...The Taoist Monk "Meets" Miss Korea

My friend Hai called recently to invite me to join him and his teacher Ong Muoi (tenth uncle) for a trip to Diamond Bay Beach Resort near the lovely seaside city of Nha Trang - at a bargain price. Leaving aside the question why he was bringing a Taoist monk to a beach resort, I agreed to go.

Diamond Bay became (in)famous in Vietnam after it was retained to host the Miss Universe contest in 2008, and then failed to complete construction in time, forcing the contest to be moved to another venue in the same town. This has not prevented the resort from taking full advantage of the exposure their (not) hosting the event garnered.

After a two day side trip to Danang, I arrived a half day before Hai and Ong Moui at Diamond Bay. Upon one's arrival at the reception area, one is greeted by a life sized portrait of the winner of the Miss Universe contest behind the counter. I forget what country she was from. This kind of sets the tone for what is to come. When you go for a bite to eat, you dine in the company of photos from 100 contestants from around the world. There is nothing like looking out the window at the beautiful bay, eating rice cakes, sipping coffee and having Miss Belarussia staring you down.

Nha Trang (sorry-stock photo)
Ong Muoi and Hai arrived eventually. I was very much looking forward to spending time with Hai's teacher. I had met him in passing but we had never really spoken at length. He is 82 years old, and has spent most of his life in the mountains of Phu Quoc, an island off the southern coast of Vietnam. He is thin but strong, has a wispy white beard, long hair in a pony tail, and smiles at everyone quite a bit. I asked him how he has stayed so strong at such an advanced age, and he says it is because he climbs the mountain in Phu Quoc everday. I believed him.

Now, because the Vietnamese tend be even more obsessed with feminine beauty than we in the U.S., the developers decided to name the bungalows along the beach after various contestants in the pageant. My bald, quasi-monastic friend Hai settled in the Miss Albania cottage,and Ong Mui settled in the Miss Korea suite. There, in yet another life-sized portrait, Miss Korean herself, wearing a traditional Korean frock-dress, strikes a tae-kwon-do pose, wielding a large scary looking saber.

Nha Trang (sorry-stock photo)
We met at the pool and then in the dining room and spoke of many things. He read my pulse (Chinese style, with three fingers). He told me I needed to eat more vegetables, that my meditation practice was too mental, and that I needed to breath more deeply . He was right on all counts, and how he knew that from reading my pulse, I have no idea. When we went to the dining room (filled with kodachrome beauty contestants) for a buffet, Ong Muoi looked at the food Hai brought him with great curiosity, as if he had never seen such things before. Finally, he ate some lettuce, and nibbled at some fruit.

That night we decided to go into the city for the Sea Festival that was happenning there. Like many Vietnamese events in Vietnam (TET, Christmas, New Year's, etc.) the celebration seemed to focus on bringing together as many motorbikes, pedestrians and cars into as small a space as possible. We went out for vegetarian food, and then, because the decibel level on the street was unbearable, I decided to return to the hotel with Ong Mui.

Hai and Ong Muoi
The problem was, I had yet to visit Ong Muoi in his Miss Korea bungalow, and so neither he nor I had any idea where his room was. So we wandered the pathways of Diamond Bay - me and the Taoist monk - trying to find the bungalow in which he was staying. They were all of identical design, and because of the hour, many were unlit from the inside. Was he staying in Miss France? We approached and he shook his head. Mais non! Pas ici! Miss Germany? Nichts. Miss Vietnam? Khong! Miss Iceland? No. Miss Nigeria? No. Miss China? No. Finally, we arrived at the Miss Korea bungalow, and they key fit. We said good night and I left the tenth uncle with Miss Korea rattling a saber above his bed.

The next morning, I met Hai and Ong Muoi at the pool, another memorable moment. Hai had come to the conclusion that rubbing one's body all over with salt prior to taking a swim was excellent for one's health, so when I groggily arrived for my morning dip, my two friends were standing poolside covered from head to toe in salt, happily chatting like father and son, which basically they are. I wish I had taken a picture. Instead I rubbed salt on my body and went swimming.

