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WAITING FOR THE BOMBS

::

Being Big

Late September 2001

Chiang Mai to Louang Phabang

The plane is small, and operated by less-than-reliable Lao Aviation, but convincingly shiny, and I climb the aluminum stairs off the tarmac confident, grateful as the next guy to be avoiding a bus. But I am one of the stragglers, and I’m hardly in my seat before the stewardesses are calling for seatbelts. The plane begins to taxi, taking aim out of the flat, Chiang Mai valley at the green mountains of Laos to the east. In a flying-trance, it takes me a long moment to realize that the stewardess standing in the aisle is speaking not to the passengers at large but to me in particular. Please, she’s saying, this way. And as the airplane picks up speed she leads me from the rear of the plane, up the aisle, to the front, the very front, To balance the airplane, she explains.

Oh.

The nose of the plane tips up, but not too far up, and we’re airborne. I feel like I’ve made an important contribution to air safety. Over my shoulder, I see a planeload of Thais, small, neat people, and I have to acknowledge the simple efficiency of moving me rather than three or four of them. But that’s an exaggeration, surely, two slim Thai to one of me? Not that I’m that large. At home, in West Virginia, my six feet, two hundred, hardly stands out, but since I’ve been in Southeast Asia—less than two weeks—I have begun to feel large, swollen, shapeless and shambling. Lumpy. The word galoot rollicks into consciousness and sits down. I feel like I’ve taken some drug and woken up in the mind of anorexia. Food looks less good. I pass on the in-flight snack.

Out the window, the jagged hills of Laos glow an emerald green through the patchy clouds. Soon, the Mekong River snakes into view, brown and rolling here at the end of the rainy season. We begin our descent, Louang Phabang only minutes away.

I think of Delta B. Horne, back in Morgantown, who after September 11 no doubt entertained grave doubts about the wisdom of my traveling this fall. She emailed me she had dreamed we were on an airplane, and everything was okay, except we were all ghosts. Only that.

I look up. The seams of the cabin have started to smoke, but it’s not smoke, more like the fog that rises off a cooler of dry ice when the lid’s opened. The molding around the oblong windows pours with it, wreathing the view. But we are seasoned travelers, no one panics, even when the seams overhead start to rain down water on us. The mood is festive. One intrepid traveler has his camera out and is considering a picture. Probably he’d like to stand in the aisle, a man in a cloud on a plane, while someone else took his picture, but the seatbelt light is on. So he snaps and grins.

The red tile roofs of Louang Phabang are clearly visible now, the town situated like a miniature Pittsburgh on a narrow peninsula between the Nam Khan on one side and the swirling eddies of the Mekong on the other.

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Waiting for the Bombs

Late September/early October 2001

Louang Phabang

The first gong resonates like it’s in my room, and I’m awake, the silence of 4:00 a.m. still thick behind the single ringing, the air black and liquid. I can almost see the sound vibrating out, waves on a disturbed night lake. It’s the monks. Their day has begun. Begins with percussion. There are monasteries (wats) all over town, three within a hundred yards of my room in Villa Xiang Moane, itself named after the sweet sound of the big drum in the monastery compound just across the street. Monasteries dot the landscape across the Mekong, across the Nam Khan; one sits on top of Phou Si, the holy hill. There are at least twenty, maybe thirty monasteries within earshot of my bed in the Xiang Moane. Every monastery has a big drum housed in its own building, and soon a monk is standing before it, a soft hammer in hand, pounding morning from the drum’s taut hide. And gongs, and cymbals, and old car wheels hung and struck with two feet of rebar, and teak logs, hollowed out, made sonorous, hung and struck.

I feel like my bed is sitting on the strings of a gigantic, prepared piano. Every monastery its own ensemble, playing together, but each on its own, playing alone. The whole is not a concert, but not a cacophony either. Every monastery plays and pauses, and plays again. The rhythm, the spatial effects, are like peepers in spring or crickets in fall. Mysterious, organic polyphonies.

I get out of bed to stand at the windows, throw back the shutters. The golden stupa atop Phou Si is lit, casts a yellow radiance up into the still starry sky.

