bad metaphor

I was somewhere over the Pacific, hurtling through time. Next to me, my boyfriend sat coughing quietly into the crusted remains of what once was a tissue. Across the aisle from me, a girl with braces and a faded blue 4-H club t-shirt kept glancing in our direction.

“That 4-H bitch is going to rat us out,” I thought.

This was back in early June, after the initial swine flu mania had simmered down in America, but was just intensifying in Japan. I’d read numerous reports of harsh quarantining procedures. China had just ejected several Mexican nationals, even some who hadn’t been to their home country in years. I didn’t think Japan would be that insensible. Or would they? Liz, Eli’s friend and our host, said that schools in her prefecture were panicking big time. One of her fellow English teachers was immediately quarantined for a week upon returning from a vacation in the U.S., without even exhibiting any symptoms. With knowledge of Japan’s reputation for hyper-cleanliness, I envisioned their robot-patrolled quarantine rooms.

“Shh,” I hissed at poor Eli, who was blowing his reddened nose into the tissue remnants. We had joked around about falling ill and having to spend our Asian vacation in quarantine, but Eli had gone and actually caught a cold the night before we left! He’d packed some cold medication – but just one set of tablets, and he strategically opted to take that shortly before landing. Would it fool the robot stormtroopers sent by the Japanese version of the CDC who would march through the plane, scouring each passenger with x-rays and thermometers for hints of the dreaded H1N1?

We weren’t too sure, but I knew that 4H Girl was not fooled. She could tell what was going on. The flight attendants passed around health questionnaires in addition to the typical visa paperwork. “Have you been sitting next to or near other passengers who exhibit symptoms of coughing, sneezing, etc?” Shit. She would not only check the “yes” box, I KNEW this was the type of goody two shoes, community citizen in training who would pull one of the flight attendants aside, point, and it would be all over for us. I didn’t care that she was thirteen. Right then, she was high on my shit list, up there with my worst enemy.

I began devising back up plans. It wouldn’t be so bad if both of us were quarantined…sure, that would be a lame vacation and we wouldn’t get to see Japan, but it would make for an interesting story. And maybe Japanese quarantine rooms have cool vending machines. Not to mention the robot stormtroopers. But if Eli were quarantined, and I was not? Or if we were separated? What would I do? I barely knew Liz! What if I couldn’t find her? And what about the ferry to Korea…what if Eli missed it, and were stuck in Japan? We had been planning this trip together; I did not look forward to roaming around Japan all by myself. I squeezed his hand (the one not currently clutching the gross kleenex).

Landing. Usually I look forward to this part of the plane ride, but this time I was filled with dread. Eli had taken the cold tablets, reduced his coughing and other blatant displays of illness (oh, but 4H Bitch knew). He collected his sad, snotty nubbins of tissue and stuffed them into an airsickness bag, which he then crammed into the smallest compartment of his backpack. I felt bad, like I was importing illegal contraband into the country. But I knew I would feel worse if Eli were trapped in a robot Japanese invalid prison. Quietly, we deplaned.

“What if they find the kleenex?” I said. “They won’t,” said Eli, but he looked worried, too. Just then, the lane of traffic towards customs took us by some restrooms. Phew. He darted in, discarded the slimy contraband and washed his hands (thank god), and we walked towards the quarantine station together. This was the moment of truth.

Went up to a counter, staffed by a man wearing a mask. Handed him my questionnaire, visa documents, passports. The man quickly scanned the forms with his eyes. Shuffled the papers about, stamped something, and handed my passport and visa documents back to me, with a yellow slip that read: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFULLY QUARANTINED. PLEASE KEEP THIS CERTIFICATE ON YOU FOR REFERENCE.” Then waved me on my way with a muffled “Arigato gozaimashita!”

We were free! I think! I met up with Eli, who had the same yellow paper, as did everyone else on our plane, who were all headed towards passport control. I hugged him tightly, cheering as if we had just run a marathon. Well, we had traveled a long way.

A deep “sumimasen” to the 4H Girl, whose meddlesome-ness I had vastly overestimated, and also to the country of Japan. It turned out that Eli did not have swine flu, however, and the both of us contributed lots of dirty tourist dollars towards your coffers. So everybody was happy in the end.

Woke up early, whether due to jet lag, or maybe my body has become accustomed to sleeping in cramped seats on planes, trains, taxis, subways – and isn’t able to fall asleep that well on such a soft, luxuriously pillowy king-sized mattress (a surprise and extremely generous gift from our roommate while E and I were away). Or maybe somehow, I can still hear the call of my aunt’s neighbor’s rooster: a triumphal annunciation of dawn in Saigon, taking twelve hours to float across the ocean to wake me up at precisely six in the morning here in Kansas. Whatever the reason, I got out of bed and got onto a bicycle seat, riding along the river, trying to sort in my head all the places I’ve been.

