Now that we have established the social order

In Hoi An, in the middle part of Vietnam, i met two men in a very local pub where i was eating 'running chicken'* and banana flower salad. And lo, they were from Christchurch, and we began a conversation you can only have with Christchurchians. They asked me where i lived (ah, Linwood! and we even have an inside toilet!) They then told me what schools they went to (posh ones). i figured, now that we have established the social order, we need to know nothing more. Even on the other side of the world, in the pouring South East Asian rain, in a scene from a Tom Waites song, Christchurch rules work. Ye canna break the laws of physics...

Images of Vietnam, a country not a war:

- A small boy monk reads his manga comic, tucked up in old monastery. Near him a very old woman sleeps on her side on a stone slab, just out in the open.
- A bride in a pink pavlova tiptoes through a muddy field. Her groom wears cream satin flounces; he follows grappling with her train. Mud is a feature here, especially as the monsoon kicked in. No wonder Napoleon said it was the fifth element.
- In the evenings people burn paper money and paper models of cars and washing machines for their ancestors in the next world. The money is US dollars.
- We watch a propaganda film from American War of the 1960'S. Propaganda in Vietnam is strident and unsubtle compared with ours.
- Delta life on the Meking is slow and lazy like the great river. Every meal ends with song, and after dinner a drunken jam session on guitar and two stringed violin. All the songs are local, about the river and its life; there is little 'pop music'.
- On the night train i share a grubby cabin with strangers, and we have intense conversations about Chilean politics.
-Out of Hue, the old imperial city, i take motorscooter tour of the countryside. Scooter offroading! The air is indistinct with the coming monsoon. There is no horizon. Land and water mix and i ride through floods and up stop-banks. The brightest colours are seen in the cemeteries, where the graves are newly painted for the festival of Tet.
- Luxury in Halong Bay after trekking - a night on a junk, the most lovely sight of thousands of tiny limestone islands in a still sea.
- Dogs live with people in an older form of the canine-human relationship. They keep away intruders and in turn get fed scraps. They live in compicated whanau arrangements, keep their pups in line and lie around in the shade. i was always feeding them and sometimes i could pat the pups.
- A Goth/Emo/Punk shop in Ho Chi Minh City. i am unsure why a Vietnamese youth would want to be a Goth.

A final note about the Confucian/Taoist/Buddhist mix. In Vietnam the world of spirit is everywhere, ancestors and saints are with us, and the religions seem to blend. In the western tradition, the sacred and the profane are separate. It is important to know what is of God and what is of the world. In Vietnam spirituality is less dualistic. i am reminded of animistic cultures, where spirit is in natural phenomena and is to be negotiated with as much as worshipped. Spirit is thus very natural and everyday and taken for granted. I never really got to grips with it. It seemed quite odd and superficial - like the people spending real money to burn fake money to send to their ancestors, who could use it in the afterlife. On reflection, though, i felt that the world of spirit was just no big deal - it is as real as food and love and children, a part of life and death.



*Running chickens are not raised in cages and are thus more expensive. This one was was running, i saw it go.