1.
Rabindranath Tagore divided opinion in colonial Viet Nam...

Those seeking change in French-dominated Viet Nam adopted radically different attitudes to Tagore (1861-1941) when he visited Saigon in 1929. Some gravitated towards his ideas of pacifism and a pan-Asian cultural sphere, almost revering him as a meditating sage. Nationalists, on the other hand, were disappointed in him, regarding his ideas as unrealistic, and his solutions as insufficiently urgent. Marxists criticized what they saw as his bourgeois lifestyle.

I've had a sort of drip-feed of Tagore over the years.

First encounter: Singapore, March 2010, the Asian Civilizations Museum. I watched a spectacle called Shah Jahan, the Eternal Love Story of a Mughal Emperor, which was held in conjunction with an extraordinary exhibition of Mughal jewellery. It featured readings from Tagore's poem Shah Jahan (the best text I can find is here, but I'm not sure whose translation it is), along with performances of Kathak dance (stillness and highly controlled movement; highly expressive facial expressions and hand gestures; and wonderful spins and runs, enhanced by the percussive effects of the circlets of bells that are worn around the ankles). Quite an extraordinary evening.

The following year, I'm noting a bit of his diary. Anything that talks about being "wistful for the far beyond" is bound to get my attention...


What is now Bangladesh, and in Tagore's time was part of a larger Bengal

Then, in 2012, when we lived in KL, the National Visual Arts Gallery featured a temporary exhibition of Tagore's work. At the time, I have to admit, I didn't find it that accessible, but there's more information here and here. He didn't begin painting and drawing until he was 63, which is quite something in itself...

In 2016, I'm reading his novel Home and the World, and the following year, we're (slightly confusedly) watching Rituparno Ghosh's Chokher Bali, a movie based on another of Tagore's novels. There's a review here.

What's interesting me now is Tagore's connection with Victoria Ocampo, who was instrumental in arranging that last ever set of photos of Virginia Woolf... Watch this space...



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2.
Maria Popova dissects Ocean Vuong's take on anger.

I know Vuong from his arresting novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.

Popova writes: "The transmutation of suffering into love -- the transmutation of the wear and tear and helplessness of living, of the rage it can induce, into compassion and care -- is what we call art. Anyone who performs that alchemy within and then gives another the means to it -- whether with a poem or a painting or an act of kindness -- is what I would call an artist. I know of no one who has articulated this task of transmutation more beautifully than the poet (in the largest Baldwinian sense) Ocean Vuong."

She quotes a number of the points he makes:

1. We need to see where cruelty is coming from. Generally, the source is fear and vulnerability.
2. We're told anger and care are at opposite ends of a spectrum, "but I think they're actually very close together... [and] inform each other".
3. Writing is calming: "It’s hard to be rageful when you’re working with something that needs your care. If each word is a citizen in this world of the text, they are so dependent on me to think clearly and with restraint and with a sense of compassion and dignity to them."
4. We shouldn't be required to suppress our anger, but on the other hand, it shouldn't be the goal of our work. Rather, it's an opening: "If you’re not awake, you wouldn’t feel angry. But to be alive in American bones is to be enraged by what’s happening. And, of course, I feel anger. But I will say -- I’m not proud of many things -- but I’m incredibly proud that not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger. It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful -- as a writer, as an artist -- when I’m angry."


Nha Trang, 2003

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3.
Andrew Lam describes the torn life of the migrant.

This reminded me of lots of accounts of leaving Viet Nam for political reasons, the most recent being The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Lam remembers standing on the beach at Vung Tau, which lies on the Vietnamese coast a little to the southeast of what was then Saigon. He's 11 years old, and he's going through a sequence of incantations and gestures that he hopes will summon up the promised American rescue ships. It doesn't. The ships don't come. His family returns to the South Vietnamese capital. Next time, however, their attempt to leave is successful: "On the morning of April 28, 1975, two days before Saigon fell, we piled into a crowded cargo plane and flew out to the Philippines. After that, we boarded yet another plane for Guam, where army tents were being hastily set up on freshly bulldozed ground to welcome America’s latest huddled masses." Eventually, they reach San Francisco.

It's not easy, but he and his family do well in the US. He "swallowed America whole". Now, retired, he splits his time between San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City. But he has never really come to terms with his past: "For many, their childhood faded slowly, and for some, it even dawdled and stretched out long into adulthood. Mine, however, ended on a specific geographical marker: it ended, more or less, on the beach of Vung Tau, where magic and prayers failed. In retrospect, I was a double refugee. Abruptly forced out of my beloved homeland, I also migrated out of my childhood wonders at the very same time. Then, in the new country, I moved so far and fast away from that little boy that by the time I looked back, I couldn’t claim to truly know him at all."