Japan, with its fastidious attention to detail: nothing is left to chance there, not even the unfurling of tree limbs. Korea, flocked with duck-billed visor bearing women, vigilantly shielding their faces from the sun in an attempt to preserve their beauty (and ironically enough, looking awfully silly in the process). I think of all the countries, I had the toughest time in Vietnam – not just because I have the language capacities of a two year old (and a particularly slow one at that), nor simply because like a slow two-year old, I couldn’t cross the street without holding my aunt by the hand. It was in Vietnam that I had to deal with conflicting loyalties and identities. Here I could blend in, certainly better than E, who got the devil’s eye from an elderly woman in a market (who possibly took offense at his devil-colored hair) – but never fully. Even before I’d open my mouth to reveal my poor command of Vietnamese, my plumper frame and general look of wide-eyed cluelessness identifies me as foreigner, and I’d get stuck with the foreigner price. Vietnam is freshest in my mind, so I’ll begin recounting my days there – even though my journey actually started on the gaudy, noisy streets of Shinjuku.

Vietnam has price differentials – if you’re a foreigner, expect to get charged more than locals. This puts off a lot of tourists, including some of our friends who visited recently and got really tired of getting ripped off all the time. After awhile, though, I concluded that this is not because Vietnamese people hate foreigners or anything (although some might, like that old lady in the market). It’s not so much that they’re gouging foreigners, as they are helping themselves. First: Vietnam is still a third world country, in the process of rapid expansion, but getting a late start because of decades of ravaging war. So people are still very, very poor. Second: Vietnamese are extremely loyal to their kindred. Whenever possible, they’ll cut deals or try to go easy on their fellow countrymen, who they know probably need the help. Foreigners (and plump Vietnamese-Americans who can’t even speak the language) are probably rich and therefore don’t need the local “discounts.”

Every now and then I wondered how my life would have turned out had, instead of being born in the States, I grew up here. If my parents hadn’t traded rice paddies for wheat fields as scenery. If I grew up eating fresh mang cut every day, knew instinctively the proper pedestrian technique for avoiding death by herd of motorcycles, donned a face mask to shield my lower chin from sun-induced darkness. If there hadn’t been a terrible, protracted war that forced my parents to abandon their beloved homeland. If twenty million gallons of Agent Orange hadn’t been dumped onto this land, melting Viet Cong-shielding leaves from trees, skin from bones. As I toured the War Remnants Museum, looking at the photographs of the devastation inflicted upon my parents’ country by my own, the thought came to my mind: gosh, what if my family had been fighting for the wrong side?

But then, my family and other South Vietnamese suffered at the hands of their brethren up north. My uncle, much beloved by his sisters and mother, was shot by Viet Cong while serving an extended tour of duty (he re-enlisted to protect his younger brother from having to serve). I remember my dad’s voice, choked with rarely displayed emotion as he declared he’d kiss the soil, once the people responsible for wreaking utter devastation upon his hometown were brought to justice for their crimes.

I must stop here, because I don’t mean to make my vacation to Vietnam sound like a constant angst-fest. I had a wonderful time, eating the freshest, ripest, sweetest fruit – fruit whose paler, less flavorful cousins might be accessible to you in the States if you’re lucky – and spending time with dear old Auntie Needles, who doted on me like I was her daughter for the week. She’s the sweetest auntie one could hope for, and now it seems silly to me that I was so afraid of her as a wee lass – though, witnessing some of the ire she directed at cab drivers and waitresses, maybe I could see why a ten year old would fear her. For her part, she was ecstatic that I had made the trek to visit her, pinched my cheeks red in the manner of doting aunties, was endlessly patient with my bad Vietnamese and E’s culinary pickiness, and went to great lengths to make sure we had an amazing time there. I’ll miss having an Auntie Needles around to guide me through traffic and yell at taxi drivers!

More to come later, and as soon as I find my card reader for my camera, photos.

As I mentioned in my last post, pretty soon E and I are going to be hopping the pond (that other one, filled with tsunamis and shit) to visit Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Though we’ve both kind of vaguely wanted to go on an Asia trip before this – even so far as considering teaching in Korea for a year, like all our other peers who don’t know what to do with their lives – our reasons for going now are twofold. 1) E is turning 30 soon and doesn’t want to officially turn “old” in the states and 2) we actually do have a number of friends who are teaching in Japan and Korea, and I have a battalion’s worth of aunties stationed in Vietnam. We won’t always have free housing and tour guides available in the places where we want to go, so we decided we needed to take advantage of these soon.

