nicholas in vietnam

Though Christmas lies between and might fog my memory somewhat, I think it’s time to report on my first survey. I left on the fourteenth of December after frantic packing. Hannah’s old red rucksack, which I borrowed was stuffed up with plaster of paris and silica gel for taking samples of tracks and dung. I bought a ticket in the morning for the long train south.
I was going to the north of Quang Nam province to find out whether, one way or another, I might find any trace of my study species there. My study species, for those of you who don’t know, is the saola, the beast that caused a stir by being discovered by science in 1992, when the number of known large mammals was supposed to be shrinking not growing and secrets of that size were supposed to all be gone. The saola lives only in the Annamite mountains, the ancient rain-soaked range that divides the ancient kingdoms of Vietnam and Lao, that separates the tides of Chinese and Indian culture and holds in its crags a heritage much older, and older than the ice.
As I was about to leave I got an email from my friend Sam who had just finished a survey. He was searching for another five-letter Asian animal: the Baiji, dolphin of the Yangtze. It seems like the results of the survey were widely reported on the news: As far as anyone can tell, the baiji is extinct.
It is impossible to say what the age of a species is because the meaning of ’species’ gets lost in time and anyway we haven’t the fossils to track their histories. But it is possible to talk about the divergence times of species – that is, how long ago the lineage of that species split off from any others still alive today -  how much evolutionary experience that species represents. As far as we can judge the baiji diverged from all other cetaceans 20 million years ago. It was perhaps the most ancient single lineage of all the weird and ancient order of cetaceans, it is now the first cetacean to have been eliminated by humans.
I like to point out that the ‘ancient’ nation of China is only one five-thousandth the age of the baiji lineage. That perhaps the baiji’s extinction might serve as a reminder that past performance is no guarantee of future success. Endangered species, after all, are our canaries in the coalmines; warning signs about our own survival.
Yeah, yeah, so sayeth the blog. Anyway, about my trip:
It was good to feel like I was really doing something and in a weird way I felt on top of things. Although I made shedloads of mistakes (like falling too far into the clutches of the village headman and so being unable to escape hiring his family as guides) I felt they were all basic beginners mistakes. At no point did I get that numbing feeling that has hit me in the past that goes: “this is a useless piece of research, overambitious and ill-conceived and it will net me nothing for a lot of hard work and discomfort but a shifting set of numbers and some stats that don’t connect”.
It was hard work: the country there is sliced by white streams, ever-running over blocks of black rock, carving chutes and falls and pools in black walled gorges where grey ferns and green snakes stand out bright against the stone. Between, the streams leave knife-edge ridges with slopes steep as the rain, thick with tangle and slick with mud. The saola, they say, is seen on the streams. Indeed one man from the next town had said he’d shot a party of three by one of the waterfalls here three years ago. No westerner, and no scientist has ever seen a saola in the wild. Do they really like the leaves along the streams, or is it simply that the hunters themselves tend to wait there. Or do the saola, like the hunters and like us, use the streams as roads? The ridges, certainly, are no joke; me and Hung passed a freezing day in the endless drizzle running transects along the flanks of one. Our guides gave up and went back to camp. In the end we found nothing, which was all I expected but then, coming back along the stream I found a green mess of dung on a rain-soaked rock by the stream, bringing the total for the trip up to two. It’s now in a sealed bag in a sealed box in the freezer, awaiting shipment to America for genetic identification. It’s probably serow dung – a creature like a shaggy chamois that shares the Saola’s home. But at least we’ll know. If I get enough dung samples analysed then maybe we can work out what saola dung looks like and it is just possible that we will find enough of it (if we know how to look) to find out something about where the saola are and how they live: some basis for protection.
There’s too much to say about the situation of wildlife in Vietnam, iron filings in an acid bath about sums it up. All mammals are valid meat and once they’re almost used up, markets can be found for birds, reptiles, even insects. The last large mammals in the accessible forests are easily killed off by opportunistic bug collectors. As more and more roads are built, more and more forests become accessible. As more people become richer, more of them are likely to come up with the idea that it would be cool to have a stuffed saola in their living room. Without a serious protection effort the saola has no hope, none whatsoever. It’s hard to describe how desparate its situation is, and depressing to try.
Sam said ‘the world is that little bit greyer, and what’s more, most people won’t give a damn’
Oh there’s so much more to say on this but I have no time. I’m off to an insight meditation course in Thailand for ten days.

Trying to help Hannah out the gate with her motorbike I see a little old lady on a high stool picking green starfruit over the wall. I ask if I can help.

