Reading & Writing » Language

The Full Ceremonial Monte

jd — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:21:47 +0000

Attended the opening ceremony of the translation conference this morning — hundreds of people in the new, monumental National Convention Center. There was dancing and singing and speech-making and then lunch. I met a lot of the writers — American and Vietnamese — that I’ve corresponded with over the years, or seen in passing on one of my trips. I’m not crazy about being stuck out at the West Lake compound, but I’ve been able to get off on my own enough to get some work done on the classes I will begin teaching next week. And I’ll spend the last couple of days of my trip back down town, so it’s all good. I feel energized and excited about developing some translation projects, work that will begin tomorrow when we begin doing small-scale workshops.

Bouncing off the Walls (VN Diary No. 37)

jd — Tue, 26 May 2009 14:10:11 +0000

This is my last day in Hanoi and the truth is I’m ready to go. I haven’t done much this last week except walk around the Old Quarter and buy presents for friends at home. Playing the tourist. It is of course very difficult if not impossible to get inside another place, another culture; but these last days I have felt mostly as if I’m just bouncing off the surfaces of the city. I am solitary under the best of circumstances, finding it difficult to throw myself into social rituals either abroad or at home, and I have not tried very hard these last few days to see people or go places that would require testing my language skills. The exception to this is in a few shops where I use Vietnamese to buy things. When I first came, I was adamant about using Vietnamese even in places where people speak English, but this last week, I have simply gone along with the English spoken by the waiters at my favorite restaurants. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been feeling very well until the last few days, but I think I’m just culturally worn out. I don’t know how anthropologists who spend a year doing fieldwork can take it — I can adapt for a while, but then I want to get back inside my own assumptions about the world.

So, I’ve been bouncing around, bouncing off of things. Literally, in one case. A couple of days ago I was crossing a street near my hotel in the established manner, walking slowly and letting the traffic flow around me, when a young woman on a new Honda Dream (with granny on the back) came barelling around the corner while talking on her cell phone, hitting me a glancing blow and knocking me backward a couple of steps, though I stayed on my feet. She stopped, said “Sorry” in English, then sped off, granny giving me a dirty look as they drove away. The traffic is perverse, drivers’ behavior apparently calculated to extract maximum short-term advantage at the expense of safety and order, to say nothing of simple courtesy. Among family and friends the Vietnamese are deeply cooperative and supportivcce of each other, but in the broader public spehre, such as driving, there seems to be no sense of an abstract set of rules to which one ought to adhere. Even walking on the sidewalk, there is no standing aside to let another pass, but always the pressing of individual advantage.

This attitude shows up in economic relations as well. Twice in the last week, I’ve been cheated by street hawkers. It embarasses me to admit that I was an almost perfect victim in both cases. In the first case, I decided to finally give in and buy a couple of tee-shirts from one of the hawkers who work the streets around the hotels south of the Old Quarter. The shirts have pictures of Uncle Ho or a cyclo, with Hanoi or Vietnam under the image. The shirts should cost about three dollars, five for one with embrordery. I bought one shirt and went to dinner. On my way back, I was approached by another hawker who had missed the sale. “I saw you before,” she said. “You work in Hanoi. Why you buy from that other girl, not from me?” she asked, putting on a big pout. That’s when I should have walked away. For one thing, I was tired; for another, I’d already let her begin to manipulate me. I wanted to be a nice guy. She was pulling out shirts and handing them to me and talking a mile a minute and I was asking how much for this one how much for that one.* Did I mention I was tired? By the time we were finished handing shirts and money back and forth I had paid eleven dollars each for two shirts, a fact that only fully came into focus for me when I got back to my hotel room and my calculator. When I saw her a couple of days later she tried to tell me I had agreed to pay her another ten dollars! I told her I could have bought two silk shirts at one of the big shops for what I had already paid her and she asserted that “Those shirts are fake — real silk shirts are very expensive” and offered to show me. But when I told her I was going back to the hotel to get the shirts she had sold me so I could give them back to her, she disappeared. Haven’t seen her since. I gave the shirts to one of her competitors, gratis.A couple of days later, it was the shoeshine and shoe repair guy. I had previously paid about three dollars for a shoe shine, which I didn’t really need, my shoes being a wreck. I had seen this guy work before, pulling his tools out on the sidewalk to repair the shoes of both Westerners and Vietnamese. He’s older than the shoeshine boys, who really are boys and who only clean and shine rather than repair. My first mistake was not establishing the price and the scope of the service at the start. I wanted to be a nice guy and so when I was approached I sat down on the HSBC bank steps and took my shoes off, where I was quickly shoed away by a security guard, so we moved across the sidewalk and the shoe guy got to work. He reglued a flapping bit of sole, and actually glued new rubber onto the heels, trimming it expertly with a knife, all the while talking to me about his children and asking where I was from and so on. I was standing there thinking, I’ll be happy to pay 100,000 for this, so one can imagine my surprise when he asked me for 800,000, about thirty dollars. I took out my pocket calculator and we went over the numbers again. In the end, I wound up paying him more than ten dollars for a five dollar job, with him all the while saying it was a “good deal, fair price,” but I also heard him laughing with the security guard as I walked away.