It felt great.

...Four Kinds of Cinnamon for the Monk

About ten years ago, I found myself curled up on the floor of a large closet of an old monastery in the mountains of Korea with a bad case of kim-chee-induced food poisoning. Because of the way the retreat was set up, we practiced, ate and slept in the meditation hall, and for those who were too sick to practice, we had to rest in the changing room.

During the breaks people would roll through the changing room, folding and unfolding monkish garbs, and I would lie and watch them. But there was one monk from Vietnam who was practicing there and when he came to change his robes, he always bent over and asked me how I was doing, patted me gently, and offered me various kinds of herbs and vitamins. That touched me.



He had been a monk since he was a young boy, and there was always something innocent and child-like in him. I remember for example at a dharma talk one day when the teacher explained a fine point of zen which perplexed my friend. He raised and his hand, and asked "But when you throw something up in the air, it always comes back down." I remember laughing quite a bit at the simplicity of the way he perceived the world.

So it was great pleasure that I heard from a mutual friend that this monk was visiting Vietnam. He had come to seek help with an incurable medical condition related to a parasite of some kind - or one deemed so by his western doctors in California. I had heard that he was actually so weak he could not go outside, and that he was close to dying.

Here, through the typical "i know someone who knows someone" network used by everyone in Vietnam, he found a mysterious sounding traditional doctor, who asked for his date and year of birth and his symptoms through an intermediary. Based on that information, the doctor told the monk to bathe in four kinds of cinnamon and then go bathe in the sea.

On Sunday, I had lunch with him and his neice, a nun. (See photo). He could not stop repeating the word "unbelievable." His symptoms had vanished. He was full of energy. We ate a small park near my home, and the water was brimming with fish. The same innocence led him to be more interested in the activities of the fish than anything I could say or do in our conversation.

"Why don't poor people come here and catch these fish and sell them at the market?" he asked, a question for which I had no answer. From there he launched into a quite sophisticated (and child-like) explanation of the difference between zen meditation techniques in Korea and Vietnam, and how they relate to buddhist metaphysics. He was clearly "back" to use a tired sports metaphor.

Through another set of coincidences he had read a book I had given to our mutual friend in the US called "Fourth Uncle in the Mountain" (see post). He said he wanted to visit the area and meet some of the mystics, madmen, monks and medicine men that lived in that area (or used to, depending on who you ask.) Given my recent trip there, I gave him the coordinates of a temple, a teacher (Chi), and a few towns to pass through to get there.

This morning, I spoke with him on the phone. His voice was radiant. "Unbelievable," he kept saying. "Unbelievable." He had arrived at Forbidden Mountain, and was visiting the Matireya Buddha statue. The day before he had visited Chi. He sounded like a fish returning to water, which of course, for a pure-minded monk is the next best thing after nirvana.

...The Dong Nai Fruit Heist

A friend and former business school classmate from Saigon owns a small farm in the town of L. T., about a 90 minute drive from the city, in Dong Nai province. I have visited the farm over the years to stay at the traditional North-highland stilt-house she built there, known as a "nha san," and to visit the family that lives on the farm and works the land. So when I received a call from my old classmate a few weeks ago inviting me to head out to the house on a day trip, my answer was a very quick "yes."

The wooden nha san stands out here in the south, a land of low, one-story houses made from a less exotic material - known locally as xi mang, and in English as cement. The house is raised up on stilts, to keep the wild animals that (used to) prowl the forest at a safe distance, and was also the type of traditional house that Ho Chi Minh lived in. There are many things to see on the farm, depending on the time of year: the lotus pond in various stages of life - budding, blossoming, blooming; the fields of rice just before harvest, a deep green; corn, bitter melon and other crops; and beyond these a small muddy river spanned by a rickety rope bridge; and a long thicket of banana trees along the river.

