Some People and Things I Forgot to Write About

Francoise plays hard-core badminton with a student in front of the school residence.

This morning the Austrian Artists leave on a bus to Dien Bien Phu. I admire their fortitude; they said they really enjoyed the other long-distance VN bus ride with the chickens in the aisle and people sitting on sacks of potatoes. More power to them; I would find it much less fun. Plus, the road to Dien Bien is twisty and turny, and muddy and narrow.

I forgot to tell you about the Austrian Artists . They’re tall, long-wasted short-haired hearty young women. I thought they were a couple until the one with the lip-ring showed me the package she was sending to her girlfriend studying in New Zealand. They turned up last week, having volunteered to paint the café and offices, which they did with great diligence, talent, and good humor. As usual, I was the skeptic, wondering why they’d relocate everyone in the offices, and wary that they’d do what I would do: make a mess, start the job, and not finish it. Instead, they painted murals, refreshed the ones the children had made, and squatted in the street to re-paint the concrete wall in bright yellow with the SOC logo. Plus they were self-aware, kind, and surprisingly funny. One evening I came by the café, and Sabine (‘m going to call her Sabine) said “You missed the Dutch boys painting,” which, when you think about it, is very funny in a stereotypical kind of way. She says they were “dressed funny,” and when I ask what they were wearing, she says, “not much.” Apparently, to protect their clothes -- and their beards, Sabine speculates -- they wore transparent plastic rain ponchos over nothing but boxer briefs.

They were also great company on the walk to Cat Cat. Drily, Sabine wonders how Francoise, the French IT teacher, had managed to get himself out of France and all the way to Sapa. Francoise is a tall, awkward, myopic and googly-eyed Frenchman who teaches the children how to use the computers. He’s irrepressible and totally ingenuous, and the children love him. They all want their pictures made with him, and every time he poses he throws up single or double peace signs. As he climbs up the valley carrying water bottles for everyone in his pack, children circle and cling to him. He lets loose enthusiastic Francophone syllabic utterances from time to time, which I think are “oh, yeah,” or “oh, no.” He lives at the school, and likes to play games with the children after dinner. I have to hand it to Jaya: he would have been a terrible English teacher – on account of not speaking understandable English --, but he’s absolutely marvelous at what she’s assigned him to do. Without revealing his real name, I can say that the children pronounce it something like “EEE—AWN,” like a donkey braying.

You might be interested in a brief Colin update. His hard luck continues. Two days ago, he bit into a Snickers Bar and broke off his front tooth, which he's terribly embarrassed about. People keep suggesting that he go to Thailand for destination dentistry, which they say might take 6 months. Not helpful. 

What is there to do in the evenings?

This is the question that appears in the Lonely Planet phrase book that caused everyone to blush and fall out laughing every time Graeme and I tried to say it back in Bac Ha a few years ago. I think it’s one of those mistranslated bombs that LP plants in its books. We thought it was our poor pronunciation that caused the hilarity, but when the Hmong men literally fell backwards of the drinking bench and started making universal hand gestures, we surmised that whatever we were saying, we were probably saying it correctly.

In this case, however, I mean it in the chaste and literal sense: what does one do in the evenings in Sapa, especially when one is here for an extended stay? The answer is, not much. Sapa has a late-night backpacker drinking and game-playing scene, but I have never been to those places, and don’t really want to. The dimming of the day is when loneliness comes on, and I do best when I hold to a routine. Teaching from 7:30-8:30 gives shape to the evening, and by the time of the students runs me to my hotel on his motorbike, it’s close to 9:00. Then two Bia Hanoi on the terrace, and I go in to compulsively arrange my mosquito netting and crawl in with my Kindle (I know, I know, I resisted the Kindle, but now I love it, especially because I can read in the dark).  I often just snack on something for dinner or just skip it entirely; I don’t notice or suffer from my aloneness until I sit among all the families and couples. I recently discovered the communal table at the Hill Station Restaurant, but last night, I sat between a family of four and a family of five. Felt like the least popular kid in eighth grade. (But it was worth it for the food: smoked buffalo with pickled local greens and a glass of Norton Shiraz. Total cost –not that it matters: $7.50.)

