nicholas in vietnam

It was our very last day. Me and Đức (the student from VNU who was with me) were sitting on the steps of the traditional K’Tu stilt house where we stayed. The house was built during the Quang Nam year of tourism but who had been the last person to stay in it I have no idea. Two Australian girls did turn up for a few minutes on day 2 while we were making paper planes for the kids but they just stopped for a minute or two.
Đức and I were feeling rather discouraged; we hadn’t been able to go to the forest for more than a day because people said it was too rainy. We had a strong feeling that people in the village were being very secretive about their current hunting activities and we didn’t know whether to trust any of the information we’d got. Different people told us different things and the same people had given contradictory answers to the same questions at different times. Neither of us had done more than a little interview work before, both of us were pinning our theses plans on the belief that it could provide useful data and neither of us had had very much sleep for the last three nights. The fact was that we were getting paranoid. I’d developed an elaborate conspiracy theory based on, it turned out, a complete misunderstanding. I remember Đức saying that a cow was looking at him strangely.
An elderly man who we’d never seen before. suddenly turned up on a motorbike and said that, in a house across the river they’d killed a serow and would we like to see. We would indeed; he gave us a lift
It turned out to be a muntjac, a young male of the common species Muntiacus muntjak. Two men were roasting it whole over an open fire in a little stilt house. The very nice Catholic lady who’d had us over for lunch was there and the headman turned up halfway through and grinned a lot which meant we probably wouldn’t get much information. One wall had a modest display of muntjac and pig skulls, a few porcupines and bamboo rats and a civet’s tail. Nothing spectacular; either they’d sold the rest to traders or, more likely, they only set traps in scrub near the village. The muntjac’s tongue was hanging out and turning blue and the men were scraping hair off the cracking flesh of the body. As the legs and the tail were still unroasted I asked for a sample and they cut off the tip of the tail for me.
“What do you think about this?” Đức asked me in English. I said I didn’t have time to think anything just then; I was working. Later, as we walked back across the bridge, I asked “do you want to know what I think or what I feel?”
“What you feel.” said Đức
But, although I had some thoughts, I still had nothing to say about my feelings. All I knew was that I didn’t like to see the animal’s head being sliced off but I didn’t say that. I said that, as this was a common species with a high rate of reproduction and as they caught it near the village where rarer animals seldom go I didn’t think it was a matter of conservation concern. Also hunting, despite being technically illegal, is the traditional way of life of these people for all that they are now part of the wider Vietnamese society.
Đức is truly passionate about saving the natural heritage of his country. Listening to him talk gives me the kind of hope I’d been looking for ever since I arrived and saw the endless paddyfields empty of birds, read about the rampant trade in everything that breathes in every inch of forest. The hope slides away into that same secret place as my feelings about the butchered muntjac. I know it’s there, I just don’t know if I will ever see it. But it’s being there makes a difference.
And just as we’re preparing to leave someone else suddenly tells us that someone in the next village has some saola horns in his house. So far we’ve only seen one pair and the rest have been sold which is, in itself a very worrying development. We set out down the road, prepared to miss the bus for this.
The hunter is fishing in the pond by his house; he’s in his thirties, younger than anyone else we’ve interviewed. It’s clear I unnerve him but, as we’re accompanied by a friendly old man from the village, he invites us in for tea, served in glasses on a coffee table decorated with pictures of singers from magazines. The saola horns are not hung in the rafters above a smoky fire but are set in a glass display case in the sideboard with some other prize possessions. He gets them out for us – they are an impressive pair and very sharp. I’ll post a picture when I can. Đức gets him talking and in the end he’s very open. I sit silently understanding the gist of the Vietnamese conversation. I intervene via Đức as translator but occasionally because I see the man getting nervous as I’m about to speak. He tells us where he caught the saola, that he has caught one other and that someone else in the village also caught one but sold the horns.
“People keep asking to buy these horns from me,” he says “but I won’t sell them.”
That flicks a switch in my question list. “Who asks to buy them?” I ask.
He does answer: someone from Hue always comes past. He can’t remember his name. What happened to the horns of the other Saola he caught? He has lost them.
At the very last minute of our trip we have struck lucky – this is excellent information. As we leave I want to shake Đức’s hand. The old man is still with us, though. That evening, at the Catholic lady’s house, we have stewed leg of muntjac in a black sauce of spices. It is delicious. We are motorbiked back to Đà nẵng and stay in a cheapo guesthouse for a six o’clock bus the next morning but it was worth it for that interview.
Thinking back on it, in the car up to Huế, I realise that there was something about that hunter I liked. He had a gentle manner and worried eyes that wanted to be honest. But I think the reason I liked him is that he seemed to love the Saola. He spoke about its hair being soft like our own hair, not shaggy like that of the serow. Its meat, he said, was better than that of any other animal, even sambar deer. He said it’s chin curved ‘like a goat’ but his eyes seemed to show a kind of enthusiasm as he showed the shape of the chin with his hand in the air. I’ve only seen photographs but, come to think of it, there is something really beautiful about the curve of the animal’s chin; something in line with its quiet nature, perhaps.
Maybe part of the reason why working gets in the way of thinking and thinking gets in the way of feeling is that working is more certain than thinking and thinking is more certain than feeling; after all I don’t know that any of this is true. I have a series of glimpses: a description of the behaviour of one captive animal in Lao, the words and expressions of people who may have good cause to deceive me, the movement of a hand that describes a slight curve in the air. Perhaps the truth would laugh at the way I feel, perhaps all that matters is that people need to eat and like to eat well and have fun. I don’t want to stick my neck out and say something stupid. And I don’t really know what to say, it is, after all, rather complex.
I think I want phrase a question about living with hidden things.