We arrive to the warm smiles of the farmer, Mr. Q., who along with his wife, and two young boys, Tuan and Tu live in a little (cement) house on a corner of the property. I know the family a bit from past visits, and they have always been politely curious about me. Our conversations are simple: I ask what the difference is between rice in the field (lua) rice after harvest (gao) and cooked rice (com). What are the names of some of the plants and birds around the place? What time do the boys go to school? How are rice prices these days? And they typically ask me the same question: Could I explain again why I am 47 and have never been married?

Mr. Q. prepares tea and drops a bunch of large, flourescent choum choum (rambutan, see photo) on the table for us to nibble on. For his son Tu, Mr. Q has managed to pluck a bees nest ripe with honey from a tree, and Tu is chomping away on it, as soon we all are. (See photo). It tastes like the smell of the countryside here at night. Mr. Q. is of a different breed than us neurotic, haywire city folk: placid, good-humored, and humble. For one, as far as I can tell he never stops smiling. His skin is a deep brown, and his arms look like the arms of a man who works his fields from - you guessed it - sun up to sun down. If I spend the night here, I often see him walking smoothly and peacefully along the narrow footpaths, past the stilt house, back to his house, only a trace of light remaining along the horizon. I believe he is deeply connected to the land in a kind of innocent and knowing and wise way.

We are a group of four, and so Mr. Q's wife has been busy in their kitchen preparing a lunch of boiled chicken, fried chicken, fried fish, rice, vegetable soup, and stuffed bitter melon (kho qua, which means in Vietnamese "crossing past the difficult in life"). The preponderance of chicken on the menu might explain why the two-legged creatures - skinny and little - scattered rapidly in ten directions when our car pulled up in the driveway. There used to be two oxen here as well, tended to by the boys, but they were sold to help pay for the boys' school fees.

After lunch, we read and sleep our way through the midday heat storm, but are soon walking down the footpath to visit the grove of choum choum. Tu has joined us, so we are five walking along the low dikes skirting square plots of land blocked out in the countryside here like a checkerboard. We slip through a stand of brush and out into a kind of hidden orchard, where the choum choum trees grow, along with lime and banana. Mr. Q. is plucking the prickly fruit from the trees, when a pod of very large red ants drops out of the tree and onto his back. It slows him down little. He simply takes off his shirt, and is quickly scaling a banana tree, and, like a Shaolin monk in a Chinese martial arts movie, seems to leap-float from branch to branch, heading higher and higher, his eyes set on a cluster of bananas at the top of a nearby tree. After some tugging, wrenching, twisting, the banana bunch drops down on the ground with a thud, a majestic pile of bananas (a small portion of which kept my potassium high for the entire week to follow). The stem of the hand is covered with a clear, sugary liquid, which I find out to be quite sticky when I try to pick it up.

We walk back to the house with branches of the rambutan tree (covered with the purplish yellow fruit) and a big load of bananas. Somehow, during the course of the day, we and others have also gathered a harvest of many kinds of local crops: not only choum choum and banana, but also jackfruit, as well as the dreaded and smelly durian, birds of paradise flowers (or as a local friend still working on her English botany says: "paradise birds"), grapefruit (known here as pomelo), and lychee. We pile the haul into the back of the old black Mercedes and head back to the big city with a week's worth of fruit.

...Paradise Found, Paradise Lost

Somethings are just too good to be true, I suppose. Upon arrival in Saigon, I began to look for an apartment, and for some reason the first place I visited was what I was looking for, quiet, outside of the downtown area, close to some open space. The owner is a Tibetan buddhist, and did a wonderful job decorating the building. Paradise Found.
Unfortunately, it was less than a month after I moved in that four gentlemen arrived one morning on the open plot of land next to my apartment with a makeshift altar, incense, fruit, flowers, and lots of prayers. In Vietnam, such devotion can mean mainly one thing: business. Sure enough, within the day, my new neighborhood arrived: a crane, a pile driver, and about 15 workers.
Paradise lost.
Since then, my balcony has offered up the view of various forms of heavy machinery, trucks, and tools: the dump truck that drops stones, the pile driver pounding concrete foundations into the soft earth, the back hoe digging the foundation, the crane lifting and dropping slabs of stone. The hours between 6 and 8 am, when the digging begins, are now my favorite part of the day.

