Master Key

(PICTURE: Me in the tiny locker room.)

Every day when I go to the gym, I'm immediately handed a towel and a key to a locker. Well, the other day I had an epiphany while opening my locker: all the keys look the exact same.

Nobody was in the locker room so I shrugged my shoulders and tried my key on another locker...and it worked. I then tried it on another locker...and it worked on that one too. Yeah, the locker keys are all the exact same. So, as you can imagine, I will no longer be bringing my wallet with me to the gym.

Hygiene

(PICTURE: This is basically what the edges of the lake look like.)

Huyen and I have been on a great exercise kick recently. Yeah, we're in the "wedding diet" mode with only five months to go before we tie the knot. The other night we went to the lake by our house to run some laps. Although it's a nice scene near the lake, the lake itself is absolutely disgusting. The lake not only has an odor but there are always dead fish floating near the edges. Well, as we were stretching, I noticed a woman who had walked up to the water and dipped a washcloth into it. I asked Huyen what she thought the woman was doing and Huyen said that she was probably washing dishes. I'm pretty sure my eyes bugged out at this point as I said, "Are you serious?" Huyen nodded and left it at that. Well, sure enough, at the end of our run we passed the woman who was selling mia da (sugar cane juice). As far as I could tell, the woman had used the wash cloth with something related to the juice she was selling whether it be dish washing, cleaning the juicer or whatever.

And with that, I'm never ever ever having a drink anywhere near the lake again.

Hillary's In Town

Apparently everyone in America knows that Hillary Clinton is in Hanoi because I got sent a whole bunch of emails yesterday with links to online newspaper stories. I knew that Hillary was gonna be here for two reasons: 1) I read it on CNN last week 2) One of my private students told me that his father was going to have a meeting with her on the 23rd -- yeah, his pops is pretty big time (although not as big time as my dad who met Bill Clinton in '92; some would say without my Dad Clinton couldn't have carried New Jersey...those "some" are my dad and, well, now me).

Anyway, here's my brush with Hillary story from yesterday. Since I knew that Hillary was in town, I wasn't surprised that the streets were LINED with police and army dudes yesterday morning. Seemingly ever guy with a green or tan uniform was standing by the side of the road around 7:30 AM. As I was driving, there was all of a sudden a frantic blowing of whistles by all the officials. I recognized this drill immediately since this is the capital and politicians are often heavily escorted across the city. My gut instinct told me that Hillary was about to pass me so I whipped off my sunglasses and pulled down my face mask. I thought I'd look as American as possible and give Hillary a big thumb's up and smile as she flew by me. After a few seconds the first police patrol car sped by me. Then another. And then another...and then another. Next in line was a luxury car with a red, white and blue flag attached to the antenna...

...but it wasn't our red, white and blue flag. It was North Koreas. Yeah, I got all excited and breathed in some extra exhaust just to see the delegates from North Korea. Out of all the politicians who this caravan could have been escorting, this was the one farthest in ideology from Hillary Clinton.

So yeah, sorry to disappoint everyone. Despite being perhaps one of the most popular American bloggers in Hanoi, I didn't get a meeting with Hillary. Although if you asked me, she should have met with me since she gave a speech about Human Rights and internet freedoms.

Book Review: A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain

Yup, back to back book reviews.

If you're looking for something great to read, I highly recommend "A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain" by Robert Olen Butler. This collection of short stories -- which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for fiction -- revolves around the theme of Vietnamese Americans living in Louisiana*. To put it simply, the writing is beautiful and the stories are all memorable.

My buddy Jim had given me this book after I asked him if he had anything that was jumping off his shelf. Once I opened the book I couldn't put it down. In fact, after reading the first three short stories I sent Jim a text message that said, "These stories are beautiful. I'm gonna try to read this book slowly so I can really enjoy it." Well, I tried to read it slowly but I finished it in four days.

Put this one on your summer reading list! If you don't believe me, here's a link to the NY Times Book Review about the boook.

* All the stories revolve around Vietnamese Americans except the last two, which I felt were great stories but seemed out of place and didn't go with the work as a whole. Jim later told me that the last two stories ("Salem" and "Missing") were added in later publications.

Book Review: The Stoning of Soraya M.

I just finished reading The Stoning of Soraya M. If you're looking for something utterly disturbing to read, I highly recommend this book. The book details the true story of an Iranian woman named Soraya who was stoned to death for allegedly committing adultery -- a false accusation made upon her by her cheating, wife-beating, evil husband who wanted to divorce her so he could marry a teenage bride. I'm not sure what the worst part of the story was, her having been stoned by her father and sons, or the con-artist Sheik not allowing her body to be buried and thus being eaten by stray dogs.

My friend Lily had left this book at my house almost two years ago when she visited me in Hanoi. I never had the inclination to read it until all of the news reports last week about a woman who was sentenced to be stoned to death in Iran. It's completely mind boggling to me how something like this can still go on in our modern world.

I just googled the book to find a picture for this post and saw that there is a movie based on the book that came out this year. If you don't have time to read the book, check out the movie.

The Typhoon That Wasn't

(PICTURE: Hanoi didn't get hit by Conson but Hai Phong did.)

