This is true. I’m not exactly sure how to tell a true Vietnam story. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few days as we prepare to leave country on a jet plane. Frankly, I don’t want to leave Vietnam, even though, of course, there are plenty of new adventures to be had in the land of smiles and ladyboys and other true stories to try to tell. Except that Vietnam strikes me as an ideal place to tell a true story. The people and culture and landscape and architecture and vibe of Vietnam are of such depth and variety and honesty, that I want to leave it for now with a true Vietnam story that reflects this depth and variety and honesty. But how do you tell a true Vietnam story?
Really Being There
I think you have to really be there to write a true Vietnam story. And really being there is hard. It involves way more than booking flights and rooms and seeing the sights. Really being anywhere is a much more intense and proactive enterprise than I think many people realize. I also suspect many people don’t manage to really be there much of the time because they don’t realize that being there is a goal to try to reach that can be a lifelong endeavor for those who really want it. Really being there is a spiritual journey that I think Prozac can help a lot of people get started out on, but that’s just the beginning.
Really being there involves somehow short-circuiting the endlessly recursive mediation of real life that used to be called the postmodern condition but which we now just call normal. This is the mediation that Don DeLillo articulated so well in White Noise and which he was unable to articulate himself out of with his post-9/11 novel Falling Man. Likewise, Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II represent Spiegelman’s struggle to comprehend his father’s experience of the Holocaust in a real, which is to say unmediated, way. The presumed key to this unmediated experience is his father’s diary, which it turns out his father has destroyed. So the real thing of experience Spiegelman’s looking for—the really being there—remains elusive forever.
If you know these texts, you know that they sum up the postmodern condition pretty well and it’s obvious that they gesture toward something far deeper about our experience of the world than 4th-wall breaking, blank irony, and the like, which are some of the superficial characteristics of postmodernity. And the sort of hyper-mediation DeLillo’s and Spiegelman’s texts try to capture has increased by like a thousand since they were written in the 1980s.
In laymen’s terms, the mediation I’m talking about is the kind that prevents anyone from ever really seeing the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor in the same relatively unmediated way the immigrants who arrived by the boatloads for all sorts of reasons that we tend to reduce to “seeking a better life” saw it. Because by now virtually everybody has already “experienced” the Statue of Liberty in manifold mediated iterations that are so endless they completely occlude the real experience of seeing the Statue of Liberty.
To put the concept more simply, you can imagine attending a concert where you find yourself watching the performance through the phone of the person in front of you, except that this is your entire life and instead of watching through just one camera, there’s an endless series of cameras in front of each other, which each camera is really capturing only the image captured by the camera in front of it and no image captures the real thing, which is the Smashing Pumpkins performing “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” and it fucking rocks.
If you remember your ancient Greek philosophy, you will recognize in this example something like the paradoxes of motion exemplified by the dichotomy paradox and the Achilles and the tortoise paradox. Except while the dichotomy paradox can be refuted by simply walking from point A to point B, and the Achilles and the tortoise paradox can be refuted by simply beating a tortoise in a footrace, the postmodern problem of hyper-mediation is a lot more difficult to get oneself free of.
But maybe it is possible to get free of the postmodern condition in Vietnam because maybe it’s possible to really be here. Because Vietnam is a place where lots of things you might think are impossible happen on the regular. In Vietnam, for example, it’s possible to ask someone where they’re from, and they will respond that they’re from Hanoi and that they have never been anywhere else. When they ask you where you’re from and you respond that you’re from New York and then they look at you like you just grew a second head when you follow up by asking if they’ve ever heard of it, which is admittedly a dumb question because it’s pretty clear that they haven’t heard of New York. And then they use the translation app to ask, “How can I have heard about New York if I am only ever being in Hanoi?” And so it seems to me that this person is really being there in Hanoi. Because who hasn’t heard of New York, at all?
And so I think the first thing to do when trying to tell a true Vietnam story is to really be there.
