Tag: Roger Altman

Joy of randomness

We move between chaos and control.

For those who experience Saigon traffic, the dance takes it to another level: randomness.

A tour bus made its final stop in front of a hotel. Tourists stepped down, immediately, with cameras (little did they know, traffic like this is all too common). Rain and randomness. Control and chaos, coexist.

That’s just one aspect of life in Saigon.

You might be sitting in an outdoor cafe, tucked in the corner table, still got sneaked up by a lottery ticket seller who lost both legs.

Even on a quiet night,  Saigon still has some surprises for you: a translated version of Wonderful Tonight, a circus show from China or a low-key visit by Entertainment’s Most Powerful couple: Angelina and Brad.

Saigon is standing in its former shadow, that of Paris of the Orient. Its skyline sees new addition every six months.

Consumerism of all shades puts on its best display (black and blonde mannequins).

Some guys even went to Thailand to have sex-change.

City life takes young folks out of the country and demands much less in social mores.

With chaos comes consumerism. With consumerism comes individualism. With individualism comes choices and frustration.

For now, the city is maintaining its equilibrium: buses weave in and out, parting a sea of scooters to pick up a few passengers.

Drainage capacity is pushed over the limits during rainy season.

And vendors claim whatever left of the already-carved up sidewalks.

I wrote once about a butterfly with its innocent dance in traffic. Now I realize traffic itself imitates the butterfly in its randomness . Here lies the key to crossing the streets in Saigon. Brave it! Don’t hesitate! Chaos, and not control.

First it’s stressful. Then it’s joyful. Once in a while, it’s painful (My xe-om driver made a 90-degree turn, and the scooter skidded. This destroyed my best dress pants, leaving a knee scar).

No pain no gain.

I guess by now I have gotten over the hump: reverse culture shock.

In academic parlance, I have gone semi-native.

Only when you stuck with it, that it made some sense: people do enjoy living here more than in the countryside.

Here, they can take classes, find jobs and get married.

More options, more choices.

Even amidst chaos, one can find joy in randomness. As unpredictable as a butterfly dance in traffic. I wish the place is a Hollywood set. But it’s far from it. Here the “extras” are the main characters. Or as in Roger Altman‘s genre, the place is the persona. No one seems to be in the lead. The city itself plays the lead role.

Flaubert et moi

Actually this is about the redemptive aspect of literature.

Set in 1843, Flaubert‘s character rode the psycho-somatic roller-coaster. The result: Madame Bovary set him apart from his Romantic contemporaries. He started the school of Realism even though he never admitted it. Bovary got married, Bovary got bored, Bovary had an affair and a brush with death but recovered just to fall into the arms of another man.  Finally, bankruptcy and death. But Bovary wasn’t the character. It’s Flaubert’s attempt at depicting French country side and country living of his time (Like Roger Altman‘s films, the place is the main character).

In fact, some critics overheard him said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”.

Feeling hemmed in and enveloped by a flat country side which to others  might be heaven – wife of a country doctor  etc…but to our character, it’s an oppression.

She longed for the return of the glamorous “Gastby type”.

Flaubert held up the mirror to show us ourselves, the mirage we invented and dreams projected (which essentially our shadows in the cave).

I had no preconception before reading that piece of art.

Having finished it, I still have no post-conception of it.

It just was. Human nature.

The illusion of a better find around the bend, of Moore’s Law that keeps multiplying to infinity . This is antithetic to Flaubert who was known for his dis-taste of machine.

I wish I could read it in French.

But the English version is Flaubert enough. I understand more about escapism, nihilism and “the journey is a reward” .

The illusion that one can control and change destiny.

As fate would have it, Bovary died a wretched lady and her doctor-husband stayed on in the very town she had detested.

Back then, in that setting, writers must be autocrats to afford deep researching of the characters and setting of a novel.

What would he do had he been born in this century?

Like Norman Mailer, he perhaps would stick with the typewriter and not Twitter.

Meanwhile, what would we do being born in early 1800?