The big danger for unstructured evenings is starting the happy hour beers too soon. None of the usual checks obtain here: there’s no car to drive and no big tab to pay, and usually I’m on the terrace a few steps from my bed. Though normally not that good with consequences, even I have learned that even one or two more than my usual two beers leads to sloth the next day, which leads inevitably to anxiety and homesickness. But, every once in a while I just to concede to fatigue and inertia. Saturday, after the long hot walk to Cat Cat and back, I drank two beers, showered when the power finally came back on, meant to go out, but just got in the bed at 7:30. The tipping point was the thought of coming back up the five flights of stairs to my room after dinner. My legs were seriously tired.

Then there’s always Vietnamese television. Most channels feature Asian boy-bands in videos or contests, both of which would be much more diverting if it weren’t for the execrable music. Often there’s some martial arts contest of some sort. In recent years I’ve been able to find Aussie football – which I love – but haven’t been seen it this year. Flipping through channels the other night, I saw found what I can only surmise is a patriotic flag waving contest (Russian?). Distinguished-looking men wearing outfits with brass buttons – one was wearing riding boots – stood on a podium and swirled and twirled large flags with great seriousness, while judges judged and audiences cheered solemnly. I have no idea. A click of the remote brings me to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” with Vietnamese subtitles, one more click and then the Hong Kong TV broadcast of Wimbledon, which exists in a timeless nether world, where matches featuring East and South Asian players are looped constantly. Update: Li Na is still losing in the third set to Radwanska.

And finally, one's evenings are constrained by what is in effect a curfew. The hotel locks the doors at 10:30 p.m. (11:00 on Saturdays!). You can knock, or ring the bell, and summon a sleepy worker from the darkness, but you feel ashamed and guilty.

Some pictures from trip to Cat Cat and other stuff

Oh, just a typical view from the terrace outside my hotel room.

On Saturday, Bruce and Ann took the children (and me and Francoise) to Cat Cat Village.

We took many pictures in front of the waterfall....

We saw some children playing on a pretty cool swing.

And some other very small children climbing on a cable bridge (warning: American mothers might not want to look).

Seen, Heard, & Overheard

I wake up early here, sometimes really early, but I doze in the canopy bed of mosquito netting and look out my open windows at the mountains and the mist, lately mostly at the fog and rain. If I fall back asleep I am sometimes awakened at about 7:30 by the soft voices of the Hmong girls talking to each other and sweeping the terrace outside my window. Where Vietnamese is clangorous and sharp elbowed, and always sounds urgent and impatient, Hmong is rounded, patient, and well-worn, its syllabic repetitions as comforting and they are mysterious. The other day one of the girls was sweeping under the table right outside my window and singing. I like to think it was an ancient traditional tune, but more likely it was a pop song that I didn’t recognize. When I look up from my bed, we exchange smiles and good mornings, which I should learn how to say in Hmong and surprise her one day.

Downstairs at breakfast I check the email and Facebook posts that have come through from the American day while I was sleeping. Sometimes I chat with other guests, but mostly I just like to observe them. Every morning busses from Lao Cai disgorge tourists into the hotel lobby fresh off the (often literally) nauseating ride from the night train from Hanoi. Often they are tired and cranky, and lately the weather has been so rainy that this has made them worse. Today, I watched a woman put on a world-class pouty-face performance so dramatic that I couldn’t turn away. I think she saw me watching her, but since her own friends refused to notice her, my attention was probably better than no one’s. I couldn’t tell her nationality since her disdain was as mute as it was theatrical. She stared at her bowl of fruit and yogurt like it was road kill, and nibbled resentfully on a corner of dry toast. Then she picked up her mug of tea laboriously with both hands and bent her whole body over it like it was the hemlock she’d been hoping for all along. Occasionally, she lowered her face into both hands. I wonder if she went trekking today, and her companions and guides just left her in a village by the way somewhere.

After wolfing down my perfect vibrant orange-yolked local free-range runny eggs with French bread and butter, I usually write and read on the terrace all morning and head up to the SOC café and offices after lunch. Today I had an early meeting and walked out into the rain and up the hills shortly after 9:00.

