03/21/12, 5:47 p.m.
I’m packed and ready to hop on a plane tomorrow morning. Thank goodness it won’t be headed anywhere near the US! A little over a week ago, I decided I would meet my friends who are now traveling up north in Hanoi, the chic capital of Vietnam. I arrive in the morning to this city nicknamed Thanh Long, or City of the Soaring Dragon, and have a day allotted for guerilla tourism (throwing dong at various museums as I hurry by) before our Ha Long Bay tour begins Friday morning. Ha Long Bay is one of the seven natural wonders of Asia, and its name means Descending Dragon. I’m looking forward to a weekend on a boat, complete with night swimming in luminescent water, high-speed tubing, rock climbing, kayaking, and camping on an island. I know, right? Super dull.
I did have to relinquish two days with my kids in order to go on this trip, and I do feel guilty. I turned down my friends’ offer to join them for the entire week, so this seemed like the optimal choice. I have been curious to see Hanoi, the grand old dame of Asia where moments of Paris mingle with the tempo of new Asia, even since before my trip to Vietnam. Even so, no matter how much fun I’m having swimming in the dazzling Ha Long Bay, a part of me will wonder what the children are doing right then. I only have two measly days of work once I return before I head back to America next Wednesday, and I know I will not be able to shake that wistful feeling even after my departure. Especially haunting are my pagoda babies; their futures are pretty dismal, as many have not been off the grounds of the temple in their memory and they probably will never get that chance. Under Vietnamese care, it’s heartbreaking yet understandable that this would be the fate of the children with severe cerebral palsy, yet the real tragedy is the little girl with a textbook case of autism. No eye contact, fixation on picking up and fiddling with trash, an almost constant humming that sounds like a staccato version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” If Fortuna would have had it that she would be born into an American family, she most likely would have been diagnosed early on, and would be given help with socialization and the chance for mainstream education. Yet here she is—barefoot, head shaved, scrawny and knobby, and with a nontransferable, one-way ticket to the Ky Quang pagoda.
However, if I have learned anything about the Vietnamese in my time here, it’s that they are doggedly resilient and creative. Resolve to fight pumps through their bodies. You see it in the Cu Chi tunnel system, where people thrived for years underground, only emerging for ambush attacks in the American War. You see it in the Binh Soup shop, which I visited and ate at on Sunday, where an undercover Viet Cong sympathizer would serve pho to American GIs on the ground floor (the military base in Saigon was about 100m away) while planning the Tet Offensive of 1968 up a few flights of stairs. It’s apparent in the motorbike driver schlepping a ladder and a refrigerator through the congestion. It’s even there in the massage parlor where my friend on the VPV staff took me this weekend, which hires deaf and blind people as masseuses. Our head massages consisted of a lot of vigorous, circular cheek rubs and thumb pressure on the top of the head, and I even had my head yanked side to side in a manner that resulted in crunchy sounds exuding from my neck, but you couldn’t complain that it was ineffective. So, perhaps there are opportunities for these kids. I can only hope that what I’m doing here is bringing them closer to a future for them. Then there the small snapshots in time, like my “boy band” at the physio clinic today that was gathered around the recording function on my cell phone and having a blast wailing into it. It’s going to be so hard to leave Saigon, because if nothing else, maybe I’m making their present just a little less of a struggle.
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