We would die younger, hence the longing for escapism must have come sooner.

Would we want to switch places with them?

Are our qualities of life surpassing theirs?

How about the index of misery?

Perhaps Flaubert breathed cleaner air, but according to his character,

still oppressed and constricted.

The take-away from Madame Bovary is ” le mot juste“. Flaubert would read out loud, finding the right word that tickles the ears.

Again, I wish I could have read it in its original language.

One thing I appreciate about Vietnam: you can go to a bookstore, and buy translated books from Russia, France, America or South America.

Someone, somewhere in this “belong-to-bottom 15” of miserable index, is trying to look up le mot juste, to do justice to an author’s intent.

When they found it, they would not let go of it. So would I. Everything (word) has its place and time under the sun. Flaubert’s place has so far been secured in French literature . If Madame Bovary got digitized though. Flaubert would have hated it.

BYOD

The Economist Christmas Special was about America, a Ponzi scheme that works.

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108634&source=hptextfeature

It projects 1 Billion Americans by 2100.

With its many niches, America seems to offer a bit of everything, for everybody: hunting, boozing, gambling, church-going and freedom to protest.

I remember my first Christmas, living humbly in a cold basement. But I created my version of America by inviting Vietnamese Students at Penn State to come over for a party, albeit makeshift. We dimmed out the lights and had a disco party (mid-70’s).

My America.

No eggnog, fruit cake or tinsel. Just foreign students away from home, sharing a common bond of humanity and most pressingly, in need of  heat (it was cold in Winter 76).

People who wouldn’t otherwise have been friends: a hippie guy with hair down to his knees, a short guy majoring in Agronomy and a French-major gal with a condescending air about her.  Yet, they came, at my invitation. First Christmas in America was our common denominator. It could have been a Roger Altman‘s movie: post-card X-mas outside, Saigon-like inside.

With sweaters over shiny shirts, every guy in the room had hair down to his neck.

Winter in cold Pennsylvania. Stores were closed and foreign students had no place to go.

With plenty of snow outside (by then, our early fascination with the white stuff had been melted away), and over hot chocolate, I remember quoting Shakespeare, that “life is just a stage, and we are here to play out our role -“.

We were joined by a throng of immigrants, before and after us, to becoming American.

The language and culture part came later (naturalized).

The lingering part was hard: neither here nor there.

(like the shopper gauging which cashier to line up behind just to end up in the longest line).

Back then, we couldn’t use the phone, since it was very expensive if possible at all.

Some people even had their calls patched through Canada. Now, even the I-phone got de-commoditized via I phone 5c.

To me, it was a one-way journey (25 years later, I found I had been wrong then).

Whatever America has to offer:  from McCafe to McAfee, Morse code to Moore’s Law, it wasn’t without a price :”ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.

And church services would close with “who among you would stand up and give your life for the mission”, F/T or P/T”

(silence, organ music, and peer pressure to solicit your time or donation to the cause).

The Ponzi scheme that works. More will join us here in America, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy: your wish will come through, because America is not a place. It’s a platform, where you can launch your dream. America is Cape Canaveral, a dream launching pad. Be prepared and fasten your seat belt, It’s not a walk in the park.

By the time you land, you will wonder where the heck you have been, and most of all, who you have become.

American? That’s the answer from German, Italian, Irish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Serbian, Somalian and soon Syrian, who have arrived and bought into the scheme. BYOD (Bring your own dream), the sign says at the door. Not “Welcome to America.”  The Native Americans perhaps never put any sign up in the first place. The best you can get for free here is workplace frozen turkey (pre-recession years).

And that takes some cooking. And with that kind of party, I would put BYOB in the invitation, just to make it clear: it’s a potluck dinner, because, Ponzi, by definition, manufactures nothing except for a dream of getting rich, but never something for nothing. Buy now, pay later (either by us or our descendants, but pay we will).  It has worked so far.

But we need more MLM recruits for it to work. The new sign will have to say “BYOD”, bring as many dreams as you’d like, but no preexisting condition preferred.