so what do you want to do with your life?

I actually had my undergraduate supervisor ask me something to that effect when I was in my first year of college. We never did really come up with an answer, beyond drinking a lot of Alexander Keith's and seeing which of my circle of friends could make out with the most girls by the end of the semester (I won, but 1. my circle of friends was pretty small, and 2. looking back it doesn't seem like quite the object of pride it once did). History, as we all know, tends to repeat itself, and so it's probably not surprising that I now find myself posing the same question to my own students. Except that unlike the Reverend Doctor Hankey (yes, that's really his name and those were really his titles), I'll limit the scope to the next four months, and endeavor to keep it on a somewhat less philosophical plane. So what am I going to do?

Stop smoking. It's done. See that, everybody?

Start studying Vietnamese again, and push my limits the same way I keep exhorting my students to do.

Meditate. I gotta do it.

Be more present for my students than I was last year. And I don't just mean at Dragonfly on Friday night.

Laugh. A lot.

And this last one might not happen, but I'll put it out there just in case: work one night per week in a bar. So if bar owner wants to hire a bartender with limited skills beyond opening a bottle of beer, but capable of being charming in English, French, and Vietnamese, just let me know. I'll work for peanuts. Literally.

Signs of the times: poof!

For most of the nine years or so that I've been in Vietnam, I've lived in the same district of Hanoi in Quan Hai Ba Trung on the edge of Thong Nhat Park. I've always loved this neighborhood, I suppose precisely because it is such a neighborhood. In fact, perhaps village is a better way to describe it: there's the chua, the den and the dinh, there's the informal market that takes over Tue Tinh in the morning, there's pretty much any kind of street food that I could possibly want within a three block radius, and there's any number of miniscule cafes where I can sit under a cay da, have my morning coffee, and read the paper. And as I make my little circuits during the day, there are all my neighbors to nod to, ask after their health, complain about the heat or the rain or both.

One of the things that has characterized my experience of this little village has a sense of stability. The same little shops, the same xe om drivers on their respective corners, the bicycle repair men and the fruit sellers, the pho ga on Tue Tinh, and the pho bo on Trieu Viet Vuong. Granted, there were changes from time to time: shop fronts have been spiffed up, there was the fleeting appearance of an upscale pho shop, and an entire block of Nguyen Binh Khiem has been appropriated so the Interior Ministry cadres can park their new cars (which given their official salaries I can only assume they must be paying off over the course of several hundred years). But for the most part, things hadn't changed much since I first came to my little village in 2001. That is, until the "poofs" started happening last year .

Poof! chi Thu and her little convenience store disappeared, the shop front taken over by a store selling overpriced Buddhist paraphenalia, and chi Thu and her family supposedly relocated to a Khu do thi moi. Poof! anh Cuong, my barber for years, gone, apparently to begin a new career as a taxi driver. Poof! chi Hang, my pharmacist, disappeared, and her neighbors don't know where she went. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I know it's anecdotal, but it seems pretty clear the rate of change in the fabric of Hanoi's urban core is increasing. Inflation, skyrocketing land prices, and changing expectations are all conspiring to turn my village into something different. Into something that's less of a village. I don't ask after the health of the employees in the shop that sells the Buddhist paraphenalia, and they don't ask after mine. And when the space that used to be chi Hang's little pharmacy finally becomes a multistory office building, I'm willing to bet the security guards won't even let me inside to ask after the health of anyone. And that makes me a little sad. My village isn't gone yet, but I can feel it going.

thank you, Christelle, for making exploitation and inequality seem so damn sexy

"So, is there any luxury left that Vietnam can't afford?

The answer is, thank God, yes; luxury, by its very nature, is largely out of reach for many, and there will always be a higher ground in this busy and growing country. Meanwhile, members-only services for entertainment, dining, travel, and retail are flourishing. "You can now ask your personal shopper to choose you a selection from Cavalli and Omega's collections in HCMC," reveals Ms. Huynh Hong Hai, an elegant and and dynamic young lady who is one of the initiators of the "CEO Club" in Hanoi. "People who have a lot of money want to have exclusive treatments, clothing, parties, and networks." The nature of the relationship with luxury goods is evolving. Rather than staying undercover, the "new wealthy" are now at ease with their wealth: buying and wearing Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton from top to toe, driving around in a new Series 8 Mercedes, and opening 12 bottles of Dom Perignon in public. The wealthy want to enjoy what they have and live life to the full. "I want to spend my money now and buy what I feel like buying. I want to feel good and I am happy that I can enjoy this luxury in Vietnam," declares a sexy woman who works in Vietnamese television as she pays for three pairs of Sergio Rossi pumps."

from "Vietnam: Luxury Fever" by Christelle Thomas, East & West, Volume 5 (2008)

on writing my own obituary, oops, autobiography

Damn. This is a hard one. But I told folks I wouldn't ask them to do anything I wouldn't do myself, so I guess I've got to write something. But it's going to be hard to write something that doesn't sound like a c.v. I guess that's the "objective" version of myself. How to get at something more subjective, that captures something truer about myself? And do I really want to share that with everyone? Hell, even with a lover, we only reveal facets of ourselves (if we're lucky), and that only gradually. So I guess I'll just give you some facets. You can fill in the rest as we go through the next four months.