Now, for some odd reason, the “Vietnam” portion of the trip is making me the most nervous. Perhaps it’s because my Vietnamese is embarrassingly poor. I…well, I know the names of dishes my mom makes that I like. I can also say “sorry,” which will probably come in very handy. After that, I’m bracing for a chorus of “không biet nói Tieng Viet* Ha ha ha!!” Yeah, whatever, um, just put me and my boyfriend up for the night, mmm kay?

Maybe another reason is the traffic in Saigon:

Yeah. Um. If that’s how it’s going to be, I’m probably not going to see much of Saigon, beyond a narrow city block around the airport!

For awhile I was actually kind of reluctant to tell my parents that I was going. I’m not sure why, beyond just this vague apprehension of offending my father, who has offered to take me to Vietnam in the past year. I eventually told him, and then my mother, and from both parents I was kind of met by this…silence. I don’t know if it was shock or surprise that I wanted to go on my own, or what. I told my sister about this reaction.

“Well, I don’t know about Dad,” she said, “but I think Mom is worried you’re going to get kidnapped.”

What?! Oh, that’s right, it’s just my reliably paranoid mom. Apparently since I don’t speak the language, that makes me ripe for kidnapping. I have the intelligence and street smarts of a four year old, see, and I would just willingly climb into the back of a car with anyone, even if I didn’t understand what they were saying! My sister has been suggesting a trip to Vietnam for years, and my mother’s always put it off, claiming to be too busy. But since I’ve told Mom of my plans, she has started seriously thinking about using her minimal vacation time to come visit when I am there.
I’m touched and would actually be really thrilled about having my mom there, to show me around and stuff – but they just cut her hours at work! And she’ll have a grandbaby to come visit soon, as well! I can’t help but think of what Suze Orman would say.

And then there was the issue of telling one of the aunties, who we’d be staying with. For the longest time I hesitated about contacting this auntie, who I’ll call Auntie Needles because she taught me sewing lessons when I was little. I learned how to sew by making traditional Vietnamese style dresses for my troll doll. Back then she was known as the sternest of the aunties, and my cousins and I were a little scared of her. Sloppy hems and other transgressions were met with sharp scolding. But in retrospect, all that scolding resulted in what was probably the most well-dressed troll doll, ever. And when Auntie Needles tired of America and went back home to Vietnam, something changed in her demeanor – she relaxed, laughed, and seemed delighted even to have us noisy kids running around!

I haven’t seen this auntie since I was ten, so I really have no idea if she’s relapsed to her grumpy auntie ways. Or if she’d be happy to see me, or annoyed that this random stranger-like niece was contacting her out of the blue, to crash on her couch. Or if she even remembered English – hell, my Vietnamese has vastly deteriorated since I last spoke to her.

Our departure date for Japan is coming up very rapidly, so I finally got off my duff and emailed her. If she was going to be slightly annoyed at me trying to bum her couch, then it would follow that she’d be REALLY annoyed if I did so without advance notice.

Here was her response:

welcome you and your boyfriend,very happy.Ok you stay with me and uncle My .we are ready everything for you…I love you and hope see you soon

She’s family. Of course she’d welcome me! Sometimes it’s easy to forget, the way we live here in the states, drifting apart on our own little islands.

Still, I’m a little nervous about my upcoming reunion with Auntie Needles. I kind of wish I still had that troll doll.

*Translation: “you don’t know how to speak Vietnamese?” The one phrase I will never forget, as I’ve had it barked at me by disapproving relatives all my life. I had no idea how to write that, by the way, and am just guessing using an online translator.

My sister and I view Houston as a magical culinary palace encircled by a moat of cars, but my mother sees it as a city fraught with terrible dangers*. Perhaps this is because living in Houston entails SO much driving, and my mother emphatically reinforces the stereotype of Asian women being awful drivers: she’ll slow down to a near crawl for a turn, and practically roll through the intersection by virtue of inertia alone. Anyway she admits that she is uncomfortable driving on the freeways, so whenever I am visiting I will often drive her car. But I’m not sure sometimes whether I am more stressed out enduring her actual driving, which might induce an angry Texan to get out of his car and shoot her – or her backseat driving, which gives me road rage. My mother realizes that I can drive, I think (I did drive her practically all the way to Pennsylvania once), but The Nag is strong with her, she just can’t help herself. Once I had barely finished shifting the car into reverse, to back out of the garage, when my mother yelped, “Be careful!!” Startled, I looked behind me, fearing I was on the verge of crushing a cute puppy or old lady or something. There was nothing, of course. She was merely keeping me on my toes.

