Jackie & Andy Steves Blog Southeast Asia — Part 2
Video: War Remnants Museum
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— Video by Andy Steves for Weekend Student Adventures
Posted on July 23, 2015
The War Remnants Museum: Photographs Don’t Lie
The War Remnants Museum made a greater impact on me than anything else on this trip thus far. If I were queen of the world, I would require anyone considering waging war to spend a few hours with these photographs — they don’t lie about the raw reality of military conflict.
The first room we entered recounted the war. It was only propagandistic insofar as the phrasing and rhetoric spoke positively of Vietnamese victories and American losses. Any Vietnamese fighting for the South Vietnamese side were called “puppets.” Bias could also be seen in which quotes were selected and which were omitted. Otherwise, the facts agreed with the facts of the war promulgated in the States.
I noticed that quotes from American leaders were blunt about fighting this war in part to protect America’s access to natural resources in Southeast Asia.
American leaders aren’t so direct with what they say today. We fight wars in oil-rich countries to combat terrorism, but we ignore genocides going on that don’t threaten our material interests. George Orwell hit it right on the head in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” pointing out politicians’ increasingly veiled allusions and a rise in misleading rhetoric.
In a room co-sponsored by the United Postal Service and United Airlines, among others, stories were told through photographs, including those of Western journalists who lost their lives in the line of photojournalism duty. They were courageously and doggedly determined to capture the deadly events of the war so the rest of the world could understand the full, true nature of the conflict. They inevitably found themselves in situations in which they felt compelled to medically treat wounded soldiers and even take up weapons themselves to protect American soldiers and themselves.
The number of civilian casualties, including women, children, and the elderly, is beyond horrific. Yes, I know I sound like I’ve drunk the Vietnamese Communist Kool-Aid, but these are American soldiers and journalists admitting to these atrocities. I do not pass judgment because I can’t even begin to understand the situations these soldiers were in. All I want to do is ask how the world let this happen in this manner. How can we ensure that these crimes against humanity do not happen again? Taking a hard look at these photographs is just a start.
I had heard of Agent Orange, but not until I saw these photos and read about it did I understand the chemical’s immense impact. It seems worse than murder when those affected give birth to stillborn babies and babies with more severe deformities than I’ve ever seen before. The chemical lives on for generations, haunting descendants with birth defects, such as Siamese twins. These poor people look like characters in a sci-fi film. I just can’t believe over three million people suffered such a fate, including American soldiers. And can you even imagine if your husband finally came back from serving in Vietnam and you finally go to start a family, but then your precious children you give birth to look nothing like you expected? I had to move at a steady pace through this exhibit to avoid breaking into tears over and over again.
I’d like to share with you some of these photos, but before you scroll down, please be warned that these photos are tremendously difficult to view.
Born without eye balls.
Conjoined twins.
"Dan Jordan's family: he was officially acknowledged as an agent orange victim. His son has congenital deformations on his hands. Jordan and other veterans took the lead in the class action against chemical companies that settled with $180 million in 1983."
— Jackie
Posted on July 22, 2015
Learning about the War from a Descendant of Both Sides
We met up with a guide in Saigon who shared with us a fascinating perspective on the war as the daughter of a Viet Cong (her dad’s side) and the granddaughter of a wealthy landlord in north Vietnam (her mom’s side.) When the Communists came to power in the north, they buried her grandfather up to his neck in the field and beheaded him with a plow. While many northern landlords met this same fate, few Vietnamese know about it — and even fewer dare to speak about it because the Communist Party has systematically covered up the historical records. The rest of her mom’s family fled down to Saigon, where the wealthy were safe.
Her grandparents on her dad’s side were Viet Cong informants working as tailors in Saigon. They overheard all kinds of valuable secrets while fitting the clothes of South Vietnamese government officials. They ended up getting caught, imprisoned, and tortured in unimaginable ways.
Was it controversial for your parents to marry, we asked? Ah no, she said, they were very young when the war happened. I suppose after waiting twenty long years for a war to end, a society is eager to move forward and forget old animosities. Similarly, many Vietnamese have expressed to us that they forgive Americans, they like Americans, and they do not blame all of us for the old decisions of a few leaders.
Our guide explained that she couldn’t accompany us in the War Remnants Museum because she might get in trouble with governmental authorities for what she would say. They are pro-Communist and she is neutral. She believes capitalism is a good thing. Perhaps she would want policies to be thirty percent capitalist and the rest socialist, she says. When asked how she developed that opinion, she said certainly not in school, where it is forbidden to teach about capitalism and other Western political and economic ideas, but from Western tourists she has met and discussed politics with.
It’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around the “communism” of today’s Vietnam. I have gathered from our various guides that when Ho Chi Minh first made Marxist theories popular, most people jumped on board in favor of values such as equality, sovereignty, and freedom. Then it seems some Viet Cong got carried away with violence toward landlords and taking away freedoms. This caused diasporas of many Vietnamese to other countries like the US, Australia, and the UK. In the decade following the war, the Vietnamese leaders realized that a closed market, isolating the country from international trade, was starving the economy. So they pursued their own version of perestroika, opening and encouraging trade, including with the US. Since then, wealth inequality has grown, with a small percentage becoming very wealthy and the vast majority stuck in the lower class with very little social mobility. Sounds like the product of unrestrained capitalism to me. Yet, "capitalism" is a dirty word here, kind of like how "communism" and "socialism" are dirty words in the American politics, despite our socialist policies of universal healthcare and Social Security.
