Heartbreak in Indo-China

I moved through Indo-China last month with Jon Swain’s River of Time as a heartbreaking companion. Walking along the trash-filled streets of Phenom Penn, the never-ceasing noise of the 4 million motorcycles in Saigon, the eroded banks of the Mekong, I was pained to think these were the places of gentleness and beauty before the war. Now, crassness and penury dominate over any other characteristic.

But greater than my sorrow is my amazement at how quickly people have rebuilt their lives in a mere 35 years. In American efforts to obliterate the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Vietcong, more bombs were dropped on Laos (a country smaller than Texas) than during all of WWII. Today there are no traces of the flattened landscape (but unexploded landmines wouldn't be cleared until 2050 at the current rate). Saigon’s streets after streets of food vendors make it hard to believe it was anything but a city of people eating pho three times a day when it was actually a fashion show for the latest American and Chinese military gadgets not so long ago. An estimated 5 million Vietnamese died during the 16-year conflict, but its population jumped from 55 to 80 million after the war. How resilient people are, to have borne the unbearable and multiplied.

It’s not long (a few minutes) until I am broken out of my reverie as the next tuk-tuk driver or handicraft seller chases me down. I wonder if it embarrasses them as much as it does me that they are begging from me: a Chinese American, whose governments did them such atrocities. Women whose parched skins and hunched backs, making them look 100 years old, hold outstretched skin and bones to each passing tourist. Have we: the West, the East, driven them not only to their graves and destitution, but also robbed them of their dignity and gentleness? Are they as outraged as I am that they now have to beg from their perpetrators?

My sorrows come together in Cambodia as nowhere else. I watch the old, fat, white men with their arms around the local girls. And I wonder if they also mourn their exploitation beneath all the makeup that does not hide their youth. Cambodia has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in SE Asia and a prostitution ring so cheap it is drawing customers away from Bangkok. This is its happy ending after centuries of occupations by the Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, Americans. No concrete statistics could be taken, but it’s estimated that of its 5 million population pre-war, under a million were killed or wounded in the Vietnam War. 2 million more were tortured, starved, or worked to death by its own people: the Khmer Rouge. But its population stands at 8 million now with nearly no old people.

Do Cambodians mourn their bloodied past, impoverished present, and bleak future as I do? Do they demand justice and truth about why they suffered? Or are they too tired from just trying to survive the present? Is the war, one generation separated, already too far back to be of concern today? If so, perhaps that is a greater tragedy: to forget not only trivializes the dead but ensures that the blood baths, ideological wars will happen again and again.

Determinism

I was talking with a Tibetan girl in Beijing. She is graduating from the Beijing Forestry University, a first-tier university that many Beijingers cannot get into. She is the only Tibetan in the Computer Sci Dept. and among the dozen in the entire university of 10,000+. I cannot help but profess how impressed I was: she is studying at a top national university as a minority in her second language. Being a well-manned youth, she says she is even more impressed with me as I'm a Chinese studying at an internationally famous university in America. I tell her that it is much, much more difficult for a Tibetan Chinese to move from west to east China than for a Han Chinese to move from China's east coast to America. But she has by no means 'made it'. Of all the Tibetans I know, only a half dozen attended university in Beijing, and they are all back in their home province as racist, discriminatory laws limiting rural-urban mobility are strictly enforced in China.

I used to denounce determinism, arguing that perseverance, opportunities, luck play more important roles in where we end up in life. Just look at me, I live a completely different life in the US than I would have in China; and it all began with an unexpected turn of events in Singapore. How can I even entertain the thought of a life pre-determined!

But now I'm not so sure if I'm the poster child for counter-determinism. My cousins who grew up in Beijing now work in Chinese, British, French investment banks. My childhood friends are paving their way towards bright careers. It may be true that my personality, worldview, ideals would have been drastically different had I remained in China, but I would've continued to be educated, urban, middle-class just as my parents and grandparents were.

Traveling in SE Asia now I contemplate how my life would look as a 24 year old female born elsewhere (based on facts, I'm not this imaginative). In Laos, I married at 16 and am chasing my four children while pregnant with my fifth, but I do have time to chase after them as my husband is working in our small field and I don't have much to look after in the house since we don't even have beds. In Cambodia, I witnessed the massacre of my 4 brothers by the Khmer Rouge. And when the killings finally ended, my remaining 10 siblings starved as a human-induced famine swept over the country. In Vietnam, I lost both my parents to the war. Looking at old propaganda posters showing mothers carrying a rifle in one hand and a baby in the other, I wonder whether my mother was affected by those images while carrying me.

Instead, I am a 24 year old born in Beijing, lived in New York, traveled in Paris. I am free of family obligations, unaffected by social stigma, so independent that it worries my parents. My agonies include whether to study a masters or a PhD, to do it at Columbia or Cambridge.

(It's neither guilt nor blessing-counting that is prompting me to write this, which I never find to be productive emotions. Moreover, the stress and depressions we encounter in the West are very real and terrifying things. Like the others, this post is simply my effort to remember what I see and feel.)

Perhaps our lives are more like Indian ragas: each individual is allowed much innovation and flexibility in how she plays the notes, but the scale is fixed.