...The Quiet, Confused American

[contains graphic content.] A few weeks ago, I was driving my motorbike along a major downtown thoroughfare, and came upon a man face down on the road, his scooter laying on top of him. The man had fallen on the most famous street in Saigon - known today as Dong Khoi but called Rue Catinat in colonial times - right in front of The Continental Hotel, where Thomas Fowler was sitting in Graham Greene's "Quiet American" when a Viet Minh bomb went off at the Opera House across the street. The street is lined with a unique blend of high end boutiques, tourists, beggars, peddlars, local Vietnamese and curious people.
His head was turned at too sharp an angle, his body a little too motionless. I pulled over to the curb, and left my motorbike idling, and helped pull his bike off his body. He was not moving or making any noises, face down on the asphalt. The sea of scooters parted around us - us being a few other worried-looking people who had stopped, the man lying there, and I. One rather gristly looking man rode by, called out to me "chet roi" which means "he's already dead," let out a loud laugh, and rode on. Looking at the man face down,I tried to remember my CPR training, but my mind went blank. A man reached down and flipped him over. I expected to see a bloody mess but his face was eerily without cuts or scrapes. His eyes were half open, but white and lifeless. One of the men standing next to me took a pulse and shook his head in that very understated but serious Vietnamese way.
I wanted to call 911 but did not know who to call, not to mention how to explain what I was seeing in Vietnamese. I was overcome with a sick and helpless feeling. Looking at the security guard standing on the sidewalk next to us, he deliberately looked away, as if to say, don't look at me, you are own your own man.
At this point two or three men reached down and carried his body like a sack of potatoes to the side of the curb. I could not even get myself to reach down and grab his feet, as my desire to help was overcome by a kind of horrible repulsion. (So much for years of bodhicitta practice.)
By now, the guests walking out of the Continental were gathering, treated to the macabre scene, staring in confused shock at the drama in front of them. One of them was taking pictures. Vietnamese on-lookers, were also gathering, but without the same shocked look on their faces. This was not something new or particularly unusual to them.
I must have looked entirely confused, because local Vietnamese were offering a bit of comfort. One man made the universal sign for drinking liquor, tilting an imaginary bottle up in the air, as if to the say they guy was drunk and fell of his bike. Whether that was meant to mean he was dead or not I am not sure. Then, with a surprising urgency, person after person came up to me and told me take off and get out of there, again gesturing politely, pointing down the street, as if to say, you don't want to get involved with this situation any more.
Something in me found the idea of leaving the scene of a probable death unpalatable. Even more local people came around me now, telling me to leave with great urgency, and I was becoming more the center of attention at this point, which was acutely uncomfortable. So, against my better judgment, I went around the corner to what I had intended to do in the first place, buy some dollars on the black market.
I called a friend later to explain what happenned, and she told me that this was actually a common scam in Vietnam, and that I was lucky not to have lost my motorbike. One guys "falls" of his motorbike. Concerned passers by stop to help, leaving their motorbike idling by the side of the road, at which time the accomplice jumps on the idling motorbike and heads for the pawn shop. The passers by may also put their shoulder bag down on the pavement to help, at which point they lose that as well. My friend scolded me for being a little naive: I had left my motorbike running, but luckily, I had not put down my bag, which had a month's worth of earnings in the form of cash.
Be that as it may, I decided that this was not in fact a scam, for a number of reasons. First, the man really looked dead. Very dead. Second, my idling motorbike was still there idling ten minutes later when I got back on it. Third, the concerned pleas of the local Vietnamese to get the hell out of there told me that it was something more serious and that I did not want to get involved in.
This was not the first time I had stumbled upon a corpse in Vietnam: two years before, when visiting here, a dead body was spotted floating under the bridge I cross on my way to work. A few days later, a second washed up nearby. All of this morbid story telling is a reminder that even here, in the heart of the "economic miracle" unfolding around us, poverty still reigns, as does what comes along with it, suffering.
As we say in the Kwan Um School of Zen, Ji Jang Bo Sal.