Get Relative with Things
The second way to tell a true Vietnam story is to get seriously relative with things. This is the moral and cultural relativity that I’ve gone on about at some length in the Southeast Asia Escape Plan. This will be a huge challenge for a lot of people, and just when you start thinking you’re maybe getting the hang of relativity, you’re likely to witness something or have the sort of real-deal, being-there experience that completely overwhelms the open and relativistic parts of your mind and so you revert to imposing your own ethnocentric mores and prejudices on the experience. Witnessing the roasted dogs on the roadside around the corner from your block might be for many people the kind of experience that completely overwhelms their relativistic intentions and makes them completely disgusted. And since disgust is automatic and never actually chosen by anyone, I think disgust and ethnocentric mores and prejudice are a cut from the same basic cloth. I am not, however, arguing that we should all just evacuate all ethnocentric mores and prejudices and disgust from our being. This would be a crazy position to take because mores and prejudices and disgust do a lot of the heavy lifting in our lives in terms of binding us together in groups and keeping us safe and preventing us from eating things that are poisonous.
But if you want to tell a true Vietnamese story you’re gonna have to get relative with some stuff that spontaneously and reflexively makes you uncomfortable and / or disgusted. For example, while we were enjoying a delicious and extravagant and extremely enjoyable 20-course tasting menu at TUNG, I couldn’t help but notice that at two of the other tables in the dining room there were couples who were clearly on a first date enjoying the same. It was also clear that the men, who were both British and probably London City types, were paying the bill, and that the much younger and really very attractive Vietnamese ladies were way out of these guys’ league. Not even the same sport, really. This doesn’t mean that the older London City types who were clearly punching above their weight class weren’t simply good company and very funny and probably write hysterical blogs, which would explain the striking contrast in terms of youthfulness and attractiveness between them and their dates. This is possible. Of course, it is. But it struck me as much more likely that the ladies were escorts, and if you believe that escorts are simply beautiful young women who men to pay to accompany them to Michelin-starred restaurants, you need to just grow up.
So the next day while we’re enjoying beers at Bia Hoi Foxy Tiger Mom and Shockingly Young Daughter, Gina and I get to discussing the sex work situation in Southeast Asia, which if you don’t know about that I urge you to stop reading this and starting googling with SafeSearch turned off immediately. And it becomes pretty clear that Gina holds a lot of the kinds of spontaneous and reflexive ethnocentric mores and prejudices about sex work that are pretty much mainstream back in real life. I’m talking about the whole “It must be terrible to have to resort to that as a last resort” and “How awful to be forced into such a life by the oppressive patriarchy” business, although she didn’t use those exact words. You know what I’m talking about. Except that I got relative with sex work a long time ago and so I’ve let go of those mores and prejudices and we definitely had different views on the matter.
My own feelings about sex work are, as I’ve said before, that people basically choose what’s best for them based on their options. So when all the What Abouts have been dragged out—What about drug addiction? What about abuse? What about poverty? What about whatever you like?—what you’re still left with is that given whatever the conditions happened to be, people who choose to work in the sex industry—which is massive, by the way—do so because they need or want to earn money and sex work seems like a good way for them to do so, just like everyone else who has to work and so gets a job. Some of them, believe it or not, maybe even enjoy sex and enjoy getting paid for it. Other sex workers are likely to have totally different explanations for why they do what they do. Of course they do. Because explaining anything humans do in such a reductionist manner as the What Abouts would like to explain things is just plain reductionist and arrogant and naive and disingenuous. My friend Molly, who was and I believe still is a full-time sex worker, framed her explanation for why she does what she does in terms of care that really resonated with me: “I care about making people feel good about themselves, and they care about me having a home and nice things and being able to support myself and my daughter.”
But why are sex workers required to justify themselves at all? Pure arrogance and prejudice and taboo. Nobody interrogates bartenders or construction workers or Waffle House waitresses about why they choose the work that they choose. Nobody even questions—not in the sense of really needing a compelling explanation to understand it—people with maybe more interesting jobs like graphic designers and television producers and others that we refer to as creatives. Nobody has ever thought of their accountant and just can’t get a handle on how they could resort to doing that kind of work, which one can only assume is obviously terrible and soul-sucking. It just doesn’t happen. Not really.
