Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Red flags were plastered and hung everywhere around the train station…
I’d come as a flashpacker, heading out on the Reunification Express line, train
#SE4, from Da Nang to Hue.
The train ride was sold as beautiful, and it was, aesthetically; known as one of the world’s most scenic, jaw-dropping train routes, it lived up to its reputation.
Train tracks snaked through lush jungle, and gazing out the window, I peered out at the tropical, verdant mountains, rugged streams, and sinuous valleys of the Hai Van Pass.
Straddling the pass were the lapping waves of the South China Sea, their undulating, yale blue waters bubbling and foaming into squiggly shores of eroding rock and bronze sand.
Aside from spotting a gun tower, it was generally hard to fathom that a place as picturesque and serene was once a conflict zone, a place of unspeakable barbarity, carnage.
Communism…
The train itself was more what I would have expected. It was run-down, utilitarian.
My train seat was hard, though it was sold as the soft option. Sitting in it numbed my lower back, legs and ass.
A tiny cockroach scurried by my feet. I wondered, that if sentient, would the cockroach be communist or anti-communist... I couldn’t see it being apathetic or apolitical. Not after 300 million spins around the sun…
Cigarette smoke wafted its way through the carriage. A middle-aged Viet in high-riding blue jeans, a white “same same” t-shirt and shiny leather shoes poked his head into the space between the cars, coffin nail dangling from his lips.
Disinterested rail employees in blue uniforms sold snacks and water, and without any hint of irony, a hammer and sickle were embroidered on their carts’
moneybags.
One train employee sat in the seat next to me for a time, watching a historical drama set in Nguyen Dynasty, on his phone, without earphones…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The scenic surroundings gave way to urban sprawl as the train arrived in Hue city.
Seeing the red star flags, hammer and sickles, portraits of “Uncle Ho” everywhere had me thinking communism, thinking in confabulations, perhaps due to my indoctrination as a child in the US school system of the 1980s.
But, in fact, in 2020, I’d discovered through observation, conversations with locals and browsing online that Vietnam is probably the most capitalist place in the world…
Everything is to be sold. Anything can be bought.
Human organs. Human beings included, if you have the right connections.
Regulations, laws take a backseat to cash.
There are little to no environmental regulations, at least that are enforced.
Garbage, leaves, plastics are burned on sidewalks, in front and backyards of houses, apartments…
The traffic, roads are Darwinian, more of a jungle than anything in the Mekong.
There’s little to no social safety net. It’s every man, woman and child for themselves.
Government cash flow flows into a super small, select few. The rest of the masses are left to fight for scraps.
If not for the strict censorship, monitoring of media and draconian anti-drug, anti-porn, and anti-vice laws, Vietnam would be a libertarian utopia.
This Vietnam, the Vietnam of today, is communist in name, power structure, and superstructure only...
I’d come to this communist turned capitalist utopia as a solo traveler, trekking through the center of Vietnam, to Hoi An, Da Nang, and, finally, Hue.
Unlike us Americans, the Vietnam War, or, as the Vietnamese refer to it, “The American War” isn’t much on the minds of the local people.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Unlike America, where we still discuss, pain over it, refer to unwinnable conflicts, quagmires, warzones, and general dumbfuck foreign policy as “this or that Vietnam.”
Unlike America, the Vietnamese don’t think much of it, aside from learning about their victory over the Americans in schools.
Aside from that, they don’t spare a second (or first) thought when walking or riding their motorbikes by a decommissioned M-46 towed field gun, or a captured US warplane or chinook helicopter with its belly, its ballast cemented into the pavement out in front of a government building or museum…
I’d grown up in the 1980s, in the long shadow of the war, when Vietnam, the war there, remained etched into America’s recent memory.
It was a stigma, a trauma.
A festering, open wound.
As a nation, we had collective PTSD.
There were those I knew, personally, who’d returned from the front lines, and I’d heard their stories...