...Culinary Adventures in the New Year

The Tet holiday in Vietnam, better known as the Lunar New Year, is truly a time for celebration here. The night before the new moon is much like Christmas Eve in the west in terms of the energy that builds up before hand. Stores are overflowing with flowers, markets brimming with vegetables and fruit, and shiny red and gold trinkets hang from push carts lining the street. The main street downtown is turned into 500 meter display of flowers, flags, signs, glitter and lights. People shop fervently for large feasts to be prepared on the first day of the New Year, deliver gifts to friends and family, close offices and stores. And finally, like at home in the U.S., people disapear inside their homes, leaving the streets blissfully quiet.
At home, Vietnamese families (those who aren't Christian) celebrate return to the hearth of Ong Tao, "the kitchen god," who a week earlier had left to visit with the Jade Emperor. Ong Tao usually lives in the family's kitchen, above the kitchen altar, and looks over the family's activities during the year. He had left to issue a report to the emperor on the families activities. His return is a cause for celebration, if not concern (have we been naughty or nice?)
The day after Tet, the first day of the lunar new year, the mua lan dances begin, as "dragons" dance around from store to store to bless the business for the year (for a small fee of course). A Chinese tradition, the merry makers come from Cholon in District 5, Saigon's China Town. They are followed by a band of musicians, blessing the house with a wild ritual dance, drums, cymbals and merrymaking. The long cloth dragons writhing down the street are of course filled with three or four young men jumping up and down inside.
And most of all, the first day of lunar new year, people eat. Yesterday, I was treated to two feasts on the Lunar New Year. At the first, the traditional sticky rice cake - banh chung - was eaten, along with chicken, squid, egg rolls and rice. The sound of loud crunchy caused me to look across the table, and watch a thin little man devour the foot of a chicken. He worked his way up each long toe, crunchy on each, and then arrived at the metatarsal, at which point he bit even harder, and managed to grind it up well enough for swallowing.
At the second feast, that night, consisting of fish, egg rolls, vegetable soup and beef, there was one dish that worried me a great deal. Gelatin cubes were piled on a plate, each containing various small bits of food of many textures and colours. Because the Vietnamese are incredibly gracious to guests, and always want to make sure you have enjoyed each delicacy, they saw I had abstained, and explained that it was in fact, a delicate way to prepare pigs' ears. The polite nod from me was my ineffective way of saying "no thanks," which was not enough to dissuade my gracious host from picking up a gelatin square with his chopsticks. I eyed the square, which at first was held suspended over the center of the table for a moment and which then floated slowly in my direction. It could have gone to my left, or to my right, into bowls of my friends, but unfortunately it landed square in mine.
Gnarled bits of white flesh and unidentifiable black matters were suspended in the gelatinous delicacy, and despite having been told many times it is extremely rude to turn down food from a host, I had absolutely no intention of eating it. At the first possible moment, as invisible as possible, I picked up the pig's ears with my chopsticks and put them in the bowl of the person eating to my left!
The Tet festival continues for a week, each day traditionally involving different activities. Overseeing it all are the three folk gods - the wise man Ong Loc (wealth) Ong Phuc (happiness) and Ong Thu (longevity) - who sit on most family altars. And perhaps most beloved of all is Ong Dia, the slightly overweight, happy and generous man not so different from the laughing buddha.