For as long as they play I forget and am happy. Fifteen minutes not bereaved, fifteen minutes without anxiety. Fifteen minutes just a man, all ears, in a town awake, listening.

Breakfast at the Scandinavian Bakery. CNN on a TV mounted high on the wall: Larry King Live. The Lao girls bring me a mango shake, a croissant, a cup of thick, Lao coffee. I listen. I can’t help it. The question: when the bombs will fall, not if. The news scrolls across the bottom of the screen, all bad. Worse than the news though is the rhetoric. Patriotic frenzy. Whatever will be done, must ideological corruption precede it? Can men who hijack airliners and fly them into buildings honestly be characterized as “cowards”? This from the man who, when he got the news, flew in Air Force One to Offutt AFB, in Nebraska? And wasn’t it ideology that made those other guys hijackers? The same kind of lies? I finish my coffee and leave Larry King to the generals.

An American traveling so soon after September 11, I am traveling in the wake. Since I’ve been in Southeast Asia I’ve been asked to accept condolences, again and again, for the nation, which feels strange. I am, of course, sorry, too.

One of the good things about being American is that at home I don’t have to feel American very often. That layer of identity drops out; for weeks at a time it never occurs to me to think of myself as an American. Traveling abroad, of course, the world insists, asks, Where are you from? In Southeast Asia, this question is asked all day, every day. And now, I’m sorry, and that thin shell of my identity that is national, accepts the condolences, Thank you.

In old Louang Phabang, the main streets are lined with shop houses. There are a few colonial mansions now put to new uses, and beyond that, in the alleys or away from the center, the distinctive stilt houses of the people. And monasteries, of course. I take an interest in them all, walking. But I like best to walk in the evening, when the architecture begins to soften in the darkness, when the monks are in their sims, chanting. I might walk the whole town, listening to the chanting swell up as I get close and fade after I walk by. Or perhaps sit on a curbstone or a stone stair, listening, or stand at a gate, looking at the rows of kneeling figures, shaved heads, orange robes. Here there is no before or after, just again, the chants taken up, devotion again. But it’s not all seriousness. Some of the monks are only boys, and a serious demeanor at times fails them. One boy will lean and whisper and another’s face will light in a wicked grin. Being a monk in Laos isn’t only the decision of a lifetime, but a rite of passage that almost all boys undergo, to “ripen” into men.

Another day I climb Phou Si at day’s end, leaving my black, rental bike at the bottom of the serpent (naga) stairs. Up, through trees, to the golden stupa, That Chomsi, where the sun catches last in Louang Phabang. Like much of the religious architecture in Laos, it looks better at a distance, but the voice of a monk chanting saturates the air, his voice filling the vowels with yearning, and I am happy to be here.

The terrace in front of the stupa is decorated, flowers in planters made from the tail sections of American bombs, fins serving as feet to support cases now full of dirt. I’ve seen a few others around town. Reminders. The map of unexploded bombs in Laos from the Vietnam War is pretty much a map of Laos. Many of these bombs were not even dropped on targets, but just dumped before the bombers returned to their bases. These bombs are still falling, thirty years on. UXO, “unexploded ordinance,” kills or maims on average two hundred Lao a year.

What we do keeps going after it leaves our hand, beyond what we intend, sometimes with dire consequences in a future we cannot know.

Another day I visit the Royal Palace Museum; most of my attention goes to the building and not much to the collection. But near the exit, in a display of diplomatic gifts, I see a boomerang, from Australia, of course. A caution. And from Richard Nixon, who also gave many of the bombs, a little clutch of moon rocks.

For days the quiet citizens of Louang Phabang have been preparing for Lai Heua Fai, a moveable feast that falls on the full moon at the end of the rainy season. Celebrated widely in Laos, it falls on a different moon in different places, depending on the timing of the monsoon in that locale. It’s the October moon this year in Louang Phabang, tonight. The floats that have been going up all over town will be marched along the main drag to Wat Xiang Thong, then carried down on the great stairs to the Mekong and launched into the fast-flowing river.