Like an uncle of mine who’d served, taken a bullet in the ankle, was honorably discharged.
Every single night since the war, for years afterwards, he’d been plagued by night terrors. Vivid dreams.
Him back in the green, trudging through the caws, echoes and marshes of boobytrapped jungle, his friend, Derrick, in tripwire; the whoosh of a bamboo whip; the young marine writhing and twisting on the spikes, his eyebrows upcurved, dark blood curdled in his mouth.
My uncle, in his dreams, would hear those wretched gurgling murmurs Derrick uttered, as mortars clapped and colored the sky.
Every night he’d see Derrick’s face in a deathmask.
Every day, my uncle’s limp, tottering gait served as a reminder.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer He’d taken to smoking reefer to calm his nerves. He and my dad, staying up late into the night, watching baseball, puffing joints and laughing.
It was the only time he was happy, my uncle, when he was stoned enough to forget…
And there were those I saw but didn’t know, who’d returned from the war.
The homeless vets.
My neighborhood was dotted w/several homeless veterans, sleeping rough, shellshocked, unable to function in society.
I’d see them on the street, faces blanched, cracked eyes and 1000-yard stares.
Cardboard signs asking for money and food.
Jingling Styrofoam coffee cups full of loose change.
American flags hanging from their shopping carts…
There was a constant stream of movies I’d seen on cable, late at night.
Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Rambo.
Assorted B-movies featuring yellow people, commies, being shot or blown to commie bits by someone w/a mullet or Chuck Norris or someone resembling Chuck Norris or someone resembling someone resembling Chuck Norris.
And I’d watched documentaries, news footage in grainy color, bloody bodies hurried away on stretchers, that little Vietnamese girl napalm victim, her ghastly gesticulations and nudity, and helicopter crashes, John McCain, prisoners of war in tiger cages, carpet-bombing planes and ejaculating flamethrowers, buildings aflame, charred thatched roof villages, bullet-riddled, burning and burned bodies, amputees.
That was my idea of Vietnam. A warzone, a panoply of destruction, a hot rainy jungle hell of death.
Not my superlative vacation destination…
And that was my idea of communists, communism.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Warfare, alongside starvation, bread lines, death. Siberia. Nukes. Steely grimacing vodka people in furry hats.
Boat people. Boat people in Miami. Bay of Pigs. Schoolchildren ducking under desks. Gorby and that big birthmark on his head. The Berlin Wall. Crises.
Yellow people in jungles, jumping from trees, armed with long knives, stabbing and slashing Americans. Female snipers shooting at Matthew Modine, Animal Mother and Cowboy.
A world of shit…
Communism was the Evil Empire, everything that was evil.
As a child, growing up in the last decade of the Cold War, I’d learned to hate everything communist.
(Being called a “commie” in school was even worse than being called a “faggot.”) The fucking commies wanted to fucking nuke us, and wanted to do other horrible things to me, everyone I knew. What those horrible things exactly were, I didn’t clearly know. But I did know they were horrible...
However, eventually, communism, its fiscal methodology, lost. Capitalism won.
Colonel Sanders turning out to be America’s finest commander.
America’s bankers and corporations finishing off the mission in Vietnam, decades later…
The Cold War was won. The Iron Block fell. The USSR collapsed. China became mercantilist. Laos, while still authoritarian, opened to business. Cuba is slowly opening.
Only North Korea remains true red communist, Stalinist, and even it’s got its own thriving underground commerce, markets, and may one day follow the PRC into mercantilism…
Although I’d been in Asia awhile, traveled extensively throughout the continent, because of the mental image I had of Vietnam, because of the war, communism, I’d always had an aversion to visiting.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Even though a few friends, coworkers had loved traveling in Vietnam, praised and recommended it highly, I still couldn’t bring myself to go.
I felt guilty, shitty. About us inflicting so much death. I especially felt ashamed after learning about “Agent Orange,” and how that affected, and continues to affect, veterans and locals alike.