Both these incidents made me angry, not because of the money, which, while not negligible, doesn’t make that much difference to me, but because I felt my good intentions had been violated. Of course, the charge that I was being patronizing can be leveled, but I was after all being a patron, using a service or buying a product. Clearly, though, I was opperating under a different ethic than the tee-shirt woman and the shoeshine man. I think the ethic for the street hawkers is to extract maximum profit for the short term without any sense that there is either a social compact to play fair, or a practical insight that routine overcharging will simply ruin the business. (Another tee-shirt hawker who heard my story — word travels fast on Hang Trong Street — did have this sense, saying, “You can only cheat someone once, so the street ethic I’ve described is not universal.) There is something similar in the hawker’s ethic to the way Vietnamese drive. There’s no sense that such behavior “ruins it for everbody.” Perhaps this has to do with living in a society in which authority is seen to be arbitrary, which leads to the conclusion that rules (and social compacts) are for suckers. It stands in stark contrast, at any rate, to the way I’ve seen Vietnamese interact with friends and family. It may also simply be poverty. The shop owners with whom I’ve had dealings — a much more prosperous class — have driven a hard bargain, but there was alwas a sense that there was in fact a bargain, that is, a contract, being established between seller and buyer. There were rules. That sense was completely missing in the two encounters I’ve described here.

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*The basic unit of Vietnamese currency is the dong and the current exchange rate is about 1785 dong to the dollar, so the most common bills are denominated 50,000, 100,000, and 500,000 — 100,000 is a little over $5.00 US.

Limited Discourse (VN Diary No. 30)

jd — Sat, 09 May 2009 11:33:35 +0000

I’ve noted before that it’s easiest for me to understand Vietnamese when I am inside a stereotypical situation like a restaurant or a taxi or a shop. Tonight I’m sitting in a “modern” cafe in HCMC where Vietnamese pop music is piped over a really good sound system and I find I can understand almost all the words of the songs. Pop songs, of course, have a narrow range of subjects and a remarkably limited vocabulary. Lots of lines about being “only one man” who is “alone” and always “asking” for “understanding” or “a little more time.” And so on. I’m grateful for what I would otherwise find a distraction because it provides some evidence that bits and pieces of the Vietnamese language are sticking in my brain.

