Vietnam - December '94 to January '95

Only 3-4 months after my first trip to Southeast Asia, I received a request to return to Vietnam from an advertising client of mine. Diane, a middle-aged single Creative Director from Jacksonville was fascinated with the idea of seeing Vietnam, but felt a bit uncomfortable as a woman traveling alone through a war-torn Third World country. I assured her it was completely safe, but agreed to join her since Vietnam was very much still on my mind.

Out of all the countries I had visited on the previous trip, Vietnam really lingered with me. In retrospect I have long come to realize that it was the power of myth that held sway over me. I graduated high school in 1986, but even at that time World History classes usually ended with the Korean Conflict and American society still was not regarding Vietnam as a lost war. The wounds still ran deep.

The closest I came to learning anything about the Vietnam War in an academic setting was during my World History class in 11th grade. It had been established that my teacher, Mr. Carson, a Vietnam veteran, had traditionally used the last day of the school year to discuss the war. I looked forward with some anticipation to this day, but it ended up being a series of anecdotes about a scared 19-year old sharing a foxhole in the jungle with a buddy with dysentery. Nothing about the politics of the situation. My education of Vietnam remained what movies and tv had fed me for years.

So that first trip began a process of peeling back layers and challenging the ridiculous myths I carried in my head. Like meeting a celebrity in real life, Vietnam was becoming more human to me. Though unlike meeting a celebrity, Vietnam was becoming more fascinating to me. Back in the States I ended up writing 40 pages of notes about an experience that was increasingly obsessing me

So gladly, I gave up a holiday with my family and headed back with Diane to keep journals of my experience. Eventually I wrote about 100 more pages of what I thought would be a book. Maybe it'll be another blog.

The pages below are from when I visited Qbar, an expat joint in Saigon. Showing my sketches to Thuy, a gorgeous bartendress, (who is sketched further below), she took my book and wrote out my first Vietnam language lessons for me.
I had little inkling at the time that Qbar would become my regular hang-out, 2-3 years later when I ended up living in Saigon.



Around this trip I also began to realize the nature and importance of the sketchbook process in my travels. With the previous recorded journeys, I ended up finishing a complete book on this trip. It felt good to have something so ragged, textural, and personalized to preserve the experience. During this time I began the habit of making subjects sign the book after I drew their portraits and even sometimes letting them take a shot at drawing me.


Diane and I spent the first few days in Saigon, before hiring a car and driver to take us up the coast, to the Central Highlands (which reminded me of a scaled down San Francisco region with the cool air, pine trees and mountains). From there we headed to Nha Trang, the beach town, to spend Christmas.

The local children loved Diane, who, with her Southern Belle demeanor and blond hair, looked as exotic to them as they to her. Thirteen years on, some of my most vivid and warm memories of that trip are when we pulled the car over to an anonymous roadside shack in Central Vietnam for a break from the bumpy ride. Diane spent the next hour making a score of local urchins laugh their little butts off with her imitations of farm animals.

Christmas Eve we spent at an open-air seafood place on Nha Trang's beach. A local vendor, savvy to the time of year for Westerners, wandered around selling sparklers. Diane, filling the role of Santa, would hand out some Vietnamese currency to a couple little kids to buy sparklers and light them for her on the beach before us.

This had the effect of tossing some crumbs of bread to just a few seagulls.

Before you knew it, there were about 10 or 15 little kids prancing up and down the moonlit beach with sparklers. With so much youthful joy on parade, Diane, who had no children, was in maternal bliss. With a beatific look on her face, she glanced over from the celebrating pixies and exhaled, " I'm in heaven."



We continued driving up the coast, stopping in Da Nang, Hoi An, up through the dramatic Hai Van pass with it's amazing coastal views and then down into the ancient capitol city of Hue.


Hue, once being the center for Vietnamese royalty, previously was the site of an extensive palace, hundreds of years old. Unfortunately, except for a few key buildings, much of this historic architecture was flattened during the Tet Offensive of 1968 when Hue was under seige.

At that time in 1994, when you wandered the grounds, it was not difficult to spot signs of this: broken tile and china, spent bullet casings and rusting smoke cannisters.