Made of split bamboo, colored tissue paper, and glue, fanciful as floats are, every one blazes with candles or spirit lamps. To give thanks, to celebrate the end of the Buddhist Rains Retreat, and to pay homage to the river-dwelling nagas. The big floats, twenty feet long and more, are carried by a crowd; they are central to the public festival, but there is a private piety as well. Seemingly the whole town, one person at a time, carries a small offering down to the Mekong or the Nam Khan, to dismiss all that is dark in living, sin and disease, fear and hard luck. Most of these offerings are small rafts made from a banana leaf, cleverly folded into the shape of a lotus blossom. The size of a full-brimmed hat, they are charged with flowers, most with marigolds, yellow and orange, a stick of incense, and a candle.

Before the big floats arrive, I join the crowd descending to the river, serious and light-hearted, and set my offering on the dark water, the incense smoking, the candle lit, a little foil pinwheel spinning in the breeze. I ask that my sorrows be eased and set my little boat to float on the stream.

Only then do I see a darker darkness on the river, long boats, and in them men who, when a candle bobs within reach, cup the flame with a hand and blow it out. My candle! My little pinwheel must now spin the breeze unlit in the watery dark.

But some get by the boats and float the eddies along the shore; others get into the current and go. And still others float down from somewhere upstream, way out, in the middle of the river, racing along.

After I’ve watched the parade of floats, been carried along by the crowd, after I’ve listened to the monks at Wat Xiang Thong, I make my way back to the river, downstream, another stair, the same river, the same pious offerings. Again I carry a float down to the water, this one for Delta B., hand it to a boy in a boat who hands it to another, on out to the stern, where the last boy sets it directly in a fast current tongue. For a second, it resists the pull of the river, heels, then it’s off, the small yellow flame illuminating the marigolds, and higher up, the dim orange tip of the smoking incense. I watch it ride clear out of sight.

Then the news that the bombs are falling. Each one wrapped in words, in ideology. Wrapped by “us,” wrapped by “them,” but exploding nonetheless in a real world where real people live and die. And some won’t explode, will be added to Afghanistan’s already crowded map of UXO.

The effect of these bombs too will ramify in ways we can’t foresee. They are both the boomerang coming back from the hand of Al-Qaida and a new one thrown.

::

The Burden

Mid-November 2001

Danang to Hoi An, Vietnam

Motorcycles and bikes, trucks and cars, walkers, all crowd the road from Danang, a narrow road at that. My taxi goes by starts and stops, horn blaring—it is the custom of the road. I look at the people, so young. Few of them would have been born during the Vietnam War, called the American War here. Schoolgirls all in white, in ao dai, a long slit jumper over long pants, pedal along in twos and threes, talking and laughing, as schoolgirls do. Some of them hold the front panel of their ao dai in one hand, pinned to the handlebars, to keep it out of the chain, letting the back panel stream behind. Boys, some of them in school uniforms, too, others rioting as best they can or working as they must.

Danang to Hoi An is not far, but the trip consumes the better part of an hour. The taxi man drives carefully. We chatter as we go, until he, too, asks me where I’m from. The U.S., I say. Ah, America, he responds, I’m sorry. But I can tell it’s not the sorry of condolences. Sorry? I ask, suddenly glum. Because of the war.

Yes.

So many of my people died. Yes, I know. And then I find myself offering apologies for my country.

I am uneasy. I am a man for whom all identities feel a little assumed, and national identity most of all. I have spent a lifetime in opposition. But I find I cannot deny all responsibility. It hasn’t been my country right or wrong; I’ve made free with dissent and, if called, would not have gone. But however tenuous my American identity feels at home, here, I cannot say, Not me. I say, I’m sorry.

Perhaps because the country has a claim I have bridled all my life at ideological attempts to co-opt it, to make it mean a duty to subscribe, to put aside moral judgment and reason. Better to hate all flag waving, all ideological imperatives. I refuse to jump when our leaders say, You’re either for us or against us, as they have said again recently. That is how evil speaks; I know the voice, the words.