Except what about the What Abouts? Are you really suggesting that drug addiction and abuse and poverty aren’t problematic and a concern when it comes to sex workers who we should pretty obviously be concerned about, not to mention the whole sex trafficking and STD situation?
Are you really so naive as to suggest that somehow drug addiction and abuse and poverty are so much more determining factors in the lives of sex workers than they are in the lives of people who do other kinds of jobs? Have you never met a roofer? Or Waffle House waitress? Or a creative type? Or an accountant? Drug addiction and abuse and poverty are in no way problems that are particular to sex workers. I think all the people who are so worried all the time about the plights of sex workers should knock it off and start worrying about the plights of roofers and Waffle House waitresses instead. Because there were definitely no roofers or Waffle House waitresses getting paid to enjoy a 20-course tasting menu at the Michelin-rated restaurant TUNG the other night. Not a single one. And it’s a tragedy. And about the STDs: whatever. Everyone has herpes. Everyone. Grow up. And isn’t it obvious that the whole trafficking problem in the States has been blown out of all proportion to try to justify the, frankly, unjustifiable taboo against sex work and marginalization of sex workers that’s pretty clearly just a hangover from our Puritanical roots and which are totally outmoded and indefensible today. Plus, don’t you know that in places where sex work is taboo and sex workers are marginalized the whole industry simply moves into the shadows where conditions are worse and the problems of STDs and sex trafficking get worse?
Better by far, I think, to get relative with this stuff. Not because a healthy sense for moral and cultural relativism tells you how to think about these issues, but because they provide a good start toward thinking that is free of the spontaneous and unchosen mores and prejudices and taboos that determine how we tend to approach the world when we aren’t using our brains to do the important work of getting relative with things, which is a necessary condition for writing a true Vietnam story.
You Can’t Write Scared
Fear is maybe the greatest enemy of telling a true Vietnam story. It’s impossible to write truthfully when you’re afraid. Afraid of what people will think. Afraid that you will violate somebody’s privacy. Afraid that since you are not Vietnamese, you have no business whatsoever writing about Vietnam because you’ve bought into that nonsense that says a true Vietnamese story can only be written by someone who’s truly Vietnamese.
This last position has become surprisingly common, practically mainstream, over the last 10 years or so. You can see it at work in the particularly stupid critiques of films—Ghost in the Shell, comes to mind—where the idea is that the actor must personally and authentically live within the subject position of the character they’re hired to play. This subject position is always articulated in terms of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and even mental capacity or mental health condition, by the way, and never, ever, in terms of class or education. Nobody’s ever suggested the role of Gavroche in the Broadway production of Les Miserable ought only to go to an illiterate French street urchin. The idea is so stupid it practically drools. And although you might be fooled into thinking that Jeff Goldblum is a really pretty brainy type of guy because of the roles he gets, you’d be totally wrong: that guy can’t even remember his mantra, for christ’s sake. Yet the other markers of identity are trotted out all the time as essential for appropriately and accurately portraying a character. Good grief. I think Ian McKellen makes the argument against this foolishness well when he asks, Am I only ever to have played gay men in my entire career? And Zadie Smith says something similar when she points out that if she was limited to writing about poor mixed-race girls who grew up in Northwest London, she never would have been able to write White Teeth. So fuck that particular fear. It’s a nonstarter in terms of telling a true Vietnam story.
The other fears are more personal and I think are to be taken more seriously given that memoirists regularly have to hide the identities of the people they’re writing about to avoid getting sued. For example, when a friend of ours communicated to Gina that she was shocked to see that I included Kristina’s name in the post “Why the Hell Would You Want to Go There?”—though this person was apparently totally unconcerned that I had also included Ryan’s name in the same sentence—and they make it pretty clear that they would prefer not to be named in the Southeast Asia Escape Plan, I don’t totally dismiss this preference out of hand. I give it some thought. Because being in the business of telling a true Vietnam story is not license to be in business of being a water buffalo in a China shop.
