything would be okay. we were attracting attention simply for being foreign and sitting there with our sunglasses and cameras and lemonade. it must've been pretty weird for people around us. we'd become foreign tourists by default of our looks and paraphenalia. soon after another amputee appeared. he'd no hands and was selling lottery tickets that were wedged between the two stumps of his arms. his face was all mashed up and could've been mistaken for chocolate pudding. these, i thought, are the victims of vietnams independence. these are just some of the people for whom the west can endear no respect. their loathing for me was undeniable. what could i do? i represented to them all that was miserable in their lives and now i was back to make money off them. i was disgusted and sorry. we left. sunday, may 1, 10.30pm counting in the south african elections began a couple of days ago. we're so cut off from western news here (no cnn in this hotel) we've no idea whats transpired. we're missing a significant moment in history. i'd been trying to understand the differences within the black african movements in south africa. with the elections there and the violence surrounding it its hot converstation where ever we go. last week i asked lisa to explain to me the differences between the ANC and the Incatha Freedom Figthers. she grew up in sth africa and has been living in australia for a couple years. her replys' informative. lisa, hope u don't mind me copying it here :)
In answer to your question the Anc consists of mostly xhosa people - a tribe whicch originated in the eastern cape - they are supported by a majority of blacks-including zulus and other blacks- as Mandela has become a symbol of the black struggle for freedom in sa. The zulus are the largest black tribe in sa. and originate from parts of natal. Black tribes in sa have a history of great tribal warfare and the zulus were always the strongest black tribe with the most advanced methods of warfare. They had a strong identity and speak zulu which is different to xhosa language. The zulus took over and intimidated a lot of tribes - but this is way back in history.
To be zulu is different to being xhosa in terms of culture, clothing, language etc. Ethnic differences rear their ugly heads again and it is not a case of uniting because your skin is black and you have been suppressed for so long. The major problem facing sa in terms of violence at the moment is this major group difference between the zulus and the anc supporters. This would be a difference between: traditional zulus - a lot of whom live in Kwazulu - a declared homeland in the old sa - they have been governed by Buthelezi and have been relatively independent. It is quite traumatic for them to be suddenly lumped with all the black people in sa - when they know that the anc will win the vote and they will experience a reduction in freedom and perhaps a great deal of subjugation under the new government. Why should they have to give up their independence?
you can't find this information in vietnam. access to it is as mediated here as in any other country, though more so. throughout the past couple of days jagdish and i had been speaking a great deal to miss hien. she's a doctor of medicine, but was unable to complete he prac studies. so now she works as a secretary earning US$150 a month. she's saving to buy a water purifier and a new motor-bike. a bright red 75cc honda. it'll set her back US$2000. she wants it real bad. miss hien's day commences at 5.30am. she heads to the markets, buys food for the day and returns to prepare it. she then gets to work at 7.30 and leaves at 5.30pm. a 7 kilometre ride back home to prepare food again and do the housework. she'll get to bed round 11.30 with perhaps a short time to herself for some study or reading a newspaper. she looks after her mother, sister and her sisters children. hers is the only salary in the house. at eight she remembers seeing bodies of dying men, women, children and even babies on the streets of hanoi. she grew up in the last years of the vietnam war when it was at its bitterest. tension between north and south is still evident. miss hien's ambition is to become a housewife. the "modern way", as she calls it is not her her. she preferes the "old way" where a woman is duty-bound to her husband. recently an indian fortune teller told her that she would have children, a husband but no love and hers would be an unhappy life. shes desperate to get married. we talked about this alot. she wanted to know what it was like to be married in australia, how much it cost, at what time of year people were married and what kind of gifts were given. she has a dream. it was a hard one to talk about. by the end of the weekend she'd relised that neither jagdish or i were typical of the kind of westerners she'd been exposed to in the past. neither were we typical of the consultants passing through CESTI. i think she found her perceptions of the US hardest to shake. we told her lots of what wasn't translated across the media. all her information was based on happy happy joy joy propaganda from the US. heres some of happy happy joy joy of the urban kind. its a way cool message i got from susan. sorry susan, i had to share it with friends. you know how much information wants to free...
dear andrew,
I've just spent the day sunburning myself while videotaping graffiti, trains, and buildings being demolished or built by large yellow machines. It was great fun! The graffiti is some of the best I've seen. Huge 3D twining letterforms ("aeroglyphix") thrown up on foundation walls for nonexistant buildings in psychedelic swirls and geometric complexities...huge faces showing many emotions, mostly hopelessness,...rabbit, cat, roses, skeletons... cartoons...fire hydrant with face... awesome art. I took a bunch of stills. I can't wait to show you!