‘Just the biggest ones,’ she tells me as I get up on the stool. At least I think that’s what she’s saying. Like my great aunt Gilda she talks very fast in a steady stream and I have only the vaguest sense of what she’s on about. I give her six of the largest fruits which she then pushes into my hands, amkes me unlock the gate and bundles me inside. ‘Don’t worry, go home.’ she says. ‘Lock the gate.’

So now I have six unripe starfruit. Any ideas, anyone?

I walk through the market, looking for breakfast. I reject an enthusiastic offer of live eels and plump for xôi khúc instead. Xôi is sticky rice and khúc is an orange bristly gourd like a teenage pumpkin. I go and eat it on the piers of the steps into the lake, sitting under a willow tree and watching the little grebes out on the grey water. It’s good, but to be honest pumpkin is not one of the classic breakfast flavours; it needs  a little sesame salt IMHO.

As I leave a kingfisher streaks out from the bank and bolts away low, leaving a wake of terror in the fish-packed water.

By the rules of nanowrimo I now have 2 days to write 25,000 words, effectively doubling my total in the last 28 days. Some hidden part of my psyche loves getting into this sort of situation.

we’ve just moved.

		Our old apartment was a way south of town in the foreign language university compound. We were a clean little world on the fourth floor with a starfruit tree way below. It was a very little world with 2 rooms, no kitchen, and two single beds shoved together. There was an excercise ground in the middle of the campus, it was peaceful away from the main road.
		Our new house is down a warren of streets (OMT) closer to the centre. Hanoi is really an agglomeration of villages; there’s a communal courtyard out back with a well, dogs & chickens (4am wake-up) and a fruit tree whose name I don’t know. It’s a three floor house (!). We have one housemate, Joey.

Our first night was not so restful. A family in the block out front were having a four-hour long argument. But last night we moved to a room at the back of the house and it was less noisy. Some mysterious ladies just delivered some microbial drain cleaner. Things are looking up. All we need now is a mosquito net.

I’m reading a book called ‘The Love of Nature and the End of the World.’ The general worldview is very similar to Joanna Macy’s Deep Ecology although the ideas are expressed in a different way.It got me thinking about different explanations I’ve heard for why we aren’t doing enough about ‘the environmental crisis’ These, in patronisingly simple form, are the ones I could think of. Can anyone else think of any others? Does anyone prefer one over another?

1) Because we can’t bear the pain and so are in denial (this is the Deep Ecology argument I know)
2) Because we don’t have a gameplan for solving it so we might as well not know (a political revolutionary’s view)
3) Because powerful people (who aren’t threatened as much as the rest of us, or don’t think they are) deceive us into thinking that there is no problem
4) Because powerful people deceive us into thinking that, even if there is a problem, we are powerless to solve it [and maybe they're right].
5) Because of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ – an economic argument. If I don’t kill this whale, burn this forest, drive my car, somebody else will. So my sacrifice will be for nothing and otherpeople will get benefits which I am denying myself so I might as well not bother.
6) Because our minds just aren’t big enough to cope with the complexity, scale and diffuse nature of the problem (and perhaps our minds never were big enough and never previously needed to be). This is a psychological argument which may or may not have an evolutionary slant.
7) Because it’s just not done to talk about that sort of thing in polite society. It puts a damper on the conversation (this may be tied to ideas about the mania of consumerist society)
8.) Because, in an urban/ technological/ humanist society ‘the environment’ just isn’t part of what we care about any more, emotionally or practically. (I met someone on the train the other day who found out that Indonesian fishermen continued to destroy the reef, not because they didn’t care about their children and grandchildren but because they wanted to liquidate the reef’s capital in order to send their children to college so they didn’t have to be fishermen any more.)
9) We are doing enough/There is no crisis

I’m not rejecting number one by any means, but I’m just realising that it’s not the only one I’ve heard. Of course they aren’t all mutually exclusive. Number six, in particular fascinates me right now. I know I’m being cold, dispassionate and weird about this – I’m not quite sure what to do about that right now.

