Tuesday, April 26, 2011

In old Hoi An, a kitten dies by the side of the road

Hoi An is an old and beautiful city in the middle section of Vietnam. It floods like Venice, and people boat down the streets. The buildings are the colour of butter. It is famous for its overnight tailoring. i got excited about the tailoring, my first experience of being fitted for clothes by anyone except my Mum. i frequented the rather funky Blue Sky Tailoring Company where i got silk shirts made for male family members, and a silk suit and linen pants for myself. Needless to say, i have grown out of them (see my entry, The earthquake shrank my clothes).

i was on my way back to the hotel with my bags of new tailor made clothing, and walking with me were James and Graham, both Londoners. James was a banker. He was keen to meet people and share business wisdom, and he had lots of opinions and ideas. He enjoyed bargaining and buying. Graham was a factory worker, who had travelled a lot in the South world, and had a very laissez faire attitude to other cultures. He was used to roughing it and travelled light.

On the way, we saw a kitten on the side of the road. It was raining and the kitten was wet and hunched. Its ears were huge and its face was pinched and it was clearly dying. It was a baby kitten, not a young cat, and helpless. Nobody seemed to notice it.

James and Graham argued about it. James wanted to save it, but Graham thought that was impossible. James felt that we simply couldn't do nothing, that we could at least feed it, that we could not know about the kitten and not take up the responsibility to care for it. Graham argued that Vietnam does not have the infrastructure to deal with stray animals, and without that, it would be misguided to help just one animal who will die later anyway.

On the whole, i agreed with Graham, although i didn't say much. It's dysmorphic, i said, it is going to die no matter what we do.

What's dysmorphic, asked James. Fucked, i said.

In the end, of course, we did nothing. We walked on. But the kitten wounded my heart and disturbed my thoughts. Later that night we went back down the street to have dinner. i did not want to pass the place where we saw the dying kitten. i tossed my thoughts about in my mind. Either the kitten will be there or it won't. If it is there, it will be either alive or dead. (Damn that Schrodinger!) If it is alive, it will still be sick. If it is dead, it will be (gulp!) dead. Either way i will be sad.

Well, the kitten wasn't there, but its tiny presence has lasted a long time.

For a srart, why did i use the word dysmorphic? Dysmorphic does not mean fucked. It was a word they used in a Neomatal Unit where i worked as a social worker, with sick and premature babies. A baby is described as dysmorphic if there is something wrong with its features. You have no idea what can go wrong with babies until you have seen a Neonatal Unit. i have seen babies who are further away from me chromasomally than chimpanzees, and it makes you wonder what is the definition of a human. Social work in such places requires a true compassion and a stern lack of judgment. And at times a strong stomach. Informally, such babies get called FLK's which stands for Funny Looking Kid, i regret to say. Another awful term is NFC or NFK. In the UK, NFC is Normal for Cornwall, and in New Zealand it is Normal for Kaitangata. (Kaitangata is a small coal town in South Otago). Very occasionally these pejorative terms get written up in babies' files, and naturally there is hell to pay if the parents see them and ask what they mean.

Both the informal and formal labels for babies are professionally useful for several reasons, but one reason is that they distance us from the subject. We can use our clinical terms or our humour to disance ourselves from the raw painful human stuff that just leaks out and upsets people and makes it all too hard. When i said 'dysmorphic', James and Graham were unaware of this, but i was evoking all that need for distance, for carrying on regardless, for doing the job, for surviving. You know it, that way of coping that means you drink some stiff gins in the bath and have a bit of a cry, and then get back on the next shift, rewired by that tender sense of clarity that is the hangover's special gift to the next day.

And so, the kitten undid us, with its small life and its death so small as to be invisible. What does it matter? Most countries do not have the infrastructure to manage stray animals. That sort of charity work requires a leisured middle class. From what i saw of Vietnam, its middle class is anything but leisured. i have come across versions of our Cats' Protection League in Kuala Lumpur and Port Vila but those are wealthier cities with a stronger ex-pat presence.

My response to the kitten was layered. There were the words and the analysis, but underneath there was pathos, and underneath that, the fear and revulsion that comes from sickness and death and wrongness in the world. The world should not have such things in it and i should not have to experience them. We should all be like Gautama Siddhartha, the prince, living in his palace, deliberately removed from all age and sickness and death. Except that it was his destiny to discover those things, and to leave the palace and undergo all those spiritual trials, and become the Buddha and give us the four Noble Truths.

And the first Truth is that there is suffering. And underneath the fear and revulsion there was an acknowledgement that any death, no matter how small, diminishes us, and that we call our sense of that diminishment our sadness, and that we are right to be sad, and to know that we are.

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