Based on a story by Son Nam, the film looks at the lives of young men whose parents, landless peasants, barely eke out a living as share croppers on large tracts of rice land, using their buffaloes to cultivate the paddies. The buffalo is the most valuable thing that the peasants own & the death of an animal is a disastrous event — literally a matter of life & death — for a family. During the rainy season when the floods come even the poorest peasant must hire buffalo herders to take the animals to pasture. Kim, the hero of the story, is the son of such a poor family & he refuses to go to work as a laborer for a landowner, so he takes the family’s two buffaloes himself when the floods come, one of the animal dying of starvation during the journey. The death of the animal marks the beginning of the disintegration of Kim’s family & the rest of the film chronicles his life after he joins up with the Lap, the leader of the largest “gang” of herders.

The depiction of the life of these herders is remarkably like the wild west, with drinking, dope-smoking, fighting, murder, & rape. The one thing the herders have is a kind of freedom — they are not farm laborers working for someone else. The plot of the film works out Kim’s coming of age & his coming to a kind of understanding. Throughout everything, the buffalo stands as a symbol of mute persistence in the face of nearly impossible adversity. The critique of French colonial economics is subtle, but clearly present in the story. It is not an accident that a French patrol walks past without concern while Kim is burying the remains of the family’s buffalo. Throughout, the hardness of the peasant’s life is set against breathtaking beauty and the characters are presented sympathetically but without any hint of overwrought romanticism.

In looking around just now for commentary on the film, I discovered this post on the All In One Boat blog, which gives a fuller account of the story. The blog itself looks interesting as well, dealing with the environment, poetry, religion & all sorts of things I’m interested in — I’ll  certainly look in again from time to time. And here is the NY Times review of Buffalo Boy.

Then I headed slowly back uptown, taking my time. Eventually I got to the Asia Society, where I spent an hour with The Arts of Ancient Vietnam. It was a beautiful exhibition with exquisite objects arranged so as to tell a coherent story, though a story different from the standard cultural narrative one might hear in Hanoi. The standard narrative involves the emergence of a distinctively Vietnamese culture in the Red River Delta about 1000 BCE that then slowly extends its hegemony southward into territory that, while not exactly presented as empty, is conceived of as being in need of settlement — by the Vietnamese, of course. Like the way many Americans thought about “settling” the west in the 19th century. What the Asia Society exhibition shows, by filling in the reality of the Cham, Fu Nan, and Sa Huyen cultures, is that the standard picture is incomplete. The narrative of Vietnamese history is composed of several lines that move forward in time from different geographical areas in what is now the modern state of Vietnam, interacting and shifting and dying out and perhaps reemerging genetically in different regions of modern Vietnam.

Upstairs from the Vietnam exhibit was a newly installed show of Buddhist art and artifacts related loosely to the idea of pilgrimage. The images of the historical Buddha are deeply moving despite the fact that they are completely imaginary: no one knows what that ancient prince of the Shakyas looked like. There is a profound stillness in the best of the images. The other Buddhas — future & past, etc. — move me to the extent that they resemble Shakyamuni, though the images of the bodhisattvas are often wonderful as symbolic art.

After the Asia Society, I walked over to the Met, which is impressive in any number of ways, but which I found both overwhelming & disappointing. The American painting wing was closed for renovation & I found the acres & acres of European painting oppressive. (I’m just speaking personally here I know there are good reasons to collect and study and even love this tradition and there was a time when I studied it, to some extent, happily enough; but at this point in my life I take no solace in it.) I wandered through the Greek & Roman statuary — saw a lovely Three Graces among the emperors — and went to sit and rest in a huge hall exhibiting artifacts from Oceania, things completely foreign to me. I didn’t make any attempt to understand any of the objects, just sat resting on a bench for twenty minutes; the light was strangely muted and there weren’t so many people there.

Left the Met and got a deli sandwich and sat in Central Park to eat, watching the kids and the musicians, hearing fragments of conversations. Perhaps it’s me, perhaps its the weather, but people have seemed preternaturally mellow on this trip. And walking around the city I have had the sense that, looking at people and the images they project of themselves, I am looking through tiny openings into their lives.