Then on a trip to Australia, I had an unavoidable connecting flight that was delayed, making it necessary for me to spend 48 hours in Saigon, or, as it’s now known: “Ho Chi Min City.”
Contrary to my expectations, preconceived notions, learned wariness, I loved it!
The buildings. The cavalcades, waves of motorbikes. The electric, buzzing and chaotic streets. The freshest fruits, vegetables; the banh mi, pho noodles and yummiest milk coffee concoctions I’d ever tasted.
(Ever had an egg coffee? Salty coffee? Or coconut coffee? Well, dear reader, you should!)
I was taken aback by how friendly, talkative, and welcoming the people were.
How wired the city was. Every little café, corner restaurant, mom and pop noodle spot having a WIFI router, the password posted on the wall or table. The net speedy too.
I’d even met and had sex with a tour guide. A Vietnamese girl. Never could I imagine that I would have, technically, had sex with a communist, had sex with a member of the communist party. But I did.
(And it was glorious!)
Vietnam certainly was, still is, as of this writing, a developing country, with nagging issues like wealth inequality, traffic safety, pollution, corruption.
But, to me, an outsider, a casual observer, a dilettante, Vietnam, with its large young population, looks to be on the verge of- something.
What, I don’t profess to know, exactly. But it is something…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I’d later happily visit Hanoi and Phu Quoc, finding friendly faces, culture everywhere, like the fabulously well-preserved temples and fascinating traditions, such as the elaborate rituals, celebrations, colorful robes, dances of ancestor worshipping ceremonies and holidays.
And I’d had fun strolling the night markets, which were bathed in sweet aromas of fruits, seafood, coconut pancakes, local snacks, and the super fragrant, ubiquitous sandalwood incense burned nightly in hopes of conjuring good luck.
(Fortunately for Vietnam, unlike Cambodia or China, there wasn’t anything akin to the Khmer Rouge or Cultural Revolution, and many time-honored cultural traditions remain intact…)
As for the “American War,” while there, it wasn’t on my mind a lot.
Sure, in museums I’d seen relics, fragments of bombs, landmines, torn bloodstained clothing, radios, walkie-talkies, journals, ledgers used by the communists, to coordinate the war effort and guns and knives used by Viet Cong to kill determinate and indeterminate numbers of French, Americans, Koreans, assorted enemies, “soldiers of the puppet government,” but these displays about the
“American War” mostly made me sigh, shake my head in dismay.
(It had been educational, enlightening, though, to see the war from their eyes, their perspective.)
((To them, as was stated in a video display, a “martyr’s epilogue,” spoken by a Vietnamese commander, a battle-hardened, gravelly voiced communist, with twin tufts of scraggly coal black hair and a fierce face, who, forehead furrowed in deep folds, emphatically proclaimed the war as “their American Revolution.”) (((It was a narrative I’d not heard before, their side; it was a story that, perhaps, should be told in American schools, not because it was right or wrong, but because they had their reasons for fighting, and as Americans, as participants in that war, we should, from an epistemological perspective, be aware of it…))) However informative, nothing I saw affected me, that much, on a personal, emotional level.
Until Hue.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Hue had one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
During the “Tet” offensive, in the small hours of the night, a fierce ambush was launched by the North Vietnamese communists and their affiliates.
The communists captured the city, but after a protracted battle, featuring urban warfare, house to house combat, heavy street gun battles and sniper fire, the Americans won back control of Hue, their victory declared in an emotional flag raising ceremony, hoisting Old Glory in front of the Citadel…
It dawned on me that visiting Hue, for someone a generation or two ahead of me, would be sort of like visiting Fallujah, for anyone in my generation…
As for the city, the Hue of today, it’s amazing, aside from trivial developing world annoyances like a handful of obnoxious touts, the worst being motorcycle taxi drivers constantly passing by and barking “marijuana, marijuana, lady, lady, boom boom.”
