Converse- Ha Noi to Vinh Long

"Diamond life, lover boy.
We move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy"- Sade

There's no conflict tougher to tackle than that of identity. In Ha Noi, I feel my mind, my body, my emotions screaming at once. There was no euphoria stage created by being somewhere different for me because it's different but on some level it's an uneasy familiar.

My host mother is making us necklaces and purses using beads. My host brothers took us out on motorbikes to get cds and cake. And we get too many options, we get fed way too much. So the kindness does exist but the comfort level does not.

The city is very reckless, very loud, like any industrializing city but sometimes I feel it doesn't take a breath to consider people. When I'm moving I don't always take time out to consider people either, so I see part of myself in the city.

Who would've thought I would've enjoyed a place like Bushbuckrigde but that Ha Noi would be hard. Because everyday I feel like the government silences the people and often what we learn and how we learn it makes me feel silenced. I'm becoming as angry as this city is with its overcrowded buses and stoic policeman wearing communist colors.

I miss a few things, music- ala Jay Z, chocolate, and poetry writing (even when I consistently make life and love complicated enough for poetry). I'm recognizing a lot in myself and I'm seeing a lot of my fire if Ha Noi shows me nothing else. And sometimes that anger, that fire, spurs creativity, which I'm also thankful for. It certainly doesn't hurt the poetry any.

I'm looking forward to Brazil and the rainbow of races and faces we'll see there. Enduring through Ha Noi, the noise and often the over-tired and sometimes brash people-- in a way it gives me tough skin but it also makes me think and question everything, as an anthropologist should.

I went to visit the family in the rural south in Vinh Long. Whenever I start to lose confidence in a place, I'm always struck by how beautiful and full of life children are. There's not much in Vinh Long, as far as industrialization and education-- there are people still fighting through poverty, and in my part of the village, only the family supported by my parents back in the U.S. seem to be well off. Life there ten years ago and life there today is relatively the same.

Same lake, same ponds, same toilets, the same geniune beautiful people. Because most of the families there have been through poverty, extreme poverty the period after war, they give everything, from the their bedrooms to shirts off their backs to you- after the brash attitude of Ha Noi- it's good to be reminded of Vinh Long and the calm and beauty and nature that exists in globalizing world of competition and chaos.

But as much as I romanticize the place, it has its struggles and limitations. The biggest being whether the children will live a better life than their parents or whether the same cycle of rural oppresion will continue in Viet Nam. Educational opportunities are few and far in between for some of the most intelligent kids-- them not reaching their potential is heartbreaking.

An example: If there are two material items I can't live without, it's shoes and chocolate. And so my sister (ala my cousin, but in Viet Nam everyone is a sister or brother), sees me wearing my converse allstars and she says her company makes them. In the U.S. they're sometimes priced over $100, in Viet Nam, workers such as she make $100 a month.

First and foremost, it shows my undeniable privilege, but secondly, it also shows the lack of privilege people from Vinh Long are afforded. I hope for the best for the children because they always put a smile on my face but right Viet Nam seems to be in tough spot.

The stratification between rich and poor is growing. Viet Nam is struggling between democracy and retaining the communist control of its people. And it's modernizing but it seems it doesn't know how because it's leaving a lot of people behind while simultaneously making a lot of people lose their humanity in exchange for success.