...Fun with the police

If you don't like to offer "gratuities" to people in places of power, then this is not the country for you. The first time this happened to me was two years ago, when, at dusk, I had neglected to turn on the front light on my motorbike as I was heading to a yoga class. By some miracle of genius, the police officer who pulled me over spoke perfect English. What a coincidence! He knew the work for "foreign driver's license," and he could say "In Vietnam, you must follow the laws of the Vietnamese," and he even knew the word "confiscate," as in "I am going to have to confiscate your motorbike right now and you will have to come with me to the police station." After conferring with his partner, he turned back to me and informed that I could save myself all the trouble if I happened to have 400,000 VND on me (about $25). As it turned out, I only had 100,000 VND ($6) which apparently was enough to relieve him of the responsibility of having to arrest me.
It wasn't long before, on this trip, I met up again with the "canh sat," as they are known here. (Police.) This time is was for "speeding" down a major thoroughfare jammed with traffic (OK, maybe I was going a little fast). But this time, experienced in the ways of police officers here (and in the US for that matter), I tried some diplomacy: smiling, and speaking really bad Vietnamese. "Happy New Year!"
Taken aback by the tall white person speaking (mangling) his language, he smiled at me. I told him I was sorry for speeding. He smiled again, went to talk to this partner, and returned. Again, in impeccable english, he said "You can keep your motorbike for 100,00 VND." Wow, what a bargain. Now, having gotten over my reticence at sharing the largesse with local authorities, I forked over a crisp note, which he slipped into a wad of bills I estimate at about three inches thick, wedged into the spine of a little book he carried.
So imagine what it would cost to start a company here? Or buy a house? As the locals say, "Troi oi," loosely translated as "Oh my heavens."

...You think your economy is in trouble?

Economies evolve in much the same way that other things do: most start out with a very large agrarian sectors, then industrialize and build cars and trucks for example, and then move on to higher value added service industries (like engineering, software.) Vietnam is at the moment moving from an agrarian to an industrialized economy. All you have to do is drive outside of the city and get lost in the massive and dismal industrial parks packed with processing plants, textile plants, chip plants and so on to know that. Lines of weary workers file in and out as shifts change, heading back to the little towns that sprout up around the factories.

So now that all of the countries that Vietnam sells things to are going into the tank (like the US for example), Vietnam is starting to feel the pain as well. Exports are dropping, GDP is slowing, interest rates are being cut, people are losing jobs, banks are seeing loan portfolios sour and so on. As at home, for the super-rich, this is a great time: buying distressed companies and assets at fire sale prices, which will only help stuff the coffers on the next up turn. For the rest, the decline in the prices of food that is grown here, such as rice, cashews, coffee and sugar, mean that those on the lower part of the income ladder - i.e. farmers in the agricultural sector and workers in the industrial sector - are going to struggle for awhile.

...Ag. Economics 101

Update on the man selling chickens: He's back, this time with one rooster and three hens. I could not resist stopping and asking how much for the birds. The rooster goes for 400,000 vietnamese dong, which is $25. The hens go for 300,000, about $18. Pretty expensive, I thought. I checked with a friend of mine whose family raises chickens in the countryside: 100,000 VND is all you should pay for a chicken, I was told. I guess the chicken farmer was not the country bumpkin one could take him for after all.

Anyway, I told him I thought the rooster was a nice rooster and he thought I was trying to bargain the price down. I said no, I just think it is a nice bird. He still thought I was bartering, which of course is because I speak Vietnamese about as well as a rooster. Anyway, he had to explain to me in very simple language that the reason the rooster is more expensive is that it can "marry" (dam cuoi) a lot of hens, and then gave me a fairly universal and quite vulgar illustration with his right and left hand of the act of biological reproduction, just so no doubt remained why the rooster cost more than the hen. Thanks but no thanks, I will pass on the rooster.

