Really random - Post-Nam post

I loved being back in Asia. I love the hustle and bustle, the smell of bitumen in the humidity as you get off the plane, the complete overload of the senses with sight, smell, and sound. The brightness and diversity; the contrasts and clashes. And I LOVE coconuts. If there was only one reason to move to Asia, coconuts would be it for me.

I loved catching up with Jem. We had a fabulous time in Saigon and Hanoi, eating, shopping and laughing. A tropical thunderstorm put paid to our trip to Ha Long Bay, but Hanoi kept us occupied. A city where streets are named after what they sell, and staying on Silk St around the corner from Shoe Road, well, it wasn't a hardship...

One of the fascinating things I find in Asia is the stereotypes that are played out. Stereotypes have their basis in reality - sometimes they are benign and amusing (the oodles of glittery shoes and Hello Kitty paraphernalia beloved of many Asian women); sometimes they are irritating (being considered a walking ATM or a 'loose woman' because I'm white in Java); and sometimes, the line between stereotyping and racism is hard to define, and sometimes I find myself walking it.

I hate racism. I wish everyone could walk a mile in someone else's shoes, see something from the other side of the coin. It's not just a one sided thing - it goes both ways. It sounds odd, but the discrimination I experience from time to time in Asia - being a bule (albino) in Indonesia, a guilo (foreign devil) in China, or goodness knows what in Vietnam - reminds me to look at things from the other side.
For example, queuing. I found myself wryly reminded that Asians can't queue. They shove in front, sneak up the side, cut in any way possible. There is no idea of one straight, orderly line, one person in front of the other. It's every person for themselves. The idea of personal space or waiting one's turn doesn't exist.

Or,  are Westerners just bad at queuing? If we look at it from the other perspective, they hang back, they don't take advantage of the space provided, they are slow and hesitant and not very clever at finding gaps. You could call that polite (as we do in the West) or just plain dumb.

The idea of polite differs greatly from place to place. The little Buddhist monk who sat across the aisle from me on the plane and I disgusted each other. Both having head colds, he spent the short flight from Ho Chi Minh to Kuala Lumpur snorting and sniffing - long, wet, reverberating sniffs like slime up a vacuum cleaner - and I blew my nose into a tissue - a completely disgusting thing to do by most Asian standards.

And that word "they". I snuck it in there, a few times, deliberately. It's an innocuous word, but it's divisive. Because if there's a 'they' there's also a 'we'. There's a 'them' and there's an 'us'. It's language dividing and unifying, but unifying camps one against the other, not creating unity.

I visited a couple of sites in Vietnam that reminded me of the importance of looking at both sides of the coin thing. The first was the Cu Chi tunnels. These 200km of tunnels were used by the VietCong to launch surprise attacks and resist the invading troops. The Vietnamese pride in the ingenuity of the tunnel system and associated trapdoors and booby traps which enabled them to resist the military might of the US forces was evident and understandable, but the glorification of war was disturbing. The cheeriness in telling a one-sided story disturbed me: "Here are the ways we maimed and killed the invading forces". I was the only nationality in my tour group who had any connection with the war, and my connection is negligible. I wasn't born in 1973 when the last Aussie troops sailed into Sydney Harbour - I'm not even Australian by birth - but the Vietnam war is strong in our popular culture through songs like Khe Sahn and I was only 19. I wondered how anyone who had any connection would cope without punching out the tour guide. This song kept running through my head.

I didn't go to the War Remnants museum in Saigon, but there's a place that tells the other side of the story.  Being confronted with deformed foetus in jars, victims of Agent Orange, and other atrocities of "the American war" was not something I wanted to spend time doing on holiday. But again, only one side of the story.  Here's a blogger who tells it well.

We did drop by the Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi, a place which was also known as the Hanoi Hilton. The French built it originally to house, and sometimes torture and execute political dissidents who were pushing for independence. The (poor) translations provided ample information about the amount and quality of food prisoners were allowed, and the number of Vietnamese who died there. The prison was also used to house captured (mainly American) servicemen during the Vietnam war. Despite numerous firsthand accounts of the torture the prisoners suffered, according to the photos of laughing servicemen and the captions, the Hanoi Hilton was kind of a summer camp for US soldiers - badminton, chess, Christmas dinners, chickens as pets... Jemma and I were ready to sign up.  I find propaganda fascinating, but I prefer it to be acknowledged as such.

I've visited Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany, where thousands (nearly 32000) of prisoners died, many gassed then cremated, which explicitly tells the story of the atrocities that happened there and has the words "Never again" emblazoned on a memorial wall in many languages. The difference in naming and claiming the war crimes is poles - but only 30 years - apart.

I will post about more cheery things when I've processed some more photos. I've missed Thursday but I may as well link up with Really Random Thursday for the first time!

In other news, somehow, Google+ turned me into a no-reply blogger. I'm not sure how or why. Katy pointed it out to me. This post from Fluster Buster showed me how to get around it in case you are having the same problem. I'm seriously thinking of migrating to wordpress, but I find the google link with Picasa just a tad easier to import photos.