(A common Hue scam where an unwitting foreigner will try to buy weed or a hooker and find himself arrested, having to bribe his way out of jail. The motorcycle taxi driver and corrupt police working in tandem.) And, of course, the traffic safety issues, literally taking your life into your feet anytime you crossed the road, attempting to dodge the mobs of motorbikes streaming by like missiles, or navigating the sidewalks full of street vendors, construction rubble, large piles of dirt, debris fires, and garbage.
Developing world stuff, basically.
Other than that, the city was highly enjoyable, gorgeous, the riverside area, specifically, when lit neon at night.
All along the Perfume River were roistering young people from the colleges nearby, and many buildings built in art deco architecture, painted pastel.
My personal favorite landmark had to be the Saigon Morin Hotel, with its elegant French colonial architecture, rectangular face of quintuple rows of French doors and small glass pane grids, wooden-framed windows, and wrought iron balcony railings.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer True architectural eye candy.
And one must traverse the visually dazzling remains of the Imperial City, see its pavilions, gates, eaves, frescoes, gardens, and stone bridges, as well as the nearby emperors’ elaborate tombs, the various towering pagodas, and one must ride or drive around the surrounding countryside, gander at the sprawling green jungle hills in the distance, which were magnificently photogenic…
But I couldn’t get past the battle there.
Thinking of those soldiers, young bucks, 18, 19, 20-year-olds, thrown into that situation, them running in the muck, gunning “commie” motherfuckers down and themselves falling bloody to the earth in hailstorms of bullets, exploding in improvised bombs and wanton mortar fire, being picked off by snipers in the same very streets I walked as a tourist.
So many people, just so many fucking people, had died there.
There were over 1000 Americans dead or wounded.
Not to mention the ARVN, its over 2000 dead or wounded, and the occupying NVA, VC massacres of civilians, commies chasing down runaway Catholics, those hiding in churches, those friendly with the Americans and ARVN.
The communist death squads swarming into villages, executing every boy/man over the age of 15, bodies chucked and stacked in shallow mass graves.
The communists had their mass casualties, too, in the end, numbering thousands.
Death tolls, to this day, that are disputed…
I couldn’t shake the images. What it must have been like. The heat, horrors, stenches of death.
It was in the starkest contrast imaginable to the present city, its youthful energy, cafes and colleges. Hard to truly envision that sort of calamity happening in this effervescent, wondrous place…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer When it came time to depart, I had my guesthouse arrange a ride to the Hue airport, and after checking out, I was met by the driver, a man about 60 years old.
He was approximately 5’4, thin, and sprite. Had charcoal black hair, small eyes, and a round face, reddish cheeks, thin lips and a slight smile in the right corner of his mouth.
Though his accent was strong, his English was overall pretty good, and, setting off in the car, we struck up a conversation.
“Where do you come from?” He asked, honking his horn musically at the other motorists and motorbikes that weaved and crisscrossed, buzzed like mosquitoes around our vehicle.
“America,” I said, not thinking much of it.
But he was more excited than most I’d met there to encounter an American.
“Oh, America very good! Very good!” He exclaimed, his heightened voice having a raspy cigarette cadence, and he gave me an enthusiastic thumb’s up with his free hand.
He proceeded to tell me how as a child he lived near the MACV compound.
American soldiers, aid workers had taught him English. His family and friends of his family were soldiers in the war, fighting on the side of the South, The Republic of Vietnam, alongside the Americans…
He said that when the Americans were in Hue, it was “very happy, a very happy time.”
We drove along and he pointed out landmarks- where the MACV compound was, soldiers’, locals’ late-night hangout spots, and bunkers, flashpoints in the battle…
I was curious as to what happened after the war ended, what happened to those in the city, in league with the Americans.
He told me they, including his family, were forced into the countryside. The communists repopulated the city.
It was nearly a decade until they were able to live inside the city again.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer He’d also lost track of his father. Through a network of those in similar straits, he’d been promised that his father was alive, but could never locate him...