Arriving at the café, I first see Colin, whose skinny pitifulness is exacerbated by the stripes of hickey-like marks on his neck, a sign that he’s sought out local folk healing methods for some malady. He tells me he’s had food poisoning for several days. When I ask what from, he says, of all things, “sushi.” Let me remind you that we are far from the ocean in a mountain with intermittent electricity, which is a night train from Hanoi and does not have an airport. When he swears that he’ll “never eat sushi again,” I get the feeling that the lessons of rehab may actually stick when it comes to raw fish.

My meeting with Jaya goes okay, but I am baffled by her assertion that I should go back and teach the ABCs to my fledgling adult ELLs. She says they need to learn the letters for their sounds so they can learn to pronounce English better. I then suggest that I put the words “though,” “through,” and “tough” up on the board and see how that goes.

It is deafening out on the front porch of the café, with the trucks and motorbikes, and inexplicable morning karaoke sounds, but it’s ear-splitting inside the café with the tile-cutters working on the new bathroom. I’m glad I stay out on the porch, however, so I can overhear the much more absurd and acrimonious meeting that Ann has with Jaya. The conversation they’re having has a history, as Ann has told me, but hearing it live still surprises me. What Jaya wants Ann to do is create a lesson-by-lesson record of everything she teaches in the classroom. She’s concerned, deeply concerned, as she says, that as a teacher, Ann isn’t accountable to anyone else in the organization. Naturally, she thinks it’s herself that Ann (and her successors), should be accountable to. She tries every way she knows how to get Ann to see things from her, self-described management point of view. “Why don’t you write a log entry for every day of teaching,” she suggests. Ann says, that’s absurd, that’s not a reasonable request of a teacher, and concedes that she might be persuaded to write weekly progress reports, but adds that since she’s not the paid volunteer coordinator she can’t exactly be responsible for who succeeds her. Score. Not good enough, says Jaya, “Then why don’t you just send me your lesson plans for everyday?”  To this, Ann snorts, “Lesson plans? I just come up with an idea and a theme at breakfast or in the shower,” which makes Jaya’s hair stand on end.”  Jaya makes one last futile pass at it, asking Ann to at least write out the grammar lessons she teaches. Ann’s response that that’s impossible because she doesn’t teach grammar lessons leaves Jaya fuming, and she finally goes meta and pleads, “why are you so difficult to talk to?”

It gives me no small amount of satisfaction that all the while this is going on, I’m dutifully drafting the handbook for adult ELL learners that Jaya has asked me to write, and going on at some length about Whole Language theory and zones of proximal development and the demonstrated pointlessness of atomized grammar lessons as a way of acquiring basic speaking ability in another language. I completely share Ann’s belief that a professional educator – and a volunteer one at that –  should not have to report someone with no experience in or knowledge of educational theory and method, but in a small way, I understand Jaya’s frustration, too, because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  At the end of her rope, Jaya asks, “how will I know what’s happening in the classroom?” to which I almost interject, “I guess you just won’t.”

They each holster their dueling pistols and walk away. For now.

Try Not to Be the Asshole in the Story

WARNING: I use the word "asshole" in this post. A lot.

This is one of the guiding principles of this trip, and for writing about it: try not to be The Asshole in the Story. I formed this ambition in part by re-reading my work from previous years and seeing that I seem to spend a lot of time telling tales in which I am the aggrieved victim of various forms of stupidity. Upon reflection, however, I see that there’s one common denominator in these stories: me. I may be The Asshole. Nobody likes a relentlessly cheery travel writer, but no one likes an unreflective lunkhead, either. And so it is that I’m making a conscious effort to run a little asshole heuristic before I write anything. Of course, this may be the very definition of Asshole: being certain that you’re not The Asshole.