The best part was when I met two guys who live in a lean-to in one blasted building. They are de facto tour guides and and wall "writers." They do canvasses and CD covers too, they said, but they live in a cement-block closet. They showed me how to read the words, which are really the "tags" of the artists (nicknames--nommes de guerres--like: base, haze, verse, honer, 23, ryz, red, seven, etc.). They showed me how to tell which tag goes with which piece. (tough when confronted with a wall full of hundreds of names)
I asked them about techniques and they told me how it was all done with spray cans. I was surprised because of the clean lines and smoothly modeled faces they achieve. They said it was cheating to use stencils or cards to shoot over. They showed me their special spray nozzles and which kind were the best. They discussed the aesthetics of having your letters jumbled up and growing out of each other.
I asked about the biggest mystery heretofore for me...how can anyone paint over something that good, over and over again? They said that after a piece had been "up" for a month or three it was "old" and it was time to let go of it. Kinda like an expiration date!
They sometimes get together to paint; they are the "zero crue." They range from teenage to 40-something. They are black, white, japanese, and chinese. They even gave me a phone number for "noah" in case I want to be in touch. All this and it only cost me $5 and a pack of cigs!
this crew, it seems to me, is out challenging knowledge, language and litteracy. redefining language for themselves, from a language thats been redifined by goverment and media - a language that no longer belongs to "us" but to those who copyright it, distort it etc to conform, control etc. susan's gaffitiests are make sense of all that by taking control of their own expression and by messing with the old. something like that, anyway. anarchy! beautiful stuff. more, please... monday, may 3, 10.35pm travesty of travesties. just discovered that i hadn't loaded film into the camera properly. lisa loaned me her camera -a smart, self-contained fully automated olympus. i thought i was getting too much milage out of this single roll so i ran off about 30 shots in the cupboard. when i opened the piece i discovered to my horror the tongue of the film just hanging out the roll. groan!!! lisa, i should've asked you how to load it... its supposed to automatically load but i'd stuffed it. we'd just got back from a trip up the saigon river. no vid, just stills. lost! never there!!! empty moments. a honda ride round the city in the evening. i was sat pillion and reeling off one shot after another handing the camera to jagdish who was sat on another bike to take shots...lost, like dry tears in rain!!! so it goes... apart from that we'd run a productive workshop at CESTI. they're real keen to be the national Internet host for vietnam. but they're going to have to compete with hanoi where their sister ministry has been running UUCP trials with the australian national university, canberra. theres also a bunch of americans and canadians actively persuing committements to establish Internet sites in vietnam. sometimes i wonder if its all a little like pepsi. when the trade embargo was lifted in february pepsi hit the streets within 2 days. under the supervision of international beverages corp. manufacturing plants, already in place, began churning out three beverage labels and massive advertising, mobile dispensers and refridgerators were distributed across country. in ONLY 2 days! mass consumption then closed the loop and hung the noose. coca cola arrived only weeks later to stake a claim on the market. sunday morning we were taken to an industrial trade fair just out of town. it was so hot that morning i had sweat running into my eyes behind the bangkok specs. faintsville if it weren't for the trees. the two leading company logos seen from just about anywhere were "shell" and "pepsi". intl. beverages corp sells their softdrinks in vietnam for the same price as in the states. its amazing to have a product you can sell for pretty much the same price the world over. their overheads in vietnam must ensure at least 200% profit over and above their earnings elsewhere. and the vietmese are mad for cans. full or empty. around resturants and even on the river you'll have locals wanting your empties. from the boat on the saigon this evening i saw an elderly woman skillfully manouver her small wooden boat towards this floating resturant whilst her grandchildren held their hands up for cans. people threw what they had. we still don't know what the state of the elections are in sth africa. may 3, 12.25pm - hanoi, vietnam - army hotel mandela's in. bereft of good news the world looks on with some hope. everyday we grow more a global tribe. perhaps we may even one day shape into being the notion, as i heard someone once say, that what is good for the world is good for my country. we arrived under an hour ago. i checked into a single room and found CNN. never thought i'd be so eager to watch their world news. it was good to see a few sth african streets mighty with joy. the streets of hanoi are thin tracks flanked either side by massive development. hotels, offices, apartments all shooting up as the vietmese capital prepares for its future. whats impressed me most about hanoi is the number of trees lining the streets. it makes for a pleasant refrain from the hustling sidewalks of ho chi minh city. apparently theres a great deal of planning going into the cities development. nothing goes up without adequate study and approval. in ho chi minh (or saigon as