One rainy day, I climbed the to the top of the ancient wall that surrounded the old part of the city. Amidst a rubble-strewn pile of bricks I came across a brown piece of fabric, about the size of my sketchbook page. It had many tiny violent holes in it, as though from shrapnel, and appeared as if it torn from some NVA soldier's fatigues.

At this time I was beginning to get into the habit of collecting interesting textures to montage into my book, so I took it back to my hotel and laid it out to dry.

That night I had incredibly spooky and horrifying nightmares that freaked me out. In the morning I deduced that I may have been messing with some poor soul's final resting spot before departing this world. So I returned the fabric to the exact place I found it, hoping to restore any spiritual dignity I might have disturbed.

From Hue, Diane and I flew to Hanoi as the traveler's word of mouth had suggested that much of the land in between is flat and uninspiring, and really just many many more hours of bumping along the roads of a country with a weak infrastructure.


Hanoi was impressive in it's romantic ambiance, thanks to the extensive French colonial architecture that really defined the city, and the fact that some of the men over the age of 60 wore berets.

And of course, a trip to Hanoi isn't complete without a visit with Bac Ho, who lays in permanent state in a glass coffin within a heavy-handed Communist looking masoluem. No pictures allowed, of course and you're not allowed to stop the slow single-file shuffle, circulating at a distance from the old man in a very dark room. But Uncle Ho looked great.


After a few days in Hanoi, including New Year's Eve( which I drunkenly spent with a bunch of Belgians in the bar, "Apocalypse Now"), Diane and I went our separate ways. She elected to head in-country for a few days to the hill tribes of Sapa.

Entranced by the limestone formations I saw featured in the French film, "Indochine" I elected to head to Halong Bay. (Again, little knowing that several years later in Saigon I start what would ultimately become a close acquaintance with Linh Dan, the actress who played Catherine Deneuve's adopted daughter in that film. Small world.)


The journey to Halong Bay was about 4-5 hours over land by bus. About halfway there we had to stop, along with scores of other vehicles, at the Red River to await a tugboat to push a very large barge across the water to meet us.

Several weeks before I had packed nothing but clothing for warm tropical weather. Well, Northern Vietnam it turns out is friggin cold. I was wearing my one long-sleeve item, a silk jacket I had bought in humid Venice two years before - not too effective against the damp cold and windy air I was bracing against. As we unloaded off the bus for a bit, I sprinted for the line of bamboo shacks housing vendors who serviced the barge-waiting crowd.

Inside a group of young girls stood behind souvenir stands, enveloped in big down jackets and heavy mufflers. I desperately needed a scarf and no one spoke English. So I began to pantomime being cold (cross arms tightly and shake). They pointed to expensive down jackets hanging on the wall. It was too much of an investment for the two days I would be in Halong Bay, so I put my hands to neck and pantomimed wrapping something.

The girls stared back at me blankly with looks that said " Why is that white guy choking himself?"

Finally one girl's eyes widened in comprehension. She cried out excitedly and quickly unwrapped her own handmade scarf from her neck and sold it to me for two dollars. It was a red/blue/and purplish plaid number that I wore for years and eventually mourned it's loss after a rambunctious night out on the town in NYC.




Below is the portrait of Thuy, the bartender I mentioned previously. She was still working in Qbar a couple years later when I lived in Saigon. Thuy had a somewhat austere manner about her which, mixed with her exotic looks, could be kind of intimidating. But I remember on the last occasion that I saw her, on a flight from Saigon to Bangkok, she looked very different.

Thuy was with her much older, middle-aged European boyfriend who was taking her back to his home country. It was the first time she was leaving Vietnam and coincidently, they sat behind me. From the time the Thai Airways flight took off to the time we disembarked at the large and very expansive Dom Muang airport in Bangkok, Thuy had this unguarded look of innocence and wonder, like a child who was entering Willy Wonka's world.

One of Qbar's Vietnamese patrons took a shot at drawing me and another patron, below:


The last pages of my sketchbook are often filled with writings, scribblings, directions and little notes from other travelers or locals as we tried to communicate something. The pages below are from a young woman who served me when I sat down in a cafe after wandering Hanoi alone for a few hours. She had long, very permed hair and said she was a design student. She said her spoken English was not as good as her written English, so took my book and wrote down the things she wanted to ask me.