If you've been following the weather news for the last few days, you would have read about Typhoon Conson that hit the Phillipines and China. After it soaked China, it was widely reported by CNN that the storm was headed towards "around Hanoi". CNN wasn't the only news outlet to report this, as I think every Vietnamese newspaper, radio and television station gave the same weather prediction. With the huge floods just two years in the rear-view mirror, Hanoi was in total panic mode to prepare for the incoming typhoon. The supermarkets were busy, the markets were mayhem (the vendors doubled their prices) and seemingly every candle near my house was bought up (we got four).

On Saturday, the winds in Hanoi were ridiculous. I could feel my motorbike drifting every time I was driving down the road. However, there was no rain. On Saturday night, Huyen and I had dinner plans with our friends Dave and Elissa. When Huyen and I fought the winds at 7PM to go to their house, we were one of the few motorbikes on the street. While eating dinner at Dave and Elissa's the wind was absolutely fierce outside, but again, not a drop of rain. After our great meal and a triumphant evening of spades (props to Huyen who just learned the game and was a fantastic partner) we headed home at about 1:30AM. On our way back to our apartment, the skies opened up and absolutely drenched Huyen and me. However, this wasn't the typhoon that was predicted as the news was reporting it would now arrive the next afternoon.

Well, the next day the weather was absolutely beautiful. The best part though was that everyone in the city stayed inside thinking the rain was about to come. It was nice to have the city be so calm for a change. In the end, the typhoon never came and now we've got a fridge full of food.

Mai's America

The other night Huyen and I saw "Mai's America", a documentary about a Vietnamese girl who studies abroad in America and gets placed with a self proclaimed Redneck family in Mississippi. For those of you who have a Netflix account, put it on your list!

If you're a teenager in Vietnam and reading this, DO NOT WATCH THIS FILM BECAUSE IT WILL SCARE THE CRAP OUT OF YOU!!!! My friend Jim -- thinking the film was just about Vietnamese studying abroad -- took two of his students who were about to study abroad to see this film; by the end of the film one no longer wanted to go to America. Jim said that he talked the kid back into going and promised that if he got stuck with a bad family he'd personally come rescue him.

The documentary was shot in 2002 and aired on PBS. Here's the full movie description from PBS's website:

Mai's America is a personal journey that defies all expectations. Mai, a smart, vivacious, and resilient Vietnamese teenager, travels to America for her senior year of high school, shouldering her family's high expectations and her own visions of western-style success. Yet, nothing in Mai's wildest imagination could prepare her for what she finds in rural Mississippi, where encounters with white Pentecostal and black Baptist host-families, a local transvestite, and South Vietnamese immigrants challenge her long-held ideas about America, the concept of freedom, her identity and even her homeland of Vietnam.

Mai's father, a successful Hanoi businessman and proud veteran of what the Vietnamese call "the American War," sends Mai to the U.S. as a high school exchange student expecting her to secure admission — and the necessary scholarships — to attend a top-ranked American university. Mai may have arrived in America with the desire to make her family proud, but her journey through the Southern heartland reveals the surprising common bonds that span global boundaries and link Mai to her American counterparts.

It's a tale as old as immigrants coming to America — the clash between dreams and reality. But each generation writes a new chapter of this essential American experience. Relatively privileged in Hanoi, Mai finds herself on a lower rung of the American economic ladder when she lands in Meridian, Mississippi. Her host family, composed of self-described rednecks, proves a challenge to her usually outgoing and upbeat personality. Plagued by unemployment and depression, the family shows little curiosity in their Vietnamese guest. At school, she finds it equally difficult at first to form real bonds.

But Mai is nothing if not persistent. She soon wins the heart of her host grandmother, who expresses an interest in her Vietnamese culture, and finds a worthy mentor in her high school history teacher. During her class, Mai experiences a remarkable revelation about the Vietnam War, when she realizes that the American soldiers she'd grown up thinking of as cruel killers were no different than the boys seated in the desks all around her.

Mai doesn't find genuine friendship, though, until she meets Chris (a.k.a. Christy), an outgoing transvestite nightclub performer with whom she immediately forms a sympathetic attachment. Drawn together by a shared sense of being outsiders, they dance, trade make-up, and have long talks about life and the difficulties of being true to oneself. With Christy providing a boost to her self-confidence, she works up enough courage to change host families, and moves in with a young, African American couple who include Mai in their active social lives.

Mai's window on the world opens even wider when she meets Tommy, an animated South Vietnamese immigrant whose father fought alongside the Americans before fleeing Saigon when Tommy was only three. Children of former enemies, Tommy and Mai engage in spirited conversations about the war and its after-affects. Through Tommy, Mai also meets an expatriate Vietnamese community that clings to the pre-war way of life. When Tommy takes Mai to a South Vietnamese celebration in a nearby town, she feels like an outsider among expatriates from her country. To Mai, they seem to cling to the Vietnamese lifestyle that they knew before the war - a culture vastly different from the Vietnam she grew up in.

(PICTURE: Mai with filmmaker Marlo Poras.)

"Mai's story is a wonderful story to have had the opportunity to tell," says filmmaker Marlo Poras. "I think we are able to see a reflection of ourselves in Mai — in her drive, her disappointments, her humor, and her dreams. Her story was nothing I expected, and yet it was incredibly familiar. And for me, it came to be very much about both the value and the cost of the American dream."

Given extraordinary access to Mai's activities and thoughts throughout her stay in the U.S., Marlo Poras has crafted, in Mai's America, a very 21st century take on seeking the American dream.