"There was all these things that I don't think I remember..."
As I've now been in Vietnam for a quarter of a century, I should probably post a few pieces about those early days (for me), starting with answering a question I get asked all the time....
“WHY DID YOU COME TO LIVE IN VIETNAM IN THE FIRST PLACE?”
I have a good friend in Saigon, who likes to say ‘I didn’t choose Vietnam. Vietnam chose me’, as if ‘it’ – the life he has lived here – was meant to be. It’s a good line that works for him, maybe because he’s Guatemalan and believes in destiny? Whenever I am with him and I hear him roll it out, whoever asks the question (“Why did you choose to come and live in Vietnam?”) always seems satisfied. If you looked at the evidence, yes, “chance” was “apparently” involved (a random job offer came his way). But he believes (and people believe him) that Vietnam somehow played a part in drawing him here. And the fact he loves his life here so much seems to back him up.
But personally, I like to give happenstance all the credit. And maybe ‘cos I can’t help it, when the question gets thrown my way, I like to whistle – one of those sliding old-timer whistles, you know, the kind of whistle that says: ‘Oh boy – that happened so long ago, I wasn’t even born1 – how could I even remember why?’
And I really can’t. But I do remember where I was, and who I was with, when I edged toward making what turned out to be a pretty significant decision considering I am still here 25 years after arriving on November 19, 1999….
I was sitting in the living room of my buddy Alan’s shared flat in Donnybrook, Dublin. This infamous abode had a deceptive stately address – Belmont Avenue – but don’t be fooled. It was very ‘Withnail and I’ in its shabby aesthetics and squalid essence, if you know what I mean. Nonetheless, let’s go back there, all the way back to January, 1999 as a pivotal scene in the story of my life is about to occur. It’s a scene that I have replayed in my head many times over – this is what we try to convince ourselves is a memory, which means I can be sure of at least two “facts”: 1) It was dark and dismal outside; 2) There are only two people in the flat. One is me – Connla Stokes (I am very possibly looking rosy-cheeked, after eating most of a free range chicken roasted with 40 cloves of garlic, a plate of spuds and all the trimmings, and quaffing a glass of fine plonk or two in my family homestead around the corner, and therefore in good spirits). The other character is Alan P. Brennan (Let’s say he is wearing a beanie and looking a bit pasty after eating his third GoodFellas pepperoni pizza of the weekend and warming himself by the fire). From here I must stitch together a scene based on dubious memories but I’m going to say it’s highly likely we have each opened a can of beer and at some stage, we get around to discussing what the hell we should do with our indistinct arts degrees. It’s Al – sparking to life with some alcohol now in the system – who throws it out there. Could we go to Asia and teach English? We’d already ‘gone west’ to San Francisco in ‘97, and we’d both kicked around Europe more than a few times, so I suppose we were simply looking for uncharted (by us) territories to explore. It must have seemed like a promising possibility because I can ‘clearly’ and ‘vividly’ recall that Al started to whisper (seductively) while poking the fire: “Shanghai, buddy, Shanghai… It’s the Paris of the East! The pearl of the Orient!”
Now it’s safe to say that neither of us knew anything much about Shanghai – our only frame of reference for the city? The opening scenes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Why did Shanghai fall in and out of contention? I have no clue – perhaps because we did a few minutes research (not sure how we could have done this in 1999 but we might have asked a human being that knew someone who lived there) and discovered the swinging 20’s had lost momentum sometime ago. For whatever reason, Shanghai fell from our thoughts and when we next discussed moving to Asia, Vietnam had become a bolter … but how?
Now, the thing is Al claims he knows how it all came to pass – he claims that one of us held open an atlas with a map of Asia or spun a globe and the other one of us lobbed a blob of Blu-Tack – the idea being, wherever it landed, that’s where we would go. That seems (to me) a little too like a scene from a film I have watched starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall wondering where in the world they should elope to … but Al swears by it (Note: he’s not exactly Johnny Mnemonic), so fuck it, let’s say it’s true. Let’s say neither of us ‘chose Vietnam’. Let’s just come clean and say the Blu-Tack did.
Which brings me to the bonus question – why did I go to Hanoi (where I lived for 12.5 years), not Ho Chi Minh City (where I have now lived for 12.5 years)?
Well that’s another decision we didn’t make. It happened later, in the summer of ‘99. The sun had returned to Dublin and plans to move to Vietnam were afoot. Before quitting my job as a bookseller, I had even bought The Rough Guide to Vietnam. We were in the process of getting some token teaching courses under our belt, you know, so we were ‘qualified’ to teach Hiberno-English to the world at large, when I got a postcard, written by our pal Cian Rice and dispatched from the Saigon Post Office. He'd been backpacking through Vietnam and had come to the conclusion: ‘You can’t beat the ‘Nam.’ Was he encouraging us, or reassuring us? By then I think me and Al had sent out the press release and told everyone where we planned to go. So all that we had to do was book a ticket. As far as I recall we hadn’t discussed whether we’d fly to Hanoi or Saigon, so in a travel agency on Dublin’s Exchequer Street, we sat back and let someone else flip the coin and call it. I feel like we should play that scene in slow motion – me and Al, mouths agog, minds blank, shoulders set to shrug, staring at a frizzy-haired female travel agent, who has just asked us which city we wanted to fly into, and then, sensing we need a nudge, and assuming we are to be backpackers, she — the travel agent who had never been east of Greece – says: “Well, normally people go to Hanoi and then travel south.” Weirdly, we didn’t contest (Al’s specialty), or even confer (Connla’s forte), and duly we booked two one-way tickets to Hanoi (via Bangkok). And so, the die had been cast and we walked out into the sunshine with two one-way tickets to Hanoi. There could have been (if we were so inclined) a litany of things we might have done that day to better prepare ourselves for moving to another continent that we had no clue about but I’m guessing, well, if we were on Exchequer Street, we most probably shuffled up to Grogan’s and had a pint or two, utterly clueless about what would happen next. But that I suppose was the goal all along, to go somewhere and “start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for [us]”2. And even though I have now confessed that the idea of moving to Vietnam was an act of complete happenstance, and choosing Hanoi over Ho Chi Minh City was left in the hands of a travel agent, when I look back now and think about it all, I tend to shrug and hear that old John Prine song playing in my head, you know, the one that goes: “Today I walked down the street I use to wander. Yeah, shook my head, and I made myself a bet. There was all these things that I don't think I remember. Hey, how lucky can one man get…
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Credit: Bob Dylan
From Laurie Lee’s ‘As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning”: “I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.