And so when someone’s explicit about their preference not to be named, I am likely to honor this request. This despite the fact that there’s a real difference between honoring someone’s right to privacy by, say, not revealing their street address or who they had an affair with (this is just an example and has nothing to do with the person whose preference I’m discussing here), and what I think is a misconstrual of the concept of privacy exemplified by the suggestion that I should conceal the fact that I know someone named Kristina with whom I’ve eaten pizza and salad with at Pizza Rock. In other words, if Kristina were to sue me for damages because I’ve violated her privacy with my post, I don’t think she’d have a very good case. If George does the same because I definitely did reveal something personal about him in a different post, he’d have a better case certainly, but I think that’s just karmic justice for threatening to fuck me non-consensually in pursuit of a vendetta. So whatever. My point is that if you’re trying to tell a true Vietnam story and you’re making a lot of effort to conceal the identities of people you know, it seems like you’re not really telling a true Vietnam story at all.
I give the most weight to the third type of fear that can inhibit you from telling a true Vietnam story. This is fear over what people will think of your story. And it’s significant because if you’re really being there and getting relative with things and telling a true Vietnam story without fear, you’re likely to be writing a lot of stuff that others will find questionable or distressing or hurtful. I’m not talking about people’s response to roasted dogs, either, which I think people ought to just grow up and get over. I’m talking about stuff that’s deep.
For example, when I told my family about the Escape Plan, the only person who was really supportive and seemed to understand that this was an important part of my life journey and spiritual development was my Aunt Debbie. She totally understood that mine is an adventurous spirit and that Gina and I are together a force to be reckoned with and that she doesn’t have to worry about us at all. My Aunt Joyce at least responded to say that she’d pray that God kept us alive long enough that she’d see us again and wished us luck. Pretty much everyone else seemed unable to understand that our move to Southeast Asia was going to be really amazing for us and free us to live our lives in ways that are extremely important to us. They didn’t seem to understand that this is about us getting more of what we want out of life and not about them really at all. Our friends and acquaintances got it and were supportive and excited for us. Gina’s family got it and were supportive and excited for us. But my family: not so much. Neither my brother nor his wife even responded to my text about it. I’ve since texted my family to encourage them to read the Southeast Asia Escape Plan in the hopes that they would take an interest my life and the really amazing things I’m doing. Emmett responded, “That’s cool.” And that is cool. But apparently no one else could be bothered.
And if I’m going to even begin to tell a true Vietnam story, I have to write about this. Because family is important to basically every human being on the planet ever. Very few people are truly indifferent to what their family thinks about them. And I’m not one of those few people. But I cannot be afraid of what my family is going to think about what I write here and tell a true Vietnam story. And writing about what seems an awful lot like my family’s indifference—except I’m pretty sure it’s closer to resentment than indifference—in the Escape Plan seems like an important part of telling a true Vietnam story.
Telling a True Vietnam Story
Every incident, observation, and person, I’ve described in the Southeast Asia Escape Plan is a true story in that I was really there as much as I could be in the moment. I observed, responded to, and engaged with them from the most relativistic position I could take. And I put them into words with as much integrity and honesty and fearlessness as I could. Because this is the only way I know how to tell a true Vietnam story.
If you ever set out to tell your own true Vietnam story—wherever you happen to be—you’ll have to find an approach and ethos and voice that works for you. Because if you don’t your Vietnam story will not be true. I hope you do tell a true Vietnam story, too. Because true stories are really the only kinds of stories that help us to find meaning in life in the face of the relentless images that prevent us from really being there in the world, the mores and prejudices we inherit that bind us to some groups while dividing us from others, and the fear that feeds the pervasive self-censorship in our culture that prevents us from ever really knowing others, prevents others from ever really knowing us, and prevents us even from knowing ourselves and determining what kinds of lives we want to live. True Vietnam stories are absolutely necessary, and they don’t tell themselves.