Same Same But Different

I'm back. Two weeks in Vietnam, one week in Cambodia. My trip was amazing. But you expected me to say that, assumed this to be inherently true. And it tells you nothing.

Yet as I sit here attempting to put into words the respiring, intently gazing memories walking slowly and deliberately through my mind, the places that filled my senses, the relationships built, relationships strengthened, the tilting of history, shuffling large feet, pushing up thick glasses, now standing awkwardly against the dance-floor-wall of this modern era, I struggle with the immensity of such a task. With material for hundreds of posts, I feel pressed to compress it to a single one.

In three weeks, I received a key-hole glimpse of two countries, both with tumultuous, sanguine histories, hands stained crimson and tear-streaked faces dark with the dirt of time. Yet through this both have emerged with bright, friendly smiles and a certain adeptness at marketing themselves to the hordes of eager tourists who at times appear to outnumber the locals. The times when I travel, when I am separated from any semblance of home, I feel most intensely the skin of my own country, of how I am affected by my American-ness. Few Americans travel to Southeast Asia.

I wish that we would. Southeast Asia, to both the knowledge and oblivion of so many Americans, has been deeply affected and afflicted by the choices of our government. Everyone knows about Vietnam, remembers the war we lost, makes the obvious analogy to our current war. Oh, pardon me. Our liberation of an oppressed people. Just like Vietnam. Fewer are aware that, while slinking away from Vietnam, we decided to display our final throws of power, puffing out our chests, by dropping bombs onto Vietnam's neighbors, Laos and Cambodia; we spent millions to bomb these countries with which we were not at war. When I was in Laos a year and a half ago, I saw the empty bomb shells, stamped by their maker, a nation defending the Freedom of All Peoples, shells now converted into flower pots, water jugs, or dinner bells. (From where, then, did this true peace and freedom come?) The landscapes of all three countries are pock-marked by the presence of the U.S. there. It is such a shameful part of our history.

While there, Pierre and I went to the Cu Chi tunnels, built by the Viet Cong during the war in defense against the U.S.. It was a testament to this current era, an unwalled museum for the art of war. Our guide, a Vietnamese man who fought on the side of the U.S., led us through the well-tread tourist paths first running past craters from the bombs dropped by an invading nation with such immense wealth and modern technology, then showing booby traps created by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the much poorer Viet Cong. Somber, learned tourists with cameras hanging from their necks, later grinning silly smiles from atop the shell of a bombed-out tank, the hollow skeleton of the achievements of my country. I felt ashamed. It felt intrusive and ignominious to treat with such lightness the horror of what occurred there, of what my country did. But then, I was the only American on the tour.

We were able to go through a small section of the tunnels, crouching lowly in the still darkness, immured by both the confines of hardened dirt walls so low and narrow I had to crawl and the cold, spectral realization of the purpose and history of this slender hollow in the earth. Just before this, we walked away from the gun field, where each rich tourist is treated to the opportunity to shoot a weapon at the low low price of just one U.S. dollar per bullet. The intense sound of gunfire, though I sat further away and the targets were merely boards at the opposite end of a field, left me shaken.

Remarkably, though the countryside still reels from the damage caused by my country, the people seem to have healed. I was treated with such friendliness and even excitement regarding from where I hail. In hearing my country, most often eyes widened with recognition and the person began to excitedly grasp for a distant relative or friend they knew in the States, or simply began naming cities. When catching our train from Sapa to Hanoi, though, a gentleman had quite a different reaction. Pierre and I were traveling with friends we met in Halong Bay, an Australian father and son, Mike and Drew, respectively. A man guiding us to our car asked Pierre where he was from. "France."

"France, oh! And they?"

"Well, they're from Australia and she's from America."

"Ah, Australia. Yes, kangaroo! And America," he noted excitedly, raising his arms in the position to fire a gun. "Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat," he said happily, mimicking the sound of machine gun fire. And so our legacy goes. (I almost shot him for saying that, but had left my own gun in my other coat.)