I had really worked myself into a froth over several incidents so far at SOC. First, there was the manipulative and puerile way that Ian organized the Friday Night Social. Here’s how it worked: email goes out to say there will be an event at an undisclosed location, to which Ian will “lead us through town like the pied piper.” Uh, how about you just tell me when and where, and I can turn up? Trying to be a team player, I hike up to at the café at the assigned time and we wait, and wait, and wait for every last person to arrive with Ian gathering us up and taking roll like we’re church campers. Then Bruce is instructed to lead us all to the store so we can each buy what we want to drink, in accordance to the BYOB policy Ian has negotiated. About 16 people crowd into this warren-like store and begin complaining bitterly about the prices, dusty bottles of Vietnamese red wine, Vang Dalat, being $5 instead of $3 (the horror!). We have to wait until every single person makes their miserly purchase before Ian arrives – on his motorbike! – to lead us on foot 3 blocks to the restaurant where we will have a pre-arranged Italian dinner. There follows even more chaos as we are instructed to sit in the lounge seating area and enjoy a drink, with no wine openers or glasses. Eventually that’s sorted, and then the garlic bread appetizer comes. I really do appreciate that you’ve managed the money and ordered the food, Ian, but I don’t need to be told how many pieces of garlic bread I’m allowed to eat (one, as it happens). If you know me, how I like to entertain, how I don’t like to travel and dine in packs, you know how berserk I am going right now. Plus, at this point I haven’t slept in about four nights, so I’m becoming even more bratty than usual. 

After the garlic bread has been parsed, the ersatz-penurious young people drink copiously of their overpriced wine and their now tepid beers in plastic bags, and eat like wolves from the buffet of gloppy pasta and soggy pizza. My night was saved by Bruce and Ann, the retired Australian couple who could see me sitting there fidgety like a caged animal and trying not to be an asshole, and invite me to sit at a table with them. I veered dangerously close to asshole territory one more time when Ian got up and rapped on his glass with a spoon and made a series of meaningless and self-serving toasts, but mostly I acquitted myself fairly well despite a simmering rage at being treated like a summer-camper. Have to say, however, that my crankiness helped form a bond, now a friendship, with Bruce and Ann, no-nonsense retired professionals in their 60s who also have no taste for this kind of pied-piper performance.

What is it about the population of people, especially the young ones, who want to do this kind of work that makes them self-involved, bossy, control freaks? Probably they were like that to start with, but I think it’s also that so few of them have had actual jobs in which some of these habits would have been censured, or at least tempered. I was about to get really furious with Jaya, the volunteer coordinator, however, when it occurred to me that I might be The Asshole in the Story. Yes, I have a job, but not in the ordinary sense where people, you know, tell you what to do. 

I had asked Jaya if I could observe Ann teaching the Hmong children in their regular classes, because I wanted to see how an expert did that, she told me no, I couldn’t, because they had a hard and fast closed-door policy against classroom visitors. This rationale I totally understand because I know that these children have been an exoticized spectacle their whole lives, with people asking their names are and how old they are and patting them on the head and taking their pictures. I get it. And one of the reasons I get it is that I’ve worked with this organization for several years and have even been the teacher in the classroom where well-meaning but disruptive visitors would arrive unannounced regularly. I say that letting me in the classroom still honors that policy, but she keeps insisting that you can’t have one rule for one person and another for everyone else. When my argument boils down to, “but it’s me; can’t you see I’m an exception?” I realize I might me The Asshole, and let it drop. It also occurs to me that I might have a problem with being told what to do, and with working and playing well with others.

“But it’s ME” is an asshole argument, to be sure, but Jaya wasn’t exactly telling the truth, as it turns out. I learned from Ann yesterday that Jaya let Kate come in and teach an entire morning’s lesson just so she could put on her resume that she had experience teaching ELLs. What was the first thing she did in class? “What is your name, and how old are you?” Ann was fit to be tied, outraged that her 40 years of professional experience and judgment counted for nothing against a 20-something British woman looking for a way to finance the rest of her trip around the world. It was all Ann could do to stop Kate from teaching her planned lessons on the history of Malta and the importance of cod (I swear I am not making this up). Kate is the same woman who, Ann says, is asking for compensation for the trekking guide handbook that she volunteered to write, threatening not to hand it over unless they pay her. Her reason? If she doesn’t get paid, then she can’t continue the next 6 months of travel. When Ann told me this story, we said in unison: Then go home and get a job.

Looks like I may not be The Asshole in this particular story, after all, but there’s plenty of time left.s