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.