Be wary of anything that labels itself "historic truths."
— Jackie
Posted on July 21, 2015
Video: The Cu Chi Tunnels
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— Video by Andy Steves for Weekend Student Adventures
Posted on July 20, 2015
Imagining Life in the Cu Chi Tunnels
We rode a bus one hour northwest of Saigon to the Cu Chi Tunnels, the extensive and elaborate network of tunnels that were integral to the Viet Cong’s success in the war.
We began our tour with a very old propaganda video that praised “American killer heroes.” I cringed at the report of this Viet Cong solder earning many medals for slaying forty-nine American soldiers (perhaps the same way an Iraqi might cringe at the glorification of the “American sniper” in the film of that name). The video commended the Viet Cong for their intelligence, cleverness, and determination in building these tunnels and waging guerrilla warfare. You can’t disagree with that. These people were ingenious at hiding, setting traps, resourcefully utilizing very limited means, and surviving under deadly circumstances for so long.
The tunnels consisted of three levels. The lowest level, twelve meters deep, was used for storage and a safe place for the injured to rest. Whole families carried on their lives in the other two levels, which were made up of living spaces, hospitals, and kitchens. They carefully made sure the smoke from their cooking didn’t give them away by letting it out dozens of meters away with a long horizontal chimney.
This hard ground, called “earth of steel,” made the job of digging tunnels strenuous, but this type of soil protected and reinforced the tunnels from collapse, especially during bombing. They were careful to dispose of the dug-up dirt in the river so as not to give themselves away.
We descended and climbed through ten meters of tunnel to get a sense of what the Viet Cong experienced. I certainly felt claustrophobic, trapped, hot, and sweaty down there. Our experience wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as theirs would have been, because the tunnels have been widened for large Westerners. They are also dimly lit and well-ventilated with fans. We, of course, had no fear of attack, bombing, or poisonous gas like the Viet Cong faced.
With rice fields bombed and rice storage burned, these soldiers survived on boiled tapioca. Many starved, and the surviving skinny ones built narrow trenches and tunnels that Americans got stuck in.
They were masters of recycling, fashioning sandal soles out of old tires and making sharp steel traps and weapons out of old American military paraphernalia. They even donned American uniforms to cover up their own scent so dogs couldn’t sniff them out in the tunnels.
There’s a shooting range next to the tunnels where you can pay to shoot off old firearms the Soviet Union would give to the Viet Cong in support of the communist side. It felt a tad dishonorable to have recreational shooting next to a site that symbolizes the shooting and killing of so many, and utilizing the same weapons. While engaged in video blogging, though, we've become suckers for good film ops, so we went for it.
The gunshots were deafening. I threw on some ineffective ear protection and filmed Andy as he shot off a round, dodging the hot shells flying my way. My turn. The staff person shoved my shoulder hard against the butt of the rifle. No instructions. Just shoot. The kick of the recoil was hard enough to bruise. Could you imagine someone at the end of that rifle, Andy asked me? Hell no, I said. I don’t have the heart. Or lack of heart, depending on how you look at it. I’m just grateful I haven’t faced the impossible moral dilemmas faced by American soldiers. Fortunate are those who viewed it simply and clearly as fighting for their country, values, and freedoms.
— Jackie
Posted on July 19, 2015
Video: To Saigon
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— Video by Andy Steves for Weekend Student Adventures
Posted on July 18, 2015
Saigon by Motorbike
Next stop: Ho Chi Minh City, a city re-christened affectionately after Vietnam’s beloved “uncle” but still called “Saigon” by most of its dwellers. This is where it all “fell”—according to our recounting of the Vietnam War. I’m curious to learn their version of their victory here that ended twenty years of atrocious fighting.
Sorry, mom and dad. Please don’t disown us. We had to do it. The #1 and #2 top rated “things to do” in Saigon are motorbike tours. You taught us to emulate the locals while we travel. So that’s what we did. We climbed on the back of two motorbikes. Don’t worry, we left the driving up to the Vietnamese pros. The tour company named XO, short for xeom (motorbike taxi), features beautiful female guides in traditional dress. Our “Saigon by Night” tour took us beyond District 1, the heavily touristic area.
We discovered Chinatown, where the massive Cantonese minority supplies the rest of the city with wholesale goods. Our guide lamented the trade deficit with too many imports from China.
They introduced us to the richest neighborhood, explaining the vast wealth inequality among the Vietnamese. Communism here does not mean wealth redistribution, free education, nor universal healthcare anymore. Rather, it means the government controls and regulates a fraction of the business activity and lets a few wealthy people get increasingly rich off of the rest. The vast majority of Vietnamese can only afford motorbikes, while the rich can afford Beamers and Bentleys, plus the 300 percent tax on foreign cars. The people who keep the many luxury car dealerships in business in this district put their money in real estate, oftentimes apartments not even lived in, because high rates of inflation results in great loss in capital kept in banks.
