One month from today...
12/04/2008
One month from today I will be at the Indianapolis Airport waiting to board the first of several flights that will take me to Ho Chi Minh City! On the preparation front, my visa arrived in today's mail--yea! After waiting for the visa approval code, the actual processing of the visa went very smoothly and quickly.
I've been so focused on preparing to teach that I haven't taken enough time to reflect on what I hope to gain from my time in Vietnam and visit to China. Having a Fulbright has been a long-time goal of mine, along with visiting China, something I've wanted to do since my freshman year at Bluffton College (now Bluffton University). I'm going to teach, but I also plan to be a sponge. I want to absorb as much as possible, and to experience as many things as I can (with the exception, perhaps, of drinking snake wine).
Yesterday I went to the Post Office with the fourth box of books that I am shipping to Nha Trang University. It has been challenging to select books for them, and I'm sure that after I'm there I will think of many titles that I should have sent. The postal clerk who helped me, a Vietnam veteran, spoke of the country's beauty as he tried to teach me some helpful Vietnamese phrases. It would be interesting to know what they really mean! In the coming weeks, I must make a better effort to study basic Vietnamese phrases!
As I prepare to visit Vietnam, I've been trying to watch films and read books that give me a glimpse of Vietnamese life from the perspective of Vietnamese people. So many people think only of the war when they hear the word Vietnam, and I've been trying to counteract that. My current reading, for instance, is The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family," by Duong Van Mai Elliott. It is a story about adaptation and survival, beginning with her great-grandfather, who was born in 1851. In the family tradition, he prepared to be a scholar and mandarin, but found himself navigating changing times because of the French presence in his country, and its annexation of Tonkin. How does a person balance loyalty to country in the face of colonial rule? His story truly illustrates the reality of cultural differences and the impact of change on the educated/professional class in nineteenth- and early twentieth century Vietnam.
Even though I want to focus on the Vietnamese people, I also need to refresh my knowledge of the war in Vietnam. Recently I finished watching the multipart American Experience documentary, "Vietnam: A Television History." It originally aired in 1983, and does an amazingly good job of capturing the complexity of that conflict, the realities of the men who fought it, the impact on the landscape as well as on the men and women involved--both American and Vietnamese, and the politics of war. PBS has an excellent website to accompany the documentary, which you can view at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/vietnam/
