Tag: travel

A War Un-won?

In 1993, I had the chance to visit Vietnam. I’d been doing a film in Thailand and with a few days off decided to head north heeding the advice of an experienced traveller to Hanoi “Before,” she said, “it was ruined.”

A quick hop and there I was, in Hanoi, a place for which I had plenty of references but in which I had no tangible experience.  I had after all lived through the Vietnam War. Sat bedside in Tokyo army hospital burn wards in my teens along with my class mates writing letters for bandaged soldiers barely older than we were.  My cousin had served two tours in ‘Nam, our local paper the Tokyo Stars and Stripes kept us abreast of the horrors, the Foreign Correspondents Club at which my folks were members was always full of seasoned, hard drinking journalists fresh off the fields. I had heard stories of the Hanoi Hilton, attended a talk given by Jane Fonda on the heels of her trip to Hanoi. Shell shocked soldiers on R&R often stayed in our home from 1967 to 1972.

Hanoi was nothing like what I had imagined…and nothing like it is today. 1995…streets were bustling with yaks, bicycles and the occasional car weaving through each other indiscriminately. Street vendors flourished, I stayed in the most posh accommodation of the time..a Soviet built hotel that had wax toilet paper. I remember feeling as if I was on two trips at the same time. One…to an exquisite new country filled with hard working farmers in a moment of great transition. The other, to the country that had been our enemy and to which too many young Americans had been sent never to return. In the sweltering heat, dressed as I was in flip flops and a sun dress, sweating profusely, I tried to imagine what the experience could have been for a young man from say Nebraska who had never been out of his own county and now half way around the world from everything he had ever known, stepping off his first plane ride, weighted down with gear, risking all to battle the ‘spread of communism’ whatever that meant.  Then after all that…to have lost the war. Waste upon tragedy upon lunacy.

On the heels of that mind bending trip, I was introduced to a Thai businessman, Stanford grad, man of the world who laughed at my depressed reaction to Hanoi. “Oh you Americans!” he laughed. “You always think you lost the Vietnam War. You didn’t! You won!”  A pretty astonishing declaration. His reasoning was that prior to the war, the Sino-Soviet pact was rock solid and eyeing India as a further frontier for business expansion. America, terrified to loose the wild west of opportunity, set about to break the pact…and that successfully done, exited Vietnam. History has gone on to prove my Thai friend right in the sense that in spite of the US having “lost the war”, Vietnam is anything but communist and a now a hot bed of commercial opportunities and growth for western entrepreneurs among others.   

I read in the news today that Putin is hosting Modi, Xi and Erdogan. Kim Jong-un is expected to attend as well, each with a posse of businessmen. Putin is looking to “consolidate solidarity” and build a “new type of international relation and business community away from an unreliable and punitive America.”

So…having “won” the Vietnam War 50 years ago it is possible that it will be un-won over these next few years.  China and Russia are united in looking to solve India’s recent tariff wound at the hands of the person occupying the White House. Looking to create partnerships in commerce and invention.  We are already collectively 80% behind China’s alternative energy industry. Reading of this extraordinary gathering I shudder to think where else we will soon be lagging.

Virginia Calling

My dog got hit by a car a few years back. She survived, mercifully with only a broken leg to show for the misadventure but it meant that rather than fly home to Colorado from the east coast, we would need to drive. I had the time, it was summer…so, off we set. Our route took us through the stunning, ancient hills of Virginia and West Virginia, land of my matriarchal ancestors. Looking at those vistas, I remember some internal switch being involuntarily flipped that cued a calling to return to those roots. Who knows why? Over the course of my life, I had only been in those parts for a handful of scattered weeks but then again, I had grown up under my Mother’s roof and for as much as her life had evolved beyond West Virginia, there was a part of her that always remained deeply grounded in those sensibilities. She could as easily wear an haute couture, gold lamé gown dripping in jewels as she could smack the shit out of an errant rattler in the backyard with the flat side of a shovel.

Recently, when an offer came in to do a movie in Virginia, I jumped at the chance to return. So here I have been this last summer week, in these unfamiliar, familiar parts. As that flipped switch had harbingered, I have been having some kind of serious series of woo woo moments since arriving.  For one thing, the vegetation is much of what Mom had duplicated in my sister’s and my Tokyo childhood gardens …gardenias, camellias, lilacs, azaleas…all of which are in bloom now.  Childhood aromas abound.  The decor in the house the film company has me staying in, as well as the residence in which we’ve been filming, eerily repeat choices of Mom’s/my guess is my grandmother Mamaw’s, as well.  Silver trays, tassels on knobs, worn tapestry carpets, silver candle sticks, sea shell and drift wood collections, wicker backed chairs, etched glass bowls, cut crystal vases, arrangements of dried pussy willow stems and peacock feathers. Shades variously of blue gray, taupes and muted coral on the walls and linen, lots of monogrammed linen. These are each elements of décor I have adopted into my own homes but had heretofore never particularly identified them as hand me down influences from my matriarchs.  Then…oddly…there are Asian accents as well. Massive peony patterned porcelain jars. Blue and white rice jars. The Asia connection continues as my driver, in this teeny tiny Virginia hamlet is of all things, Japanese.  So random…then again not? The Spirits are working some kind of wicked pull to my past and to my ancestors and I’d be lying to say I am not a little comforted by it all.  Speaks somehow to the quantum interconnectedness between past present and future… All as being one.

Inevitably somewhere in the day this reverie gets interrupted by yet another punch from the news.  You know, those government, blow up punches. The eradication and/or defunding of the EPA, Department of Education, NIH, PBS, NPR, vaccine and cancer research, USAID, etc… Tragically, the list goes on. My sense of identity as an American, cracks anew. I mean what does it mean to be an American anymore? We certainly do not stand today for any of the values my generation was raised to emulate. The path ahead as citizen again becomes fraught, unstable. Thus frozen but in the newfound comfort of Virginia, I turn willingly, to the past. As if to reassure myself that because I, we, have a past we indeed do have a future.

In an attempt to re-root in the vanishing America I love, I’ve taken to wading through the Constitution and have found solace.  It spells out clear directives and duties of each branch of government, displays evolving humanity, compassion, lawful procedure, separation of powers, separation of church and state. Thus re-rooted, when yet another flagrant action of total disregard for our Constitution is perpetrated, it is easier to undo my ingrained trust of government, call out the wrong, reset the trajectory if only mentally and realign with my, with our ancestors’ wisdom. I breathe in the Virginia aromas anew and listen for life cues. Whilst I wait…I imagine I feel or perhaps even feel an embrace from the past encouraging me and all of us onwards.