When my brother-in-law arrived, he did most of the driving by default. Despite the fact that she is terrified of his driving (he’s a touch, um, aggressive behind the wheel, to put it charitably!) (Hi, M!), he is a man and therefore automatically better equipped to drive than little girly me. Ordinarily this would annoy my feminist sensibilities, but in this case I was MORE THAN HAPPY to have someone else be the target of the backseat driving. Luckily for M, she’s a little more reluctant to nag him openly; unluckily for my sister, Chiaroscuro, she then gets the brunt of it. A lane change or slight route deviation would cue clucking, sighing and bossy murmuring in Vietnamese from the rear of the car.

Cars aren’t the only things to terrify my mother. My mother had called M’s attention to some ants milling around the base of her house outside. So far as we know, no ants had actually made it inside, but seemed content in their little ant hill suburbs. She said she was worried about termites, so M looked at them and tried to assure her that these ants were indeed ants, and not termites. She nodded and said that she knew they were ants, but still seemed to obsess over them. She had purchased some heavy duty termite toxic death in a can, and wanted M’s corroboration with her planned ant genocide. M wondered what exactly her deal was with these ants, and again reassured her that these ants weren’t doing any harm as they were.

“I know they are ants, but I heard ants can turn into termites!”

One: ants cannot turn into termites, unless biology has failed me. Two: her house appears to be made out of brick and concrete, not anything that is good to eat for termites. Then again, if an ant really could turn into termite, what’s to stop that horrible creature from eating brick, then concrete, then eventually chow down into human brains? Houston ain’t just good eatin’ for people.

Who can trust a world, in which ants can morph into termites and traffic dustups can devolve into quick-draw duels? Though I do not understand my mother, at all, I really wonder what it must be like to be her and to be terrified of everyone and everything, every day**. One of the first few nights I was there, I was relieved to be in a nice warm climate and a not-freezing house! My room was a bit stuffy, so I decided to crack open the window.

“BROOP BROOP BROOP BROOP!” “BROOP BROOP BROOP BROOP!” After my initial shock I realized I’d made a mistake, and ran down towards the alarm system, where my mom and brother were both running back and forth like scared chickens. “Sorry mom, I just opened the window! Sorry!” The alarm system automatically notified the police, my mom had to explain to a grumpy dispatcher what had happened, and I apologized profusely. I guess my mom is worried about crime in the area, and sure, South Houston doesn’t have the best reputation. But…she can’t even crack a window, to enjoy the nice weather? (Of course she probably also thinks this behavior is dangerous).

She also has barred and locked gates blocking entry to the outside doors, in addition to deadbolts and two other locks. Now, as my friend Krissy can attest, I am also kind of paranoid about safety things (for instance it is totally not safe of Krissy to take photos of herself while driving. and I don’t care if I am an e-nag. Hey, it’s in my blood). However, the things I am paranoid about and that my mother is paranoid about do not intersect. Mom is paranoid about burglars breaking in and stealing her early 1990’s TV set with bunny ears, or her collection of pirated Chinese soap opera teleseries dubbed into Vietnamese. Whereas my sister and I are paranoid about, oh, fire safety and potential barrier to exits.

I actually think that fire may be the #1 safety concern in Houston, but one that has astonishingly failed to become incorporated into my mother’s long list of terrors. I spent New Year’s Eve both enchanted by the many impressive fireworks displays going off around our neighborhood, and horrified. I mean, our directly-next-door neighbor was shooting off shit like roman candles and things, while standing directly beneath a tree. My mom said she was too scared to sleep on New Year’s Eves in Houston, because the fireworks sound a lot like gunfire. This is a valid fear in trigger-happy Texas. What is less than valid, from my perspective, is the fear that people will try and burgle your home during the New Year celebrations. Why then, of all times? Perhaps robbers will figure that the Houston PD will be too distracted dealing with people who caught themselves on fire, to be bothered chasing after them?

I never figured out her logic behind that, and I may never figure out her logic behind anything, ever. I do wonder if maybe next visit, the family activity should involve baking a big cake laced with Xanax, lounging around, and enjoying each others’ company – without fear.

* – In looking up all those Houston road-rage-turned-into-shooting articles to link – um, maybe Mom’s a little justified in her terror!

** – I just realized I have these two separate category tags, “Family” and “Crazy.” Perhaps I should just merge these.