I was waiting for my scooter ride outside Cho Ray Hospital when a peddler approached me. “Want to pick something to read?”. Turned out, she was selling used books, in a box: Cu Chi Tunnel, My Lai Massacre, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Sorrows of War, Understanding Vietnam…
Those subjects are now as old as the war itself. All healed and pealed, just scars.
When I was in high school, I went up the gang-plank to tour the Logos ship.
This ship carried books and Bibles across the ocean to far-away lands (of heathen). Later, to reciprocate, I volunteered one summer aboard the Doulos (Logos 2.0) ship to W Africa. I saw the longing for a better life in those dark eyes. The instant bonding of men in different skin colors. And the no-way-out trajectory of Liberia in the mid-80’s.
Mobile books.
But not up-ward mobile lives.
Now, we have e-books and e-learning.
Open U and open source. I wonder how many of us are taking advantage of free access to advance ourselves.
I wonder how many sales the peddler made yesterday outside the hospital?
I wonder how many patients bought and read about Man’s Fate .
I read so I won’t be alone.
I am reading “Love and Garbage”.
And I appreciate your reading this, so you and I are not alone.
Love, death and garbage will always be with us. It’s an unmovable law. The consolation is, we are not alone in this. Want to pick something to read?
Thang Nguyen 555 