I’m back in Hanoi and I’ve resolved to keep this blog going. Unfortunately it’s not the only thing I’ve promised to do. Following Hannah’s example I’ve signed up to the National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org). It’s Americanly national, not Vietnamese but actually it’s international, just that inanowrimo sounds bad.
Well I’m not really sure I want to write a novel and I’ve been kind of scratching at things for the last week in England, even while I was zipping about between the towns I know seeing people and libraries and feeling fine. But writing on the train didn’t really work. Writing on the plane was an even worse idea.
But, novels or nursery rhymes, writing brings out something in me – a need to take things in. The vibrancy of the world matters when you’re writing. I began, back in England, to find again that strong simple joy in trees, in the flight of birds, in the things which gather dust and sunlight which I associate with my first flush of Buddhism. And I had a lot of joy, too in seeing my friends and family. I ought to say I allowed myself a lot of joy because I wasn’t able to always refer instead to the important things I was doing. I couldn’t evaluate each hour in their terms. I knew the most important reason for being in England in October – even though I wasn’t starting a PhD – was to see my grandmother.
The things I’m doing do seem important, and they’re also unstructured – or rather they’re not currently structured by anyone else – which makes it easier to feel guilty about them. But thinking I had to explain my aim of being here in Vietnam was the reason I stipped this blog before. I’ll leave it for now.
Sticking within the city, I realise how hard Hanoi can be. When I went to meet Tim out of the Underground in London, I watched all the people coming up the stairs. Though they were all so wonderfully various they all had the exact same serious expression. In Hanoi, I remembered, it is the opposite. But in Hanoi I still feel uncomfortable. The big trees, the shadows of wrought ironwork on the evening walls, are beautiful. So are the people beautiful – from a distance. But I know that, on a short walk around the square, anyone might stop and talk to me and I find that hard. When you step out into the street in Hanoi, you are a participant, not a customer. It sounds good doesn’t it? But there are millions of us!!

Today on the way back from the student canteen I came upon a longhorn beetle on the pavement. It was a stunning creature, a bit over an inch long and midnight-blue with bright blue-white nebula flashes on its back. The antennae were striped like a blue tiger's tail and curved like the horns of a water-buffalo although they were proportionately much longer, each one at least twice the body's length.

The flashy appearance contrasted with its bumbling behaviour. Most longhorns look endearingly clumsy but this one was a real charmer; twice it fell over on its back while trying to climb a little wall. Eventually I let it climb onto my hands - its slowly cranking legs carefully laid big padded clown's feet down on my pink skin. It fell off but landed happily on top of the wall. As it walked away towards the drop (and the shade) on the other side its left hindmost leg began to make spasmodic kicks; it looked like an elderly gentleman suffering from a schrapnel wound. After a while it stopped uncertainly and began a weird dance with all six legs. It looked very funny but it was clear it wasn't well.

It was a very hot day and I considered that perhaps I should take it in and then let it go from the roof in the cooler evening. I could even keep it in the fridge during the day where it ought to go into torpor and feel nothing. I really wasn't sure if such a fantastic creature belonged in this dusty city. Perhaps it had hatched out of a chunk of wood brought in from the rainforest – perhaps even out of our bed where the monstrous woodworm which could be heard chomping away a few weeks ago has gone recently silent. I felt like, in this case, my interference would be justified but I was worried I would kill the creature. I'd failed to keep alive two water snails which we picked off some vegetables a week or two ago and I knew that Hannah would  be very upset if this 'pet' died too. In the end I left it and hoped it would find the shade. In general that is what I do when I see something upsetting, whether it's a beggar on the street or a report of burning forest far away. I've tended towards optimism.

In this case it was unjustified becaue I found the beetle dead on the road later in the day – at least I hope it was dead, it had ants all over it. For a moment I thought of blowing them off and taking it home in case I met a beetle collector (they go nuts for longhorns) but the ants had already made off with one whole antenna so it wouldn't have made a very good specimen.

Obviously nothing's really lost – big blue beetles become little red ants. And also become memories in my head and words on this blog  – which may not be much but it's a lot more fame than most beetles get. A couple of weeks ago all the cockroaches (there aren't that many) suddenly decided to rush madly out of houses and die horribly in the burning sun. I can't say I felt that sad about that, a bit puzzled but not really sad. Cockroaches are nervous and unpredictable, like horses, and therefore scary – the very opposite of this beetle. But mostly it isn't that, it's the rarity value.

OK it's a silly way of asking this question but at least it's a new way. I've met a linguist trying to record vanishing languages, an anthropologist saddened and concerned by the swamping of an ancient culture, I'm reading a book writted by a city planner saddened by the loss of the unique heritage and character of Hanoi and I'm here as part of the same weird quest.

There are very few adverts in Hanoi but today the canteen put up a new Pepsi awning, and umbrellas – much brighter blue than the beetle. People in remote mountain villages, watching TV for the first time, are amazed and wonder at all the things we take for granted and even complain about. They will put up with a marked drop in their living conditions so that they might enjoy these things in the future, so that these wonderful things may come their way. To do this they need money and selling wild animals to traders may be the only way of getting it.