::

The Beautiful Place

Mid to late November 2001

Hoi An

My room in Hoi An, long and narrow and overlooking Tran Phu, is on the second story of a one-hundred-fifty-year-old shop house, now the Vinh Hung Hotel. The room is dark but soothing. Built post and beam, the main uprights are peeled teak logs; the walls and ceiling are paneled with pieced teak as well. From age or stain the wood has turned almost black. The antique furniture, except for a couple of small wicker chairs, is the same deep purple. There are two beds, an enormous four poster hung with a white mosquito net on a frame with bats carved in the apron, and a smaller bed, in which I will actually sleep, a mosquito net tied up like a great white acorn hanging over it.

The room appeals to me. Like the best vernacular housing, the aesthetic feels derived from use, from centuries of responding to locale and tradition. Here, traditions. Hoi An shop houses have roots in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and, latterly, French Colonial architecture. Most of the buildings were built by merchants who lived and traded under the same roof. So the front room on the first floor opens convincingly to the street but can be closed up, made domestic. The buildings have public and private identities.

Many of the old houses in Hoi An, however, are now all public. House museums, or they’ve been converted to restaurants or hotels. I can walk in what were private rooms, and do. I go in everywhere I can, spying out variations and inspired designs. But most of what appeals to me is common: deep, two-story townhouses, a street in front, a street behind. The shop in front, with living quarters above, then a closed garden open to the sky and built against a common wall, balconies on three sides, then another two-story structure, then a garden in the back, then the back gate in a wall. These are townhouses, constructed with buildings adjoining on either side, but they are full of light. The closed garden and the back garden create great plinths of light, and the communicating doors and interior windows allow the light to stand thick and blue in every room. Except for the floors on the ground, originally slate, these houses are all wood inside, floors, walls, ceilings. This gives the interiors a profound visual harmony, a rare organic integrity.

Hoi An is a wet place. It rains, it floods, and often it’s hot and humid. The shop houses are built for water, made of teak, and there are removable grates in the floors on the second story, with block and tackle hanging above them from the ceiling, so that when the floodwaters come, and they do regularly, furniture and merchandise can quickly be hoisted to safety.

The river rises a little while I’m in town; the remnants of Typhoon Lingling have swollen the Thu Bon so that on a high tide it rises over the river wall and floods Bach Dang, where the boats are tied up. I walk there at night, not suspecting, and am surprised to see the river in the town, the boats, well down by day, now looking ready to float into the lantern-lit streets.

Old Hoi An must be about the same size as Louang Phabang, and here, as there, I walk myself to exhaustion, looking. In love with the maroon wood and the faded, pastel stucco, I think of the town as unbombed and lucky now for the years of poverty that kept it from the wrecking ball (the bomb of progress).

In the evenings I wash the road dust from my feet, my face caked and hair thick with it. My room in the shop house pleases me; I’m able to continue looking at old Hoi An right into bed. But when I shower I find I can’t stand up. The tub has been raised six inches to accommodate the plumbing and that puts the top of my head two or three inches into the ceiling. I hunch, use the soap, getting as clean as I can.

::

Shiva

Late November 2001

My Son

I travel out of Hoi An on a rainy day, to see the Cham ruins at My Son Sanctuary. Bombed, most definitely bombed. The Cham civilization flowered in the region for around ten centuries. The Hindu statuary, here and at the Cham museum in Danang, is sometimes stiff, then again, sometimes an artist with a gift quickened the stone, and a lithe girl dances still, and Shiva wears a knowing smile.

Brick temples once crowded the precincts at My Son in several clusters. French archaeologists, around the turn into the twentieth century, catalogued some seventy buildings, and that centuries after this city, sacred to the Cham, was sacked by ethnic Vietnamese. But at My Son now very few buildings are still standing. I overhear a guide explaining how American B-52s reduced much of what was here to bricks in 1969. The account is less bitter than I expect; the guide seems to lay at least half the blame on the Viet Cong, who took shelter in the ruins, who chose to fight here. I finger a stele covered in the intricate script of sacred Pali, pocked by M-16s, and think of the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in March with tank and rocket fire. How even before September 11 that act had turned back on the Taliban. Indeed, in Southeast Asia, the Buddhists I’ve talked to seem to regard those shots as the first proof of the Taliban’s ideological madness, of a karma that would lead to retribution.