Back in Vung Tau, two boys engaging in a martial arts contest make him remember his own motivations when he stood on that beach. Yes, he was trying to save his family. But he was also trying to save his childhood. That recollection replaces his bitterness and nostalgia with "a tenderness and compassion for his younger self".


Phan Thiet

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4.
Oliver Raw goes in search of scenes from The Quiet American, written by Graham Greene, set in Saigon, and published 70 years ago.

I read this novel in 2003, not long after spending three weeks in the southern half of Viet Nam. It's a great read, and it's still an apposite warning against innocents trying to do good: "Innocence," writes Greene, "always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm." Thomas Fowler (the cynical British journalist who's our narrator and by nature an observer) eventually takes sides, makes fateful decisions that end in the death of Alden Pyle (our quietly destructive American), and feels guilty about it. But we all know that more equally dangerous "innocents" will rise up to replace Pyle, all through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s -- and on into our own time.

A month later we watched Philip Noyce's movie version, which came out that same year. We found it very impressive, as did Roger Ebert. He points out: "As luck would have it, The Quiet American was planned for release in the autumn of 2001. It was shelved after 9/11, when Miramax president Harvey Weinstein decided, no doubt correctly, that the national mood was not ripe for a film pointing out that the United States is guilty of terrorist acts of its own. Caine appealed to Weinstein, who a year later allowed the film to be shown at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was so well received by the public and critics that Miramax opened it for Oscar consideration in December. Now it goes into national release, on what appears to be the eve of another dubious war."

Raw argues that the book still makes an interesting companion to an exploration of today's Ho Chi Minh City, and proves his point by tracing the pathways of Greene and his protagonists. Many features -- Notre-Dame Cathedral, Lam Son Square (formerly Place Garnier), the Hotel Grand (formerly the Saigon Palace), the Hotel Majestic -- are still recognizable. (We stayed at the Grand, but weirdly, I have no pictures...)

The Hotel Continental, says Raw, remains substantially unchanged from early photos. This is where Fowler encounters Pyle. "The hotel also served as Greene’s residence during his four winters in Vietnam, from 1951 to 1955, when he was a reporter for Life and Paris Match magazines. A plaque outside room 214 commemorates his stay. 'At least four or five people ask to see the room every week,' the concierge tells me."

Greene loved Viet Nam, especially Saigon, despite the ever-present element of risk in those days: "A meal at a restaurant or a trip to the cinema could be accompanied by a grenade from a communist guerrilla." While Greene called Saigon a city of bicycles, it's now defined by the two million scooters that populate its streets. Looking out from the rooftop of the Majestic (another of Greene's -- and Fowler's -- haunts), Raw observes: "No tracer fire these days, only the dazzle of giant electronic billboards and the lights from innumerable apartment buildings, stretching far beyond what Greene could ever have foreseen."


Another aspect of Ho Chi Minh City...

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5.
Frances Nguyen describes her struggles to learn Vietnamese.

This reminded me of Kieu's predicament in Khue Pham's Wherever You May Be.

Nguyen is another child of migrants, and when she returns to Viet Nam with her family, her father is constantly apologizing for her: "'She’s American,’ he explained, again and again -- to the acquaintance who picked us up from the airport in Saigon, the hotel owner, the business partners and the extended family I was meeting for the first time. All of them wanted to know why I couldn’t speak my own language. We were in my father’s birthplace, a city that likely would’ve been mine had my parents not fled after the war... I stood by him and stared down at my feet like a child as I listened to him recycle the same explanation on my behalf. 'She’s learning on this trip.'"

Nguyen has visited the country before, but there has just never enough time to learn the language. Just as she's getting going, it's time to leave again. Once more, it's a story of assimilation. She and her sister, born after they arrived in the US, were the first of the children to be given English names, and have their Vietnamese one relegated to middle-name status. Their parents spoke to them only in English, because they thought it would be better for them, and of course, all they wanted was for their children to succeed...

But then, when everyone suddenly realizes what has been lost, there are regrets.

Nguyen explains how she has tried learning other languages, but with little success. Conversation in anything other than English "is perforated by silences".

But then she moves to Portugal. She doesn't strictly have to learn Portuguese -- she can survive without -- but she wants to fit in, and be a "good immigrant", like her parents. She struggles in her classes. But somehow, in this situation, she's able to move on: "For my parents, being perfect was a matter of survival. The opposite is true of my immigrant experience here: no one has shunned me for being wrong, nor derided me for not knowing better. There is nothing to lose. In fact, I’m gaining more than I’d expected: a way back to my own language..."

She was excited, for example, to encounter in Portuguese some of the diacritics that Vietnamese uses: "To meet them again, in this classroom, is like seeing an old friend from childhood, and the sweetness of recognition helps me move more boldly in this new language. Maybe I haven’t lost as much as I’d thought."


Graca (with a cedilla I can't show), Lisbon, 2020