Meanwhile bored by a place of cars and trains, abundant food and more TV and alcohol than I could ever want (which isn't really much), I come out here with the view to finding out about, and maybe helping save, a strange, dark, gentle, mysterious beast of high and distant forests.

So far I haven't even managed to save one beetle – and I really am sad about the beetle, I'm not just pretending in order to write a pretentious blog-post.

What I want to know is, is there any meaning in the transformations, or does it just depend where you stand?

I just ordered a dreamwater (a sweet one) and it turned out to be prune juice. Apparently mơ means prune as well as dream.
It's like in every room I walk into is a footprint just beginning to fill up with water.

Yesterday I went to the temple for the day. In the evening I met Hannah in town and we went to a Jazz club.

The main hall in the temple has a triple-vaulted roof, although it is not very high. Lying on your back on the plastic woven mats you can see the intricate carvings on the ceilings and that the underside of every tile was printed with the symbol of longevity. Some carving is new and some is older; it is hard to tell. Outside is a patio courtyard with longan and grapefruit trees bearing unripe fruit; the weather is changeable. At the end of the opposite building is a hemicircular well-pool where tilapia gape like carp between the waterlilies. Hopping everywhere through the gardens were tiny toads. On the walking meditation, the children pointed them out to each other. Tailorbirds fretted in the vines about the door.

The altar at the end of the hall, where one feels an altar should be, is a cabinet of dark wood inlaid with highly intricate mother-of-pearl scenes of crags bristling with bamboo and birds and insects landing and leaving. Behind this is a huge painting of the Buddha in an orange robe, seated at the base of a massive tree by a river in the forest. Around his crossed legs the pink lotus petals bloom like a double gas-ring. His lips are cherry-red, and I don’t remember if his eyes are closed or open – it doesn’t seem to matter. My own eyes are drawn past his bare left shoulder into the deep forest painted behind. Halfway round the frame runs a line of red fairy-lights, the other half is dark. The offerings on the altar are a bunch of phasmid-green bananas and two boxes of biscuits.

To the left, in the shadows, is a far more elaborate triple altar, fraught with red-bronze curling dragons and spreading phoenix wings. At the front two painted statues of the baby buddha have been placed. Behind, against the wall sits the fierce, bearded Boddhidharma, first patriarch of Zen. Either side are two rather drawn-looking disciples and, in front, photographs of venerable monks. I think this is the altar dedicated to the ancestors. White vases with blue dragons hold sheaves of incense sticks.

Above a door with a bead curtain, in a white moon-circle on a black board, Vietnamese calligraphy reads 'no fear'.
Nuns in pearl grey robes invite the brass bowl bell, and people gather round to share their thoughts through the microphone. I get a summary translation from a bright-eyed man who has been here twice before. The thoughts are all very positive and enthusiastic, sometimes fiery. In western Buddhist circles people talk more about their difficulties. Under the fan, the hair of the old woman in front crackles like lightning from a plasma ball.

In the jazz club we order drinks because the music’s free. Posters of the revered ancestors of jazz decorate the walls. Above our table is a photo of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone with the caption ‘ Unfortunately, due to his busy schedule on his historic visit to Vietnam in 1999, we did not have the opportunity to welcome President Clinton at Minh’s jazz club.’

The band’s a quartet. Or, as Hannah assumes, a saxophonist with the club’s own backing group. The jazz doesn’t get the official thumbs up from her, but she says she’s enjoying not enjoying it. She enjoys this so much that she sometimes breaks out into sudden laughter or applause and her hair seems to curl tighter. The bit I like best is a drum solo which makes my face do involuntary Popeye impressions. ‘So much energy’ Hannah says of the drummer ‘if you could spend just a little bit less energy you’d be more cool’. I keep my face turned to the stage.

 The saxophonist is also expending a lot of energy, he’s in his forties and solidly built for a Vietnamese. He looks like little explosions keep going off inside him and about 60% of the blast force comes out through the sax, the rest of it manifesting through his body and making his fringe flap like a toupee. The other three are much younger: the drummer self-confident, the keyboard-guy chubby and careful and the female bassist, in the background, alternating between nun-like concentration and manifest boredom; she doesn't seem to want a solo. To the left, on top of an amp, a Yoda-sized Chinese laughing Buddha looks like he’s accompanying on the accordion. A little picture of Sakyamuni Buddha, like the huge one in the temple, stands on a small wall-mounted altar near the door. He has been offered a bottle of Gordon’s Gin.