...To the Pure Land

One thing I have learned in years of wandering around world is that it is a good idea to be open to invitations from local people. There are three young Vietnamese who live in my building, cleaning, guarding, driving a car for the owner. They are from the countryside, in the north, where there are mountains and traditional ways of life. One of them, Nhung, is returning Satruday to her home for TET (lunar new year) and wanted to visit her pagoda for good luck and to say goodbye for the month. Nhung wants to become a Buddhist nun, but her family will not let her, and asked her to work to support them. She wakes up at 5 AM and goes running, works quite hard around the place.
I returned from work at around 6 pm, having had quite enough of traffic for the day, mind-crammed with stats on GDP, sector weightings and other things when Nhung and the others leap from their room and ask if I wanted to visit their temple. They have seen the Buddhist paraphenalia in my room.
I had little inclination to go, honestly, but some little voice perked up and said "sure" and off we went, heading north of the city to a very poor area called Hoc Mon. It is hard to describe what an urban landscape marred by 150 years of colonial occupation, foreign wars, and communist rule looks like. Suffice it to say: lighting is poor, dust is plentiful, buildings tilt, people wander the side of the road, and trucks scream down the street. It is, without any exaggeration, a landscape of human suffering.
Forty five minutes later, we arrive at a high, wide, dented metal gate, and Nhung darts out of the car and through a small opening, and the gate opens, and we drive into, well, a pure land. Even in the evening dark, the temple grounds offer up immediate solace. Nhung is running along side the car, so excited to be at the temple with her friends, and leads us through a maze of buildings and paths for the grand tour: the buddha hall, where five novices are taking vows; the meditation hall, where about 40 monks and 80 lay people are sitting zen in tight lines, and where a young monk walks up and down the rows with his zen stick; to the study hall, where 50 monks in brown sit on benches studying sutras; to the library, where a young boy, who does not see us, recites sutras; and perhaps most amazingly to the kitchen, where it feels like we are stepping back 200 years in time.
An elderly woman in brown robes tending a fire turns to greet us as we enter the outer area of the complex, and she ask about the strange tall one. We exchange the local greeting "na mo a di da phat," which brings a smile to her face, and she leads us through one dark kitchen chamber, which opens onto another, and another, as we walk past towering vats of water boiling over wood fires sunken into berm platforms, high shelves of white and red rice soaking before cooking, an array of many large pots sunken into another fire-filled berm, waiting for the rice; and finally, in the heart of the giant ktichen complex, to a large table where about 15 people - monastics, elderly, young, women, men - sit in silence pounding rice into cakes, filling them with bits of food, cutting and tying string around them, and laying them on a high pile. The air is filled with the scent of smoke from the wood fire, incense, rice and mostly, to be figurative, the passage of time.
The elderly woman has wandered off, and she reappears holding out two beautiful mala and asks which one I would like. As often happens, one is overcome with gratitude at the simple kindness, such a contrast with the struggle of getting through the day in the city, trying to make rich people richer, and such a reminder of what is important.
As we are leaving, and peaking in at the novices preparing for ordination in the main Buddha hall, we are approached by a middle aged monk, with the eyes, smile, skin and ears of one who has done years of training. It is through his impeccable and shockingly clear English, his smile, and firm and warm grasp on my arm, here in the middle of an urban sprawl so suffocating and dark and remote and hopeless, that I come back to myself, to my own longing for peace glimpsed through practice, and still longed for. And to a feeling of: "Oh, this is why I came here."
He sits me down and quizzes me on the basics: "Why did Shakyamuni appear in this world?" Check, got that one. "What is your daily practice?" Oops. Wrong. Kwan se um bosal should come later, he says. First, focus on Amitabha Buddha. He tells me he does three hours of consecutive prostrations, five hours of chanting, and will go the distance pure land when he dies. (He does not sleep and lives on water, says his students later.) I ask him if there is a pure land any closer than that, and he laughs knowingly, as if to say, yes, OK, we understand each other. BUT, he says, just chant Amitaba (in Vietnamese, A Di Da Phat). Pure land fundamentalism! This explains also the fire in his eyes, the smile, and strength of his grip, the energy and excitement about his chosen vocation.
After ten minutes of fire and brimstone, which begins to make me a bit nervous, I use the excuse of the late hour, and my waiting friends, who sit with us entranced by the sight of this intense monk lecturing the nodding American on dharma, to excuse myself, and say I must be returning home. We exchange goodbyes, A Di Da Phats. Nhung, her friends and I jump back in the SUV and leave the pure land for the realm of desire, anger and ignorance, where I have always been more at home anyway.