The driver had been one of the “boat people,” attempting to flee Vietnam, in various boats, rafts, makeshift floating contraptions. He attempted to reach Hong Kong, several times, but on every attempt his boat was fired on by Vietnamese soldiers or otherwise intercepted, forced back…
When our ride began, he’d told me that “before, many people were against the communists, but now they are good.”
But as we approached the airport, he showed me something he’d written on his phone and didn’t want to say aloud.
“Communists tell lies.”
Then he wrote:
“Killing many Catholics. No freedoms.”
His withered face, the lines in his forehead like couplets of the pain he endured, made me cognizant of this forgotten bunch, the Vietnamese on the same side as the Americans, fighting with us, believing in our ideals, wanting freedom.
I’d always seen the Vietnamese War as being an interventionist adventure. I’d seen the angry hippies at peace rallies, the burning draft cards. I’d seen the movies.
I’d seen it as binary. Us against them.
But it wasn’t so simple.
I’d heard the American narrative of it, growing up, and having spent time in Vietnamese museums, I’d seen the Viet Cong, communists’ narrative.
To hear this side of the story, this firsthand account, from this man, who’d lost his father in the conflict, been banished from his home, had tried to sail a boat to Hong Kong, and was nearly killed in the waters by the communists, the Vietnamese territorial guards, it was gripping.
This man’s story moved me, affected me far more than any movie or museum exhibit...
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
And, standing in the immigration line to have my passport stamped, I wondered, what the future would hold for this country…
Would The Party be able to maintain power into the new decade, into the 2030s and beyond, with all their children growing up, online, in a globalized world?
Before my visit, they’d begun imprisoning bloggers, like Mother Mushroom, and other dissidents at an accelerated rate, and during my visit, the BBC was banned in Da Nang, Hoi An, and Hue, unable to be accessed without a VPN.
Was this a snit? A blip? Or might The Party attempt to copy the China model, reverting to totalitarian ways to assert total political control, using technology to police its population, becoming a tech-based police state…
I don’t profess to know.
Because I’m not a communist.
LIJIAN: PORTRAIT OF A WUMAO
Jia Lijian was born and raised near the city of Ruijin, a city known as the “Red Capital” for its important role in the beginnings of Chinese Communism.
From an early age, Lijian learned to love China. Raised by his grandparents, he’d sit in rapt attention, his knuckles to his chin, his eyes widening as his grandfather told him patriotic stories. His grandfather, after all, had fought in The War to Resist America and Assist Korea.
His grandfather, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sun Yat-sen, would sit across from Lijian, in the jaundiced light of their living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette, sipping baijiu and regaling the child. His grandfather, the raconteur, at his most animated when telling war stories.
Leaning forward, speaking with the force of a fortune-teller, the old man’s bushy white eyebrows would lift, his voice would crack, and his thin silver caterpillar of a mustache would tremble as he told tearful, harrowing stories. Stories of living in caves, eating tree bark and snow, and trudging, on frostbitten feet, through the icy muck of night. Stories of crossing the Yalu River to launch mortars at US
soldiers. Stories of killing and gutting imperialists with his bare hands! All for the love of Mother China!
In addition to telling his patriotic stories, Lijian’s grandfather instilled in him the habit of morning reading. Every morning, Lijian would wake to the rooster’s crow at dawn. Then he’d push himself out of bed, and rise to his feet, pick up his grandfather’s tattered copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book,” the pages slanted with age, and he’d read aloud, 10, 20 pages at a time, reciting the words loud enough to be heard, but not so loud as to wake up his grandparents sleeping in the adjacent room of their courtyard house.
In primary school, middle school, high school Lijian devoted all his time to his studies, studying, for up to 17 hours per day. His favorite subjects being Marxism and Mao Zedong’s writings and speeches.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer By the end of high school, although he diligently studied for the college entrance examination, his scores were inadequate to gain admission into a truly elite university, such as Peking University or Fudan. However, he did well enough to attend a 2nd tier university located in the suburbs of Shanghai.
