Bangkok and Hue , June 1995

In June of 1995, I returned to Vietnam once again, my third trip within a year. I guess I was on some sort of vision quest as now I was determined to experience Vietnam with more focused awareness of how I processed things as a young American. In looking back, I was at a real turning point in my life.

I had been born in the city, grown up in the suburbs, gone to an internationally attended art school, and returned to the city. But nothing was challenging my sense of critical thinking like these trips to Vietnam. In order to make sense of it all and maybe validate the journeys I began to act as a reporter, covering myself in a sense. Eventually the data I recorded at this time became about 100 pages of an abandoned nonfiction novel.

So as not to bore anyone who doesn't care, two of the chapters I wrote around 1996 can be found by clicking HERE.

The chapters cover the same time period that I did the below sketches. On this trip I spent a few days in Saigon and about week or so in Hue.




Presented in greater detail in the chapter postings is my account of randomly meeting a married artist couple, Anh and Vinh, at the Art University in Hue. Both professors at the school, he was a sculptor and she a painter.
Speaking English with me, they very graciously invited me over to their house one afternoon where I spent about 4 or 5 hours drinking tea, looking at their artwork, and sketching portraits of each other.



Additionally in Hue I unexpectedly found myself in a very innocent romance with a local woman for several days. She and her family ran a popular restaurant and for some reason she found me worthy of her attention, so volunteered to be my guide to the countryside outside Hue. What made it especially interesting was that she was deaf and mute. (My old neighbor Steve, who used to hire me as a laborer in high school at his construction sites heard just those details and cried, "She sounds perfect!" as his wife rolled her eyes.)
These interesting and fond times are also written about in the chapters.



Also on this trip, I had two chance encounters with people in Saigon. I was hanging out with a recent grad in the expat bar "Apocalypse Now" talking about RISD, my alma mater.

" You went to RISD?" he asked, " That guy over there went to RISD too", pointing to Andrew, a stocky short guy with glasses across the room.

I went over and introduced myself to Andrew and talked for about 10 minutes before I stopped and really recognized him.

"Wait a minute! I know you. I painted houses for you one summer. You fired me!" This was true, but I hadn't recognized my old boss as he had cut off his long hair. Andrew broke out into a big smile at the weird crossing of paths.

" Frankly I was a lousy painter anyway" I confessed.

On another night, in another expat bar, Q-bar, I met Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys. After introducing myself he showed interest in my sketchbook, telling me his father is an artist who always used to bring sketchbooks to family outings.

Adam was starting his first big non-concert trip through Asia with some high school friends. He told me later he was going to visit several other countries of interest, including Tibet. I guess it was on this trip that lead to his own personal quest as Tibet became a very big cause for him a couple years later. I understand he eventually even married a Tibetan woman.

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.

When the East meets a scruffy art school brat - September '94

This posting is a bit more text than sketches since my first trip to Asia was an epic assault on all my senses. I didn’t really start sketching until I returned on future trips when I was able to process the experience a little slower. (future posts)

In the fall of 1994, my roommate, John, a Merrill Lynch summer associate, told me he was flying to Vietnam for a week. With its romantic and war-torn past, it was too much for an American voyeur to pass up. I jumped on the opportunity to journey into this mythological place.

Europe? Whatever. See it, done it. I was ready for a challenge.

Unlike John, I had no vacation days to use up, as I had no job. I thought if I was going to the far side of the world that I might optimize and spend a week in Thailand, a week in Taiwan, and a week in Japan, as well. (this one trip alone gave me enough miles for a free round-trip domestic ticket.)

But I didn’t do any sketches of my first week in Vietnam for several reasons:

One, I was a bit over-whelmed by the country.

Two, I had a camcorder in my hand most of the time. But more importantly-

Three, because when you are traveling with non-artists there is very little time to stop and study a place longer than it takes to snap a picture. Then it’s usually on to the next place, instant memory captured. It made me realize how valuable my sketchbook was in really experiencing a place, really being in the moment.

Alone, I must sit for 30 or 45 minutes to do a sketch of a place. Doing this affords me to study the daily cycle of life on any given street corner – the sounds, the smells, the ebb and flow. Being alone invites locals to look over my shoulder and admire, which often results in me turning my attention to capture their great faces in my book.

I love doing this because often the people I draw are ordinary civilians or even street people. In almost all cases they usually are amused, momentarily embarrassed, and finally proud to be deemed important enough to be recorded.

But when you’re walking around with two other pasty-white guys bearing fanny packs and sweaty brows, the locals usually keep a distance.