What I really wanted to do was post these. I read once that a haiku is supposed to be written in a moment of enlightenment. That’s a lot of pressure, I think, not to mention the whole 17 syllables thing.

My eye a clear lake
A fly is taking a long drink
It really is a very long drink.

I just thought 
It was quite a nice flower, OK
Excuse me for breathing!

Right that was fun
Right then now what?
Oh yeah.

Back in Hanoi. We spent a week in a Thai temple, a fantastical place of gold and sprawling dragons. We were wearing white and not talking, looking downwards and not making eye contact. Sitting and walking meditation for six hours on the first day and upwards from there.

In the evening I would practice by the Bodhi tree, bare feet on bubbled black basalt flagstones as the shadows of bamboo faded into the shadows overall. Walking very slowly: lifting, moving, putting, lifiting, moving, putting. Whistling ducks wheeled in the evening sky and mosquitoes circled around my elbows. Four gold images of the Buddha faced the four points of the compass around the trunk of the huge tree. I remember beauty though most of the time I sat with a frown and felt nothing.

I always imagined Vipassna was hardcore: just sit for hours and hours, everything else is forbidden. If you feel agony, sit with the agony. I put up a lot of resistance to going. The introductory session seemed to confirm my opinion but by then I was in and I swallowed it all – I would do it, sit for days stiff and frowning and keep the rules strict as I could. But I secretly hoped that my pain was so great, because in me somewhere rolled up was all the pain of the dying earth and in the end it would prove too much for me as it would have proved too much for anyone and, in the middle of meditation I would suddenly scream out and collapse  and it wouldn’t have been my fault at all. Kind of childish.

But the teacher kept telling me to go easier on myself. I don’t want to start telling stories about the meditation and any insights I supposedly had (although of course I already am in my head). But I do now see that, if even from the Vipassna angle (which I thought was the most severe) I am doing myself a mischief for no good reason then, really, I clearly need to be a bit softer.

I feel this post is very inadequate. I’m not even really sure I should have written it. It’s kind of an apology for the last one.

Murray, one of our dharma teachers at Cambridge, once said to me (about environmentalism) that I had to put aside my anger because my anger would only alienate people. At the time I just felt numb but then, as I started saying angry things, his words began to come back to me but I didn’t really seem able to change what I was saying.

I think I’m tired, I’m still proud of saying sad things and sad of saying proud things. Nothing has really changed except that everything changes all the time. I still take this blog far too seriously.

Happy new year everybody.