Stranger In A Strange Land

Three months in and the strangeness of Asia has not gotten to me in the way I had figured.  Sure, they call limes lemons, eat dog, and drink beer with ice, but at the end of the day that’s not enough to trigger the homesickness I had prepared for.

Homesickness is a strange and often dangerous thing. A ‘grass is always greener’ lens through which you only recall the good about a place. Built in your mind to be the answer to all your present aggravations and frustrations.

I’ve had it hit me once before like a ton of bricks. I’ll never forget how absurd it was, and how it was able to level me so completely. Absolutely ripping me away from the moment and the wonderful things I was experiencing.

I was 14, and had the chance to spend an amazingly unsupervised summer in Greece.  I was able to party, and drink, and chase women way way above my age bracket and yet I couldn’t help but feel I was missing out. Missing out on what?

Wait for it…

Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

The absurdity of that thought makes me want to go back and beat some sense into my 14 year old self but it’s the embarrassing truth. A quick call home on a phone card to my friend was cut short because everyone (everyone) was heading out to see the second installment of the ‘Austin Powers’ franchise. The cultural event of the season I’m sure. But standing there in a phonebooth in the shadow of the Acropolis I wanted nothing more than to be going with them. Even at fourteen I realized the ridiculousness, but it changed nothing about how I felt in the moment.

In truth missing the niceties of home (fountain sodas, air conditioning, cheese) pales in comparison to missing the people that make ‘home’, or the idea of home, so special.  As I prepared for tropical illnesses with inoculations, so did I also prepare for any parasitic bouts of longing for the place with which I had so desperately wanted to leave.

Like a junkie locking themselves in a room to kick a habit, I approached it the same way.

Legend has it when Cortez arrived in the new world he burned his ships, a clear message to his men – there was no way back. As far as motivational speeches go, it seems to have been pretty effective. With 500 men he conquered an empire.

Now I wasn’t trying to take over Asia (although if a few rooms filled with gold were to have been offered…).  No I was simply trying to make my way as best I could.  Subconsciously I went about things the same way when settling my accounts in Florida. I had no ships to burn, but I set a match to every bridge that would allow a retreat back to the life I had sought to leave behind.

Moving into my last apartment took a 28ft U-Haul. Moving out took a cigar box.  There would be no physical keepsakes to return to.  My favorite comfy chair went to Paul, the guy down the street who went all ‘supermarket sweep’ on my place.  My guitar is in an upstart music shop outside of Jacksonville.  The process was surprisingly easy. Once the switch has been flipped mentally you can begin to see these things for what they are. Things. They don’t define you any more than what you had for dinner. And, like the dog noodles here, they can only sustain you for so long.

They say the reason George Washington was such a successful commander was that he had the ability to see things as they were, not how he wished them to be.  Any student of the Revolutionary War would tell you we were all a hairs-breadth away from tea time and bad dentistry. The man had a knack for understanding his strengths, and more importantly, his weaknesses.

My weaknesses are many, and any ex-girlfriend will gladly give a treatise, but the one which worried me the most was my tendency to romanticize. A few months, a year away, and my mind seeking desperately for a sense or normalcy would convince me that things were great back home.  They were far from bad. Don’t get me wrong. I had a great life filled with some of the most amazing people, but it wasn’t enough.

I don’t know how else to describe it other than being presented with an amazing meal but knowing you’re not hungry, and won’t be for a long time. I had something I felt I needed to do first.  What it was I wasn’t sure exactly. But I knew it wasn’t in Tallahassee, Florida.

So the plan was to go as far as I could until I started coming back.  From there I hoped to gain some perspective and a better understanding of the world. Looking back now I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface.  I’ve looked poverty in the eye and seen it’s emaciating effects on the faces of children.  Kids who should have been in school finger painting instead of leading packs of water buffalo down barren roads. Old men and young children, afflicted with debilitating conditions that could be cured for the price of a night out drinking crafty beer.

Life is cheap here. There’s no other way of seeing it.

A friend I traveled with was offered a baby for $100. A distraught mother assumed he and his sister were a childless couple, and that her child would have a better chance with these strangers than with her own mother. How someone overcomes the natural instinct to protect their young says to me that the future she saw for her baby girl was bleak indeed. Or maybe she just needed a new TV. I’ll never know nor understand.

Yet for every heart rending punch to the soul this place throws it makes up for it tenfold. People who have nothing to give, will still offer half of their nothing to a guest.

I was recently invited to lunch on the beach by some kite surfing instructors. Mostly kids of 12-15, they teach fat Russian tourists how to be dragged around face first in the water by a big sail. For the most part they live at the school. When the bar closes, and the German techno ravers have left, they layout their bed rolls and grab a few hours sleep on the dancefloor between the speakers before the morning classes start again.

When there is no wind, and there is no money to be made to send home, they fish for scallops in the bay.  When they have enough to fill a boat they grill them simply on the beach.  Throw in some bathtub cane liquor for the older kids and it’s a feast to behold.  A meal that would have cost me $50 anywhere else in the world, yet the only payment they would accept was a fifty-cent beer for the boy who manned the grill for hours.

Perhaps poverty can breed a generosity rarely seen in the me-first culture of the west. Maybe it’s the fact that this country is at least nominally Communist. I say nominally because like most ‘Communist’ countries Vietnam seems to have taken a page from Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese party leader who proclaimed ‘to grow rich is glorious’.  This ethos flew in the face of decades of political doctrine and has resulted in the commercialization of many formerly austere socialist regions, Vietnam among them.

To say people here are hardworking would be an understatement of inexcusable proportions.  The manual labor involved with rural life and the mechanics of wet rice paddy farming are staggering. Entire fields of family, extended family, and hired hands, stooped day long in excrement filled ponds planting and replanting rice bulbs.  It makes my back ache just to drive by.

Riding through the steep and jagged mountains of the central highlands I would often pause to take a swig of water only to be overtaken by an elderly woman with fifty kilo rice-sack on her back, grand-baby tucked in a sash across her chest, wordlessly trudging up the mountain in hundred degree heat.  Made me ashamed of my petty complaints while toiling away in the Florida summer.

Perspective. It’s what I came for.