I was born in Vernon, British Columbia, Canada.

I'm the last of eleven children.

I was raised Catholic, and meant (by my father, at least) to go into the priesthood.

My years in high school were without a doubt the most miserable of my life.

My mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was sixteen, and died the summer I graduated from high school.

It is one of the greatest regrets in my life that I was not more present for her in the last months of her illness.

I left my home town as soon as I could, and go back as infrequently as I can.

I've attended six universities and gotten degrees from three.

I've travelled to forty-odd countries, lived in seven.

My dad died when I was thirty-three, and I'm deeply grateful that I could get to know him better in the last years of his life.

I've been married, and divorced.

No kids.

I've been living in Hanoi now for most of the last nine years.

I've tried to escape, but the place keeps drawing me back, and I'm okay with that now.

I miss my wife.

I love my job.

I smoke a few cigarettes a day, but know I shouldn't.

I'm Buddhist, whatever that means.

I'm human, and very much a work in progress.

And I'm okay with that now.

on reading the obituary of John Hope Franklin

I will admit to being an occasional reader of The Economist Magazine. Granted, it's one of neo-liberalism's most devoted cheerleaders, but their writers are neoliberals with brains, often with a sense of humor, and sometimes even with a heart. I see these qualities most clearly in the magazine's Obituaries section. So as a means of jump-starting a little reflection on who and where we are, I've asked each of us to choose an obituary from The Economist, and reflect a little on what it means to us.

I suppose my choice of John Hope Franklin probably wasn't too hard to predict. Quite aside from our shared profession - historian - his life to me seems in many ways exemplary. As a black man growing up in the American South in the early part of the century, Franklin would have overcome challenges that I can only vaguely imagine, and which underline the easy time I've had of my own life. Which is, I suppose, a polite way of saying the obituary makes me feel like a lazy, dissipated dilletante, standing with a glass of bia hoi in my hand as I stare into the abyss of my own irrelevance.

Or maybe I'm not completely irrelevant. I was gratified to read that Franklin never taught a course in "Black History," but rather showed how the history of America necessarily included the history of its black citizens, and vice versa. My own project as an historian does something similar, chipping away at a historiography still largely dominated by issues of politics and nation that fail to capture the lived experiences of the vast majority of Vietnam's citizens. At the same time, my project with this class is to integrate stories of inequality, exploitation, and environmental degredation within the conventional narrative of GDP growth and export targets, and indeed explore how these problems are not unfortunate byproducts, but rather necessary complements of this thing we call "Development."

Nevertheless, it was the obituary's final line that touched me most deeply. Perhaps it was Franklin's character from the start, or perhaps it was the process of historical exploration itself, but that last line makes it clear that Franklin was a man who combined a commitment to justice and equality, with empathy, patience, and compassion. Exemplary indeed.

getting inside the river

If you know anything about my adopted home, Hanoi, you'll understand that the title is a reference to the city's name: Ha, which means river, and Noi, which means in or inner. You might also hear echoes of a Buddhist koan that attempts to capture the simultaneous continuity and mutability of existence by asking whether, if you put your hand in a river twice, it's still the same river. Maybe it will make you think of the Tao Te Chinh, and its repeated use of the metaphor of water to evoke some of the silent power and pervasiveness of the Dao. Or maybe you'll have flashbacks to walking across a busy street in Hanoi and feeling the motorbikes and bicycles flow around you like water. Or maybe you won't think of anything, and just wish I'd stop being so damn pretentious and get on with my story.

If you managed to make it through the first paragraph and are still curious about what I might be on about, this blog is part of a class I'm leading that brings students from America and from Vietnam together not just to learn more about the process of change that Vietnam is undergoing, but also to nudge that process in more equitable, sustainable, and more humane directions. Every week, all of us in the class will be reflecting on what we're experiencing as part of the class, and in our lives more generally. Hanoi can be a difficult place to live, and despite being a supposed poster child for Washington Consensus-style "Development" (or perhaps because of it), the rapid economic growth that Vietnam is undergoing is far from a uniformly happy story. This blog, then, is part of a simultaneously individual and cooperative exploration of the good, the bad, and the indifferent that is Vietnam today.