its still referred to on the streets) its pretty much anything goes where ever theres a space, who ever gets there first. its the money capital of vietnam, driven by strong economic forces pulling it into the global market place. foreign investment is everywhere. here people seem to be less possessed by achievement. its, i'm told, more academic. off-shore business is gaining ground here, though in a more regulated way than in ho chi minh. the trip from the airport with our host from the National Centre for Science and Technology Information and Documentation (NACESTID) was very informative. may 4, 12.40am tried to log onto peg earlier. couldn't get a direct line without the most violent line noise chucking me off. tried connecting at various speeds. no go! so, i swaped to pactok but mac woof wouldn't change to dial pulse. gave up on that idea real quick. then i dialled AUSTPAC's international direct dila number. got on but line noise prevented me from doing anything other than churn out curses. this is typical of life on the net from asia - even with a V42bis modem from IDRC. doh! just tried again thinking i'd get a cleaner line this time of night. no way. theres a local packet switched network set up with technical assistance from AUSTPAC, called VIETPAC. the local emerging Internet host uses it to poll the australian national university (ANU) once a day. they offered a guest account so i may see what can be done there if i can't possibly get onto peg direct. indo-chinese cyberspace as it is now is sure to cure anyone of their addiction to email. may 7, 8.20am - somewhere between hanoi and ho chi minh city you guessed it. no email. though i managed to send a couple of messages courtesy of mr thai from VARENet, the Internet host i mentioned above. they've been donated a couple of sun sparc stations by the ANU and they recently bought a couple of sleek australia made netcom modems. one handles outgoing polls to the ANU (for those interested its a UUCP poll across an full duplex, synchronous X28 connection, the only one in use in Vietnam, once every hour). she wouldn't have been more than 7. a few people clustered about her while a couple of men hoisted her from off the street. everyone was distraught. they then attempted to put her unconscious body on the back of a motor-bike. it was all i got to see before the driver turned the corner. they yelled at me as i entered the building site. it was late in the evening and work on the new "international centre" was in full swing. perhaps hanoi's first major high rise. certainly the most modern of buildings to go up in the cbd. workers wore green colonial safari hats for protection. you can buy them from just about any street vendor. i managed to take about 30 secs of footage before the threats wore me out. within moments of leaving the entrance was blocked off with straw matting. one by one they rode past, racing into the city to catch the early markets. each had as pillion a single freshly skinned carcass slung either side of the seat. one had a leg dragging along the road, its hoof scrapping the concrete, blood trickling down it. type: indistinguishable. the driver laughed hysterically. the kids were playing badmitton, others soccer. teenagers were practising their kicks and jabs and the elderly swung their arms and stretched their legs. all this activity from one end of a reasonably new road to the next. it was 5.30am. we drove through this dense play, the horn blaring. the driver liked the horn. he used it frequently regardless whether there was anything on the road or not. 4.25pm 170k before we land in jakarta. plenty of turbulance to ensure me that i'm really really flying. ever travelled singapore airlines? man, they lay on a heap of food: duck, rice and steamed mushroom, carrot and cabbage; chicken salad; fruit salad; fresh orange juice; water; red wine; bread; coffee. what, no cake??? so ends my brief romance with hanoi. it would be a shame to see it change with the coming of increased market expansion from the west. surely cars will come and the streets will become a menacing place. so many small businesses thrive on the roadside, and only due to the large push-bike and motor-cycle culture here. you can get your chain greased, your air tubes replaced, petrol, fruit and even your cycle cleaned should you want it. or, if your hairs' become a hazard you can stop for a cut from one of the many self-styled hairdressers who've hung mirrors from any available wall space. once people begin to lock themselves into cars all this will dissapear and there'll be more people hussling tourists for a bob or two. mercedes and mitsubishi have established production plants in vietnam. both will fulfill the perceived demand for cars in hanoi and the already "taxed for space" saigon. ali muzari, writer and presenter of the brilliant BBC documentary series, "The Africans", prothesised that "the temple of privelage will be pulled down to become a shrine to equality". in many developing countries, particularly those of indo-china these temples are yet to be built. but there are fewer opportunities to prevent their encroachment in an environment desirous of all that capitalism is said to offer. in the more developed of asian countries i get this sense of vast complex cultures being extinguished for the treasures and pleasures of a seductive Troy. but when this Troy burns, who will be remembered for singing amidst its wake? who will be our Nero? perhaps a VR, three-d, fractuled holographic Presley networked to each and every crumbling home by CNN-Net to still the hysteria...
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