Late one afternoon, I ask about another of the side trips on offer from Hoi An, to My Lai. I gaze into the face of the woman at the counter at the Vinh Hung and see a stricken look pass through her features, a wave of grief. I feel I should go, face the worst, the most shameful day of the Vietnam War, but I find I can’t. What I know already suddenly seems quite enough, as much as I can bear. I don’t need to see that tremor pass through another face.

So I walk down Tran Phu toward the market and drop into an unnamed café full of older Vietnamese men who welcome me to their number with a nod. I order white coffee and sit in one of the low, maroon, resin chairs. It’s very small, a size sold for children in America. The coffee comes and I relax out of being American into common humanity. But when I get up to leave, the chair sticks to my hips, and I have to pry it off with both hands.

::

Old Quarter

Early December 2001

Hanoi

I’ve come back to Hanoi, after an absence. In Hué, I watched the video on CNN, truckloads of Taliban fighters racing down dirt roads in Afghanistan to join the Northern Alliance, pledging themselves anew, ready to fight those remaining loyal to the Taliban cause. Some people just like a good scuffle, maybe.

But ideology creates a need for ideology, to carry slogans in place of a conscience or independent judgment, any flag to march under. And I don’t mean just soldiers. The flags of the world’s ideological tribes have been breeding. Everywhere it seems people are identifying with more restrictive definitions of what it means to be them and denying that imagination, love, or tolerance could ever allow anybody not them to understand them. Surely this is globalization’s twin? A way to resist the forces that would make us all alike?

Even in Hanoi, the capital and a surging, modern city, you cannot walk at all without meeting a Vietnamese woman carrying some load on a stick, a shoulder pole with wicker pans hanging from either end. They embody the traditional figure of justice; they carry the scales. And justice lies in the balance of the two pans.

There has been a lot of talk about justice recently, justice for the terrorists on board the jetliners on September 11, for bin Laden and Al-Qaida, for the Taliban and anyone else supporting “them.” As if justice in a case like this were possible. But it’s all pretty words and not what’s wanted, not at all. What “we” want is bloodier than that. The truer word is retribution, which means, at root, payback. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have it. I am saying for our own sake we should call the things we want by their real names. And if what we hope to get, beyond the blood, is deterrence, we should acknowledge that deterrence shares its root with terror. To terrorize “them” so they won’t terrorize “us.”

There is little justice in bombs, which fall more like the proverbial rain, on the just and the unjust alike.

I sit eating persimmons and a mango with an acquaintance in a Hanoi coffee shop just down the block from what remains of the “Hanoi Hilton.” The coffee is good, the conversation pointed. David, an American living in the French Quarter, refuses to answer America to the question, Where are you from? He answers, I’m Jewish. He believes he has made the break, gotten free of national identity altogether. As I have not. While we talk, two women with shoulder poles and conical, straw hats pass each other on the sidewalk in front of the café, going opposite directions, each selling the same array of vegetables, and for a moment I can’t speak, just shake my head. I register this small scene as a rebuke to even pointed conversation. For a second what futility means is right there. And perseverance, because the women dip their hats only a little and keep on, undaunted.

In Hanoi there is little to remind me of the Vietnam War, though we bombed here, too, of course; the infamous “Christmas Bombing” ordered by Nixon at the end of 1972 killed some thirteen hundred Vietnamese. I remember those days, hearing how the Vietnamese didn’t value life the way “we” did, which somehow meant that our less than sixty thousand dead seemed more important than their three to five million. Those were the days, the upside down days, when “the best” agreed to go to Vietnam to fight and “the worst” said no. Love-it-or-leave-it days. And even now there is a great outcry about the reception “the best” got when they came home, and they did suffer and yes they needed all the help they could get to live in America again. I don’t begrudge them. They were only boys. But they hadn’t made the best decision to go. And it’s funny how the patriots’ cynical story about those who resisted carried the day: how just everybody against moved directly from protest marches to corporate boardrooms. As if those who found themselves vilified when they stood against the war came away unscathed, as if listening to the lies shoveled out of Washington didn’t make them forever doubters.