While his desire was to study Political Science or Chinese History, upon entering the college, he was assigned to be an English major. An English major? Everything about that bothered him. He hated English. After all, it was a barbarian language.
The language of the colonialists, the imperialists, the enemy nations he’d grown up despising, like the UK and USA. Those horrible countries full of dirty, smelly, stupid people.
However, since he was a proud member of the Communist Youth League, he wouldn’t be making any waves. He wouldn’t be risking his good standing by questioning the college’s decision or entering the lengthy process of requesting his major be changed.
The more he pondered it, the more he realized that it shouldn’t be a surprise.
He’d always aced his required English classes. All throughout his schooling, he’d found it an incredibly easy language to master. In comparison to Chinese, it was child’s play. Only 26 letters. Ha! Chinese has over 10,000 characters! To him, the imperialists’ language was much like the imperialists themselves, much like every Western nation he could think of, backward and inferior to China in every single way.
He’d also been a huge fan of Wang Yi, long admiring the handsome, distinguished man’s poise and character, and he’d listened in awe to Comrade Wang’s perfect English. Lijian started thinking, imagining himself in a role like that, in the foreign ministry. He could be on the world stage, speaking at the UN, speaking to the world on behalf of Mother China.
Maybe English wasn’t so bad after all. Perhaps he could work at CGTV, The Global Times, or China Daily. There were many possibilities, so he threw himself into his studies, and began his attack on the evil, inferior language!
“The Oral English Teacher, Wilson Edwards”
Despite studying at a 2nd tier college, Lijian was highly impressed by his professors. They were all party members. And they were fluent in English, most speaking with clean, clear British accents. In contrast to many of Lijian’s classmates, who’d sit slouched, sleeping or playing on their phones during lectures, Lijian sat in the front row of every class, sitting upright, straight as a bolt, hanging on his teachers’ every word.
There was one class, though, he detested. His Oral English class. And this was because it was conducted by a man named Wilson Edwards. A foreigner. A cockroach of a man! It was actually the first and only foreigner Lijian had ever met.
And the foreigner was just as disgusting as Lijian could have imagined.
The foreign teacher Wilson was a middle-aged white man who’d show up to class in rock band T-shirts and dirty, rumpled blue jeans, flip flops. In addition to the man’s slovenly attire, his appearance was also suspect. He had a hulking potato of a nose, fleshy bags under his electric-blue eyes, and a receding hairline of scruffy, dandruffy, salt and pepper hair. He was thick in the waist, too, with a floppy beer belly hanging over his belt, protruding so far that if he were a female, he’d probably be mistaken as pregnant.
The foreigner often smelled of liquor and did nothing in the class except sit in a chair at the front of the room, playing children’s games with the college students.
Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Duck Duck Goose. Simon Says. His most earnest attempt at teaching would be to write a word on the blackboard, in a childish scrawl, often misspelling words, then attempting to have a conversation with the class, about the word, the stupid slob sitting down and asking, “So do you guys like barbaque?”
Worse yet, most of Lijian’s classmates were girls, and for some unexplainable reason, the girls LOVED their foreign teacher. They’d laugh hysterically at everything the teacher said, as if he were a comedian. They’d even smile and snap
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer silly selfies with him. It all made Lijian sick. Sick! Did the girls need new glasses?
Did they not see what a dog’s fart, what a scoundrel the man was? What was he even doing in China, teaching Oral English? Why wasn’t he back in HIS country?
Everything about the class made Lijian’s blood boil, had him hot with resentment.
He’d rather skip the class altogether, do something more useful with his time, like studying Xi Jinping Thought or Marxism. But he knew the college monitored attendance, and he couldn’t risk losing any morality points. He couldn’t and wouldn’t risk anything that might imperil his future party application.
