Viet Nam va Paul Salopek

"I would be you, you would be me,
we would be one, we would be just fine,
the ice caps wouldn't be melting
and neither would I." -Robin Thicke

Trying to find inspiration is like trying to find the one and only needle in the haystack. Things are so banal that the needle catches you (me) off guard and I want to leap. Two months until I leave here and leave behind the needle that I didn't quite polish. College, the here and now is odd, before we enter the world and leave behind all the hay that was supposed to be polished. We leave behind instead the kids who have confusingly helped us polish our child-like selves before we enter the jungle of swords and machetes while we're also helping them polish their needles and thicken their skin so that such swords don't cut so deep. I have two months to polish a little more before I leave a spot that's wondering and vulnerable but then again one can't have stories if every story has closure and when the scar cuts a little bit-- she'll know not to enter those parts of the jungles again, maybe. I am the one leaving with Tabula Rosa instead of beginning what can't be finished.

It is about fear and respect. Once someone respects someone else, she works to have everything stay as is because one step in any direction and it's too risky. It is banal. It is difficult. It is about nostalgia-- all better than risk. So I sin and buy shoes I can't afford-- a college kid like me can't afford anything, but must, in a sense, afford to keep up with appearances and keep the perception that others have of me as a positive one that they're comfortable with.
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I'm thinking about Viet Nam because it's one of those days when I realize I don't ever think about Viet Nam even when I am an exact replica of my grandmothers.

Vietnamese flutes, Vietnamese guitars, Vietnamese trombones and trumpets tell the stories of Vietnamese nostalgia and loneliness. The songs written during that period-- from the perspective of boys in the jungle-- or their lovely girlfriends wearing the ao dia at home, the songs of longing, departing, and realization-- on one the hand the emotion and pain in them is meditative, innocent and beautiful... on the other hand beauty comes from loss (of both love and war) and blood (of your brother and your brothers fighting on the other side). I have a love for sad love songs from Viet Nam. When I was young, I was baby-sat by my grandmother and she would listen to Che Linh almost every day and she'd sing karaoke to those little video cassettes. It's like country music in America but more bluesy-- more jazzy... more soul. Not just the war period, but I love the classic nostalgic, calmly- softly- meditatively sung songs in general, they sing a lot about winter and fall but it's always hot. They sing a lot of duets with indirect conversations through song, they let the power of the instruments fill in the words that are missing.

My mother taught herself how to read and write with song lyrics through karaoke when the nation was ravished back then. In the 70s, food was the only priority. The villagers would gather near a big screen to see movies or have karaoke to de-stress. She taught herself Vietnamese, over here she taught herself English. Those songs she listened to in the late 70s and 80s, I listen to today.

Because one day, she (I) wakes up says she (I) doesn't want to be draped in the Vietnamese and African skin that's like a tent and can fly away at any given second. It leaves what really is just lack of identity or a facade of a person. But she (I) first has to create an understanding of what that means to her (me). The 'her' being me but also all the other hers over here who are illiterate in Vietnamese and can't quite remember the last time someone said her name correctly was without her first giving them the pronunciation... only to have them politely, curiously, but very annoying and inevitably... sound foolish. And the shes who don't have a connection to any south Vietnamese residing here because it simply doesn't work, there is no similarities- in lifestyle or philosophy.

And I'm illiterate, I can write and read the language probably as well as a 5 year-old... I speak it fine, I sound more like a girl in the polite language, if not for a little hardness of the tongue and trace of the English accent I have when I speak it because something's got to give and I have no accent speaking English.

But the language of love and lost and music has always been relateable and a force that raises my conscientiousness from time to time. I love soulful African American prose and poetry that evoke the state of being or the understanding of history... and I love the Vietnamese that speaks to Nostalgia.

It's a vain attempt but still intensely innate sense of searching for identity.

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Third World Order

Revelation, revolution
Armageddon
Pandemonium.

Fuck this silence, what a nuisance
Ticking fury
Start the mafia.

He’s the vice, scorch like ice
White white white
Heinous mugger

Façade of riches, fake like wishes
Pale drab dry
Lacking texture.

We the queens, rasta dreams
Shapely lips,
Drenched with savor.

We superior, fervent warriors
Seizing back
All that’s ours.