"Why don’t you vote different people into the government to reform it? Don’t you have democracy?" I ask. Our guide said that when you vote, you are given a paper with names of people you know nothing about. All you know is that they are a member of the one and only political party in Vietnam—the Communist Party.
Will you fight for change? Is the young generation hopeful for reform? In her opinion, the young generation just wants to be able to make a good living, which is difficult here. So they want to study and work abroad, then move back later. In just a few days, for example, our guide will move to the UK to study hospitality. Her boyfriend is giving her the silent treatment because he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t just want to stay put and raise a family with him. She wants more.
On the tour, they gave us a glimpse of the rare place couples go to get some privacy from the three or four generations living in their houses. Chairs and umbrellas are set up by the lake for these lovebirds to enjoy some time alone. Tonight, however, the wind and pouring rain allowed for no secretive canoodling.
The best part of the tour for me was zooming through the concrete jungle among the motorbike traffic like graceful schools of fish. My nerves gave me a good ab workout, as I braced my core to stay rigidly erect. I soon relaxed into conversation with my guide as I drank in view of the diverse, sprawling neighborhoods of Saigon.
— Jackie
Posted on July 17, 2015
Videos: Hoi An
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— Video by Carey Carpenter for CareBear Abroad on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
[We're sorry, the video(s) are no longer available.]
— Video by Andy Steves for Weekend Student Adventures
Posted on July 16, 2015
Tailor Shops and Simple Joys
A hop, skip, and a jump — or rather a tender, bus, taxi, and a flight — later, we arrived in Hoi An. Located in the middle-east coast of Vietnam, you can see beautifully preserved remnants of the busy port town it once was. It’s a grandiose mélange of Japanese merchant houses and Chinese temples. It’s only very recently, in the past twenty years, that restaurants and tailor shops have proliferated.
Andy and I don’t particularly enjoy shopping, but the custom-made bargains called our names first thing in our first morning in Hoi An. Andy went for three-piece suits. I went for evening gowns and pencil skirts.
It goes something like this: First you peruse a menu of styles on iPads. Andy smartly flashes a pic of suave-suited Ryan Gosling to illustrate his desired look. Then you try not to go for everything because, after all, you’re on a backpacker’s budget. You rationalize to yourself what a grand spanking value this is and justify it based on the comparison to the fortune it would cost you stateside. Then you select your fabrics and accidentally fall for the most expensive ones. Then you bargain the prices, stubbornly insisting on sixty or seventy percent of their original asking price. You find your happy compromise and they whip out their measuring tapes. You squeeze in your tummy, silently vowing to eliminate carbs when you get home. They instruct you to return tomorrow three times for fittings and refittings. Tomorrow you try on the dress they magically fashioned from your measurements. You’re blown away by how they transform bolts of fabric into form-fitting clothing — in less than twenty-four hours — that requires only minor adjustments because you’ve changed your mind about this detail or because your butt is actually even bigger than they thought.
These women work hard! It's ten-hour days, six days a week. And we were tired from just the fittings! They are so talented at what they do, and it’s fascinating to watch their high-speed attention to detail and juggling of clients.
We explored the town via bicycle. Frequent stops for iced green tea and watermelon juice are musts in this energy-melting heat. I love this quaint town built along a river, beside the ocean, with traffic just mild enough for cycling Americans to handle. I can appreciate a town with only a few architectural glories to “sightsee,” leaving us but one choice: slow down and take in the simple joie de vivre.
The Japanese Covered Bridge is the perfect symbol for Hoi An. It was built to connect Chinese and Japanese sides of town, as well as entire cultures and markets, but it is still graceful with delicate ornamentation.
When the day’s heat reached its climax, we biked north to extinguish ourselves in the South China Sea. We chased the sunset back to town, passing rice paddies and whole families squeezed on the seat of a single motorbike.
I’m trying to figure out whether the Vietnamese have a sugar problem as bad as ours or if they drown the food they serve us in glucose because they aim to please our American taste buds. A black coffee with no sugar is very hard to come by. You can’t even order scrambled eggs without sugar in them! Meat and seafood preparations are as sweet as Chinese American sesame chicken, too. We’ve got to be tripling, and maybe quadrupling, our daily recommended dietary intake here.
Surprise, surprise: Here street food outdoes much of the restaurant food. Sidewalk joints serving only pho bo are as good as any we’ve ever had and charge just two bucks. Eat closer to the market and you can count on the freshest eats. The salads are especially delightful. Ingredients in them may include banana flower, papaya, mango, peanuts, jicama, plenty of green onion, and cilantro, all tossed in a refreshingly light dressing.
— Jackie
Posted on July 15, 2015
Videos: Halong Bay
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— Video by Carey Carpenter for CareBear Abroad on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
[We're sorry, the video(s) are no longer available.]
— Video by Andy Steves for Weekend Student Adventures
Posted on July 13, 2015
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