My final stop uptown was the Whitney. In my younger days I tried very hard to be a painter and I try to keep up at least a little with what is going on in the visual arts. The Whitney Biennial is one of those art world institutions I’d always wanted to see and this was my chance come round at last. It was wonderful & terrible, as I suspect most biennials must be. The most interesting work was in video and sculpture, with not much going on in traditional painting. I’m going to write more about the show when I have the catalog in front of me to refresh my memory, but I do one to mention one fascinating (an brave) aspect of the show: On the fifth (top) floor of the museum, the Biennial curators had installed examples of work from the entire history of the Whitney. Emerging from the elevator, one was confronted with a large red & black painting by Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red. (It reminded me of a monumental Buddha / I wear my fascinations on my sleeve, obviously.) And then there was a white encaustic target by Jasper Johns, a figurative work by Richard Diebenkorn — and so on all the way back to Edward Hopper. These artists, of course, were among the heroes of my young manhood & I still love them deeply.

I walked back down to Tribeca along Broadway and stopped at The Strand where I bought a couple of books, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, by David Markson, and Wake Up, a life of the historical Buddha by, no shit, Jack Kerouac. Walking along, I saw up ahead of me a collection of emergency vehicles, lights flashing & speakers popping; as I got closer I overheard someone say there had been a gas leak, but no one was redirecting traffic so I figured it couldn’t be too dangerous and kept walking. As I got closer I could see that several Con Edison guys had dug a hole in the street, exposing some old rusty pipes that looked like nothing so much as veins in an arm. Looking closer, the analogy persisted — the pavement peeled away in layers looked like skin — and the whole city seen this way is a kind of pulsating body without a solid surface.

This is obvious when you think about it, of course, the subway whooshing past beneath your feet, which are separated from the speeding train by only a few feet of earth, some concrete, or maybe just a metal grate. The whole city vibrates with light and noise and breathes, inhaling and exhaling all sorts of currents carrying odors that range from the sublime to the noxious. That’s the joy of the place, but also one of the reasons a quiet museum, especially a small one, seems so hallowed. And I had a small museum in mind for the next day, after I’d rested my tired feet and eaten a pastrami sandwich in my hotel room and had a good night’s sleep. As it turned out, I didn’t sleep that well (typical when I’m away from home), but I did get to the museum the next day . . .

Later: I’m home now and have slept for about fifteen hours. To cap the trip, Delta didn’t manage to get my bag onto the last leg of my flight home, so they had to put it in a van and drive it the 150 miles from the airport to where I live. But it and I have arrived safely after one of my best and most productive trips to Vietnam. Details to follow. Oh, and I absolutely agree with Sam’s assessment, in his comment, of travel in Asia versus travel in the US. For my part, I just repeat a little Buddhist mantra: May I be filled with loving kindness, may I be well in body and mind. . .

What the conference did bring about, though, is the creation of a nascent world-wide network of people interested in Vietnamese literature. I got together with a group of poets last night from around the world and we read poems to each other and exchanged email addresses and began hatching plans for cooperation. Significantly, we had to meet in a closet because no rooms had been set aside — in a facility filled with meeting rooms — for discussions after the close of the official parts of the program. And today, after the closing ceremony, which amounted to another empty two hours, I finally cut out and went to visit my friends at the publishing house where I worked when I had a Fulbright ten years ago. There, the Director, who I had always thought of as a kind of conservative guy, noted that the Writers Association did not seem very enthusiastic about bringing in outside translators and creating networks, despite the fact that that would seem to be a natural institutional role for them to play. Instead, they brought in 150 writers from abroad and used them as props of some kind of internal cultural kabuki.

At the publishing house, we agreed to pursue a couple of projects, including a re-edit of a famous anthology of Vietnamese literature and a collection of stories by the early Vietnamese modernist Nam Cao. And at the conference I had been able to reconnect with a Vietnamese friend — a fine poet and meticulous editor — with whom I have worked before and we agreed on a collaborative project to pursue together. As I was leaving the publishing house, the Director noted again that the Writers’ Association was “pretty conservative” and “not dynamic.” We agreed to forge ahead on our own. So the conference has been a success for me and for a lot of other writers who got to know each other; but in official terms that success was incidental.
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Note: I’ve intentionally been a little cagey about names in this post because I don’t want to embarrass anyone.