Situations (VN Diary No. 25)

jd — Sat, 02 May 2009 08:47:35 +0000

Going around Hanoi and trying to speak Vietnamese (with my limited vocabulary and grammatical resources) has made me acutely aware of the social contexts in which language operates. In a restaurant, certain kinds of words and sentences are used; in a shop, different words and sentences. In fact, this makes it easier for me to communicate because I know what to expect in different places. I’ve also learned to expect several stock questions: How long have I been in Vietnam? How old am I? What work do you do? What country am I from? And because I expect these questions, I don’t have to think quite so hard, but can fall back into language I already know. Such scts of communication always take place within some social context. Aren’t poems the same, in some respects. In poetry, the shop or restaurant might be replaces with a mode or genre — an elegy or a sonnet. So the conventions of conversation or poetry are not something — at least initially — to be gotten outside of, but something to be used. The actual language of a conversation or a poem can only be extracted from the context by an act of critical violence, an act of Abstraction, to adopt Blake’s terminology. But surely we don’t want to be limited to conventional subjects and modes. True enough. I offer my observation only to make the point that such conventional situations can carry a good deal of satisfaction and even emotional power. They ought not be sneered at or avoided in favor of novelty or originality, I think. Such moments of mutuality can be deeply significant. Poems, like my primitive conversations, start in such places and such moments.

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Cross-posted at The Plumbline School.

Language Notes (VN Diary No. 15)

jd — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:06:36 +0000

There’s nothing like one’s first language lesson in eight years to drive home one’s almost complete ignorance of the language. It’s like a Renaissance map — not the complete Medieval fiction with Jerusalem at the center, some few regions have been filled in: a more or less accurate coast line for Portugal, say, but a completely fanciful view of Africa. My map of Vietnamese has tiny fractions of sense, small bits that track the real world, but which is mostly empty. I know a lot of nouns and a few basic verbs, but lack the syntax necessary to track the world in any accurate way. And as if the lesson itself did not provide enough humiliation, I took a xe om back downtown afterward and the driver, hearing my few words of Vietnamese, started off on a long series of questions in his own language — he also had a bit of English — while roaring through traffic. I might not have been able to understand him had we been sitting across a table from each other, but I was completely lost in the noise of the traffic.

Update: This morning I went to lunch with Vietnamese friends who speak English, along with an American who speaks the language well. I find I can ear quite a few individual words in conversation and thus begin to get the drift, but it still moves so fast I get lost. And the American was easiest to understand, perhaps because her Vietnamese was a beat slower and somewhat more textbook clear.

Using the Language (VN Diary No. 12)

jd — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:31:58 +0000

I’m better at speaking Vietnamese in the morning. This morning I went to buy a small shoulder bag to carry around my wallet and notebook and dictionary. I already knew the street where such things are sold so I headed over there and began looking around. One of the shops seemed to have several bags that might do, so I went in and, speaking Vietnamese, asked for a shoulder bag, a small one. For five minutes or so I looked at various bags, asking for different colors and sizes, then negotiating the price (The owner knocked a dollar off! I’m such a tough negotiator.) I did the whole thing completely in vietnamese. Must have been the shot of espresso I had after breakfast. This afternoon, on the other hand, wrung out from the heat, I couldn’t even manage to order a Mango smoothie in the language. I really should stay ot of places that cater to tourists, where the staff (rightly) wants to help me by speaking my language. I have the best experiences when buying from the street, where people’s English is minimal to non-existant. Anyway, I certainly was not fluent this morning, but I conducted an extended transaction — a stylized conversation — completely in Vietnamese.

Hazy, Hot, and Humid in Hanoi (Vietnam Diary No. 6)

jd — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:50:59 +0000

Arrived yesterday after a very long trip but without incident. Was met as arranged with a driver from the hotel, which made the last leg of the trip as seamless as all the rest. I’d been absurdly afraid that Vietnam would be somehow less challenging — smoothed out by modernization — but I need not have worried. Same crazy traffic, same utter disregard for Western notions of zoning, same water buffalo being led across lanes of traffic from the airport by little boys.

Item: I did notice a couple of changes — everyone who rides a motorbike now wears a helmet (though some are pretty minimalist in design) and, in town, the street hawkers seemed much less aggressive than before. Maybe I was just too dazed to notice.