The United States, however, has not been the only country to have slit the throats of the people of Southeast Asia. They have done the same to each other, to themselves. The history of Cambodia, I discovered upon going there, is fascinating in its horror. After meeting up with Matt, we went to the Killing Fields, where victims of the Khmer Rouge regime were dumped into mass graves. 1.5 million Cambodians were killed by a regime with the perfect propaganda and brainwashing of the Nazis or of Mao's corrosive brand of communism.

In the first two hours I was in Cambodia, gazing at the Crayola-colored rice field countryside, I was more struck and captured by it than my entire two weeks in Vietnam. A small country, embraced tightly by the tourist factories of Thailand and Vietnam, I saw in it the same haphazard, untamed beauty that India and Laos possess, unable to be captured or packaged. It was the beauty of the untouched domesticity of a people I did not know or understand. Especially in the countryside, Cambodia has that youthful, virginal beauty of untainted people, unlike Thailand or Vietnam, both haggardly prostituted for the pleasure of tourists, swollen with an abundance of cash.

Vietnam, or at least what I encountered there, has become an imitation of itself, a forgery, a reproduction of an authentic lifestyle. Crisp white shirts tucked into pressed pants or patterned, flouncing skirts, both loosely protecting heavy wallets, lay flatteringly on those dressed up to greet the mundane local lives that we captured so well with our quickly flashing cameras. Guided from one paint-by-numbers life to the next, thickly coated in tourist colors, one is shown wide, watching eyes, and bright clothing. Tourist-colored smiles and tourist-colored products. Soon after, the sales pitches begin, people pressing you to buy every manner of local ware, speaking in their impressive English.

In Cambodia, I saw a mix of lives. Matt and I drove a motorbike 314 km from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, the tourism Mecca of Southeast Asia. Along the lengthy Highway 6, a simply paved two-lane road, we viewed lives lived without the practiced presence of performing for a camera. Siem Reap, however, where one can see Angkor Wat, has built itself today upon the thousands of tourists moving with awe through there every day. Ancient temples well-preserved and comfortable hotels in which to dream pretty, clean dreams.

All along Highway 6 were stilted houses lined into obedient rows, standing immodestly. Wooden skirts were hiked high to the second floor, while concrete legs bared themselves, set purposely and authoritatively askance. Families gathered under the shade of the carefully tiptoeing homes, like ballerinas performing. As we passed, two foreigners speeding on a motorcycle, curious stares and wild waving erupted from those shading themselves from the intense Asian heat. With every stop, I quickly retrieved the camera, stealing moments of the mundane from these wondering strangers who quickly pooled around us, performing our own unremarkable activities of purchasing water or gas, of stretching limbs stiff from perching for far too long on an uncomfortable seat.

Siem Reap is a different Cambodia, one fashioned for the eyes and comfort of the tourists who pour in like water to see the ancient Angkor temples. Impressively schooled resorts, attentively awaiting buses of tourists, surreptitiously smoothing the crisp, starch-smelling collars of their scholarly white shirts, narcissistically admiring their own meticulously manicured servitude, line the pencil-drawn dirt road, like a translucent thread of spider web abandoned prematurely in its completion, yet nonetheless glinting in the scattered sunlight. A thin link to true life in Cambodia. The resorts, protected by the money-green grass planted before them, have all stepped back from this aged line of earth, as if offended by this vagrant reminder of their location.

This has been my third trip to Southeast Asia; the accumulation of time I have spent there is two months. Vietnam startled me in its utter sameness with the rest of Southeast Asia, with little to define it differently. As the very popular Asian-English saying goes, it was Same Same But Different. Odd in its similarities to what I have thus far experienced, yet unique in my experiences. This was a great trip. For the familiarity of the unknown. For the people, my friends. For the ancient beauty of a lost culture. For the sun, its tropical warmth. For it simply being vacation.