Pictures of Vietnam

To write about Vietnam seems, at first, to be an impossibility. They've said it all, haven't they? A million travel blogs, novels, war correspondents? Every metaphor is exhausted, every photograph is taken, whether that was napalmed children running along a road in Tay Ninh Province in 1972, or a British Instagrammer posing in front of the setting sun over the spires of Ha Long Bay in 2019. #wanderlust.

And so, before I went to Vietnam, I had in my mind a set of images, the ones everyone who travels a lot has – the rice farmers in conical hats, the Haussmannized boulevards lined with little cafes serving syrupy sweet coffee, along with the older photos, the burning monks and the choppers on Saigon rooftops.

And yet what was most conspicuous was the prioritization of those more recent photos over the older ones, the absence of the history that has etched the name “Vietnam” in the American imagination. There are traces everywhere – the memorials to the fact that this was once the village of My Lai, that this was where the French came a cropper at Dien Bien Phu, the prison cells at Hanoi's Hoa Lo, with captions about the “serenity” of downed American fighter pilots who were held there (including photos of a visit by the late douchebag John McCain), a concrete bunker in the middle of a rice paddy somewhere near Da Nang, the gaps in the French-built cantilevers of the Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi, the occasional dusty case in an old museum captioned with the Politburo verbiage of another era (“The poison of reactionary culture of US-Quisling troops”), the mention that a temple had been a Viet Cong Hospital, the sight of an occasional Agent Orange victim.

But ultimately these are vague traces, hidden behind the present, like a painting painted over.

One goes to the imperial citadel of Hue, or rather, what's left of it after the bombing of the city as part of the Tet Offensive, and most of what you see are reconstructions resembling a Disney version of the Nguyen Dynasty, with barely a word as to their destruction. Or to the fact that to a generation of Westerners, their main knowledge of Hue came from the last scene of Full Metal Jacket, Matthew Modine belting out the Mickey Mouse Club theme as he marches through the burning city.

And when the remnants are made apparent, they are transformed into other tourist attractions, more things to see, more moments of sublimity for the shutter-happy traveler. You go to the Hanoi Hilton as part of the standard things-to-do-in-Hanoi list. Whole tourist shops are dedicated to propaganda posters.

So I spent a bare minimum of time encountering the recent past. What was presented to me was the mythic past, the trading city of Hoi An, old Confucian temples, the self-conscious romance ingrained in the French colonial architecture, the folkways of Hmong villagers on display in Sa Pa. The past that is presented with enough distance that the present can approach it without apprehension.

And as for the present, I can't hate. I can think of few better ways to enjoy the dusk than to sit by the Hoan Kiem Lake with a glass of bia hoi and a plate of sauteed clams.

Or any of the other moments of loveliness and transcendence – the rainfall on ancient cedars, plates of pigeons nested in fresh herbs, an old cannon fort on top of an island, crumbling concrete overlooking a crumbling limestone landscape, eating at by the relentless interaction of acid and base, whispering palms on beachsides, the delight of local hooch served in a reused water bottle, sliced green figs and starfruit, the pattern of the sun through the brise-soleil, the crusty old waiter who only addressed me in French – “l'addition, monsieur” – and the woman singing a Vietnamese-language cover of France Gall's “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son,” the almost certainly false presumption that a gorgeous Vietnamese woman getting into a taxi on a Friday night in Hanoi was smiling at me.

I travel for two reasons: the first is the understanding.

There's the Gauguin painting of Tahitian natives that I always keep in mind, undoubtedly in my mind my favorite Gauguin, possibly the strangest of his paintings, with the cryptic phrase, equally cryptically capitalized and punctuated, written in the upper left-hand corner:

D'où Venons Nous

Que Sommes Nous

Où Allons Nous

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

To travel is to position oneself in the grand arc of history, geological, biological, anthropological, sociological, psychological. Not to answer the question, but to extend one's understanding of the question itself.

But the second reason is also embedded in the painting, in the sheer sensuous delight of it.

That second reason is what I found in Vietnam, as cliché as it might be. And the knowledge that memory, as cursed as it can be, is the one thing the bastards can't take from me. I can always spend my time among the arabesques of my past, point to point, city to city, mountain to mountain, sea to sea. In 20 years' time, I might be keeping out the acid rain, three months' behind on my rent, holes in my shoes in a city threatened by the rising tide. But I'll have that bia hoi and those clams.

On one of my last days in the country, I climbed to the top of a hill on Cat Ba Island, only to find my intended location, an old cannon fort, closed. “Hey,” some French tourists called at me, “go up that path instead.”

I climbed up a rough trail, past the graves of the workmen who built it, to a new transmitter station embedded in the concrete of part of the old fort, a relic of the colonial era, with a view to the hundreds of tiny limestone spires below, the boats. I sat alone with the dust and the sun, amid the ruins for nearly an hour, not wanting to leave for anything in the world.

The two pictures intersected, old and new. And somewhere in my mind I knew it.