Item: I find that when I have the vocabulary I can generally make myself understood in Vietnamese, but the biggest difference is that I can hear spoken Vietnamese better than before. I chalk this up to drill with the computer, however sporadic, over the last few months. It’s my intention to make this trip an exercise in intensive language study.

Item: The long Cathay Pacific flight was very pleasant — more room in coach than is usual, I think, with attentive service. The amenities may not have been quite so nice, but any slight economizing that’s taken place since the last time I flew the airline didn’t detract from what was a very comfortable flight. It didn’t hurt that the airplane was only half full and that I had my entire row to myself. I slept a fair amount and read quite a bit, finishing another of the Patric O’Brien sea novels I’ve become re-addicted to recently. I tried to watch Sweeney Todd on the video screen, but I couldn’t get into it — I liked the music, but the pacing was tedious, perhaps to make space for the music. The whole Tim Burton night-of-the-living-dead / teased hair and black eye-shadow way of imagining the nineteenth century just did not seem convincing to me, not that I require historical fidelity. Add a comic book conception of good and evil and you don’t have a very convincing package.

Item: Just had my first Skype experience, a call from Carole, with video! When I first came to Vietnam more than a decade ago there was no such technology — only very expensive land-line calls. The quality of this call with Carole was remarkable, especially when you realize that it was free. I don’t have a video camera, so she couldn’t se mee, but I could see her — and Candy sitting on her lap. Over her shoulder I could look out the window at the Northern New Yoek spring. Amazing.

Vietnam Diary 2 (Nhat Ky 2)

jd — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:00:11 +0000

Language: I’ve noticed a slight shift toward increased competence in my ability to hear and understand spoken Vietnamese; also, I was looking at a Vietnamese newspaper online the other day and found I was just beginning to be able to make out sentences. My vocabulary is still too small, but my sense of the language is much deeper than I had realized. I guess the drill, which I find deadly boring, is paying off.

John Banville on Writing

jd — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 02:17:16 +0000

“Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence.” [The rest of Banville's short statement is here.] While I don’t subscribe to the young Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language, in which every proposition is a picture of reality, as a writer, I have the strong sense that every sentence is a line thrown out into the world in order to retreive something of the real. Sometimes you catch something, sometimes you don’t. But that metaphor doesn’t quite catch it either; the sentence — as opposed to the fragment, which is always self-referenmtial — the sentence tries and fails. It is the pattern of those trials and errors that give us what access we have to the real.

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Note: Cross-posted to The Plumbline School.

Some Questions about Vietnamese Poetry

jd — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:53:08 +0000

As I prepare to go to Vietnam in the spring, I have been in contact with friends there, asking them about poetry in contemporary Vietnam. Part of my project involves interviewing Vietnamese poets and that means thinking of the sorts of questions I want to ask. I know a bit about the history of Vietnam and its literature, particularly in the 20th century, but I want to know how that history is affecting the making of poems now, in the first decade of the 21st century. Here is a first pass at some questions, or pre-questions — the sort of questions I need to ask in order to find out what the real questions are:

Who are the most interesting poets now working in Vietnam?
To what extent is contemporary Vietnamese poetry connected to the poetry of the past?
What is the nature of the connection, to the extent that it exists?
Do contemporary poets make use of the extensive folk traditions, for example, of Ca Dao?
What has been the effect of urbanization of Vietnamese poetry over the last twenty years or so?
Have the changes in the Vietnamese economy over the last generation affected Vietnamese poets?
Are there marked generational differences among younger and older Vietnamese poets?
To what extent are Vietnamese poets aware of and interested in poetries in other languages?

Those are the questions I’ll be asking poets I already know as I get ready to go to Vietnam; presumably, these questions will lead to others that are more detailed and take into account the individual situations of the writers I’ll be meeting. If anyone happens by this space who has answers to the questions posed above, please feel free to chime in.