And doubters are forever ill at ease, always estranged. No monument for speaking out against the ideologues. No one to winnow the bums on skid row and say this one lost heart, lost the ability to believe, the ability to take part. No. At home, too, people were wasted, people who believed they lived in a country where freedom should be honored not only in the abstract but on the street.

I grow old, and am angry still.

And I wonder about the cheap America of the patriots these days, about those who believe the public good is best served by private greed. Buy something, anything, do it for America. Shopping, on eagles’ wings…

I go shopping, too. Wandering the 36 Streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, the city’s mercantile district. Here, commerce is face to face, and it doesn’t take long to get to know shopkeepers. Or to get known. You’re recognized on your second visit, because it’s a small shop and the same people are there everyday, nothing like a Walmart. The Old Quarter, a horseshoe-shaped square kilometer tucked between the Red River, The Citadel, and Hoan Kiem Lake, used to stand within walls, and the layout of the streets still reflects the compression of its former fixed limits. The streets teem, alive with buying and selling and living at a pitch. I fear that, like Allen Ginsberg in that “Supermarket in California,” I am shopping for images—one of my derelictions, one of the ways I fail to be fully human. But I try to make contact, and it’s easy to forget this is Vietnam, because in spite of the superficial differences, the goose blood soup and the weasel coffee, the stonecutters pounding out tombstones in the street and the banyon trees, the street life feels profoundly familiar. Human.

I’m staying in a modest hotel on Ma May, on the riverside of the quarter. The narrow street is in constant motion, cyclos and taxis, bicycles and street hawkers, motorbikes and pedestrians. It’s difficult to cross over to the other side. And yet, almost every night I see a man crawl up Ma May; paralyzed from the waist down, he drags himself along with his elbows, right up the middle of the street, a child with a begging bucket following in his wake. The traffic surges around him, not oblivious but not overly solicitous, either. He has a place. Give some money to the child. Show a little compassion.

I go walking, and walking I have become smaller. Eating less, I have become fit on the road. From the first notch in my belt to the last, my pants now blooming around me. A healthy change, physically, and a long way from anorexia, I know. But perhaps metaphorically telling. Thinking myself big, I have made myself smaller. A metaphor for ideology. Not as good a metaphor as anorexia, the real thing, the girls so thin still clinging to the idea that they are big. Thinking big their sickness. Thin to die for. Like jihad, like dominos. To kill for.

On my last day in Hanoi, I drop into the Café Pho Co on Hang Gai. From the street, it looks new, a shop full of cheap goods for tourists, but there is a hallway on the right that opens into the garden of what turns out to be an ancient shop house very like the ones in Hoi An. Café Pho Co is in the garden; it’s an improbably serene place, just that short hallway away from the loud rush of Hang Gai. There are only a few tables, and a middle-aged Vietnamese businessman gestures that I should share his rather than wait. We exchange nods and settle into the welcoming hush of the garden. When the waitress comes round I order a ca phe trung, a delicious concoction whipped out of a shot of strong coffee, sugar, and a raw egg. Fattening, no doubt.

I have been months away and am ready to go home to my small town on a river, home to Delta B. My welcome will be private, domestic. We will resume. Suddenly it will be winter in “the lost America of love.” We’ll take the dog, Worty, for walks in the graveyard when it fills with snow. We’ll talk and laugh and let the bombs fall out of hearing. I remember George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, published during the Vietnam War, his judgment on those who “develop Argument / in order to speak,” that “they become unreal, unreal, life / loses solidity,” and his conclusion that

one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

And I hope I can.

The waitress brings the ca phe trung, and I eat it with a spoon. When I set the mug down I see my tablemate has asked the waitress for a second teacup, one for me, to share the pot of green tea that sits on the stone slab between us. He pours and nods. I nod, too.

(2002)