...It's a small world after all

There is at this time one major park in the city of Saigon, known as Gia Dinh park. It is near the airport, a long, long way from where I live. (Actually, where I "live" now is actually a long way from where I normally live in the US but that is a different story.) Yesterday, a friend invited me to meet a native Vietnamese Tai Chi teacher visiting from the U.S. at Gia Dinh park.
The local residents like to walk around the park in circles. They look like worshipping Tibetans at a stupa. However, they are just walking for exercise. Young lovers cuddle on benches and on the grass. An old blind man walks around with two raggedy beggar children at his side. He blows air into a very small plastic bottle and it makes a noise, like a whistle, which I take to mean it is the entertainment he is providing in exchange for small change.
Various people arrive, and finally the teacher himself, in monastic garb. Stout, short, energetic with wild eyes, he seems more like a fighter than a monk. He lives of all places in Washington State, just a few hours from my home in Portland. I told him of my time studying zen in the school of Zen Master Seung Sahn, and he asks me if I know of a place called Cambridge Zen Center. That, as many of you know, is where I used to live. He asks me if I know Mark, and I say of course I know Mark (the co-abbot of CZC). So it is a small world after all.
Soon the local TV station is there, and in typical Vietnamese fashion, a gaggle of onlookers, many of whom seem amused by the tall lanky guy they say looks like a swan (was that a complement or not?). The teacher puts on a quite a show, dramatically demonstrating what turns out to be more like Qi Gung than Tai Chi.
In the end, it was exactly what I needed after a long week in the Vietnamese stock market.

..Dropping Ashes...on the rice?

Sometimes on my way home from work in the city, I stop at the various streetside stalls for food: fruit shop, bread shop, house supply shop and, most recently, the rice shop. There one sees a beautiful array of different kinds of rice, flowing up and out of bags, with little signs stuck in then denoting their names. I pulled up on my motorbike, and simply pointed to the prettiest rice there was, since I didn't know what any of the names meant. The somewhat grumpy shop owner proceeded to remove the cigarette from his mouth, and stick it butt down into another bag of rice, and leave it there, still burning, as he scooped rice out of another bag for me. As he did, I could not take my eyes off the ashes at the tip of the cigarette as they grew longer, and was waiting for them to fall into the pile of rice there - his ersatz ashtray - when he plucked it out and stuck it back in his mouth, and handed me my rice. "Not correct," as a noted zen master might say. This morning, I discovered I had actually bought sticky rice, though luckily, it did not seem to have any ashes in it.

...Little Red Rooster

Sometimes, while buzzing around on my motorbike in the city, I see things that just make me chuckle. One of my favorite is the man standing by the side of the highway with a chicken. As 18 wheelers, BMWs, food carts, motorbikes and taxis whir by in a blur, as giant ships are built just over the fence there, and giant cranes dredge the canal a few meters away, the beautiful red rooster with long tail feathers struts around on the pavement, clucking and pecking, apparently totally unaware that this might be his last day. The rooster's owner, looking bewildered, watches the buzzing mass of moving metal whiz by, and waits in hope that someone is craving chicken for dinner. Next time I see him, I will ask how much he wants for the rooster. Who knows, maybe I will set him free in the countryside!

...Detour to Saigon

Starting today, for the benefit of friends, family and myself - and because the world definitely needs another blog! - I will be writing entries on my (mis) adventure in Vietnam as a freelance researcher in the Vietnamese stock market. (And maybe some side accounts of trips to the countryside to regain lost sanity).
Back story: I came to Vietnam on December 16th because a friend of mine from business school, a successful entrepreneur here, has started yet another business: this time an investment company, or as they are known locally, a securities company.
Entrenched now in an apartment in the suburbs of Saigon, I make daily forays into the clogged, fume-filled, noisy, dirty streets of the city I love (Saigon) to try to make sense out of what is known in the biz as a "frontier" market. That means Vietnam has not even risen to the "lofty" standards of an emerging market, and dwells in the same class as stock markets in Bangladesh, for example. For those of you who are familiar with investment terminology, there is not ONE company here with market capitalization over $1 billion.
Applying rusty analytical skills tarnished by years of meditation and yoga, I now sit down on the computer and try to figure out what the projected income of a jack up drill rig in the South China Sea is over a five year period, given that predicting oil prices is like predicting weather - at least in New England. Or which pharmaceutical company will emerge victorious in the impending land war brought on by WTO accession.