In Thailand we met up with John’s American cousin, Rich-san, who came in from Japan with his Japanese girlfriend Tomiko. She in turn was meeting up with her Boston College roommate, a famous Thai pop-singer who went by the name Em. ( She apparently was known throughout the Thai kingdom for a song called “Sau, Sau, Sau” or something like that. My apologies to Em, wherever you are, if I really screwed that up.)

Em must have been famous since when we went to meet up with her in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel (regularly rated the top hotel in the world) all the local Thais turned their heads, wide-eyed, and whispered to each other in excited but hushed tones.

Em must have been famous since she took us to a very classy and posh restaurant that served Royal Thai cuisine where each bite was both extremely tasty and too spicy for my western mouth.

Em must have been famous since she pretty much wouldn’t stop talking about herself.

But she was nice about treating us all to lunch and she did think I was cute in a scruffy way. Still, had I known we were going to a fancy place ahead of time, I would have worn something a little nicer than my RISD sweatshirt, khaki shorts and sandals. Feeling a bit self-conscious about my budget traveler attire, I tried to keep my hairy bare legs hidden under the crisp linen table cloth.

The week in Vietnam consisted of a few days in Saigon, and a few days in Danang and Hoi An. The trip ended with me in the Continental Hotel truly believing I was dying from a 24-hour stomach virus, thanks to a bad batch of scrambled eggs from a hotel in Danang. There’s nothing like vomiting, shaking, sweating, hallucinating, and host of other horrors while your Mommy is on the other side of the world. But incredibly after 24 hours of that maelstrom, I was fine.

I’ll write more about Vietnam in future postings, though, as it became a very big part of my life in future trips.

After Rich and John took off for home, I hung out in Bangkok for another day or two, haunting the bars of Khao San Road, the backpacker ghetto. There I met two guys my age, Tim Murphy, a serious-minded Irish law student with round spectacles, and Chris Solly, an affable tall and skinny Englishman. Together we decided to brave Patpong, the legendary sex-bar district. You can’t go to Bangkok and not say you haven’t seen a goofy sex show.

So the three of us God-fearing souls, a bit nervous about entering a seedy sex club, agreed to pick one on the main drag, adjacent to where many tourists frequent a night market. Of course no sooner had we firmly decided on this than we got lead away by a young tout advertising a “cheap place”. He waved a little laminated menu in our face advertising beers for 50 baht (about 2 dollars) and a free show. The “cheap place” was through several winding dark alleyways and up a rickety flight of stairs, COMPLETELY out of site of the main drag.

Yikes.

We sat down, each had a beer and watched a lame sex show where bored little naked Thai girls performed tricks with their genitals. To our left, a fat drunk German blissfully sat in a dark corner as several naked little things massaged his stomach and giggled. Not finding the ambiance very settling we decided to pay for our “cheap beers” and move on.

When we got to the cashier, we were told we owed not 150 baht as promised (6 dollars), but 900 baht (36 dollars) and a sign that was not there when we entered was suddenly and conveniently produced, stating 300 baht a beer.

We had been scammed.

And, of course, our little tout was no where to be seen. Instead several muscular and menacing- looking Thais appeared in his place, surrounding us.

When we objected, the proprietor leaned over his counter and angrily yelled "You Pay 900 Baht NOW!!"

Tim tried to put up a lame argument which only resulted in the thugs moving in closer on us. His thinking was to firmly arbitrate a solution. My thinking was “ Let’s pay these fuckers, get the hell out of here, and chalk it up to a costly but funny anecdote, not a lesson learned the hard way as it appeared to quickly be moving towards.”

After a minute of the owner yelling at us to pay and fists becoming clenching, I slapped down the money for all three of us and pulled my friends away.

Outside, our Irish law student was still demanding justice, angrily repeating, "Let’s go to the fooking Police."

I voiced my skepticism at what the police would do, aside from laugh at us, but Tim insisted.

Well I was wrong.

At the local police stand, a senior police officer listened politely with an amused smile and then calmly swaggered back toward the bar with us in tow. When we turned a corner, our little tout saw us and suddenly ran ahead to the bar in a panic. We hadn’t even reached the bottom of the stairway when the owner and all the thugs came down with a pile of money.

The policeman didn’t even have to say a word. As the proprietor nervously doled out the baht back into my hands, the officer quietly maintained his amused smile. I mistakenly did some wrong math and looked at the owner, confused. The owner then just gave me the rest, effectively giving us free drinks, and then some

It was then that I learned that the Thai police want to protect tourists who visit the sex district. Apparently they are notoriously brutal on offenders to tourists. It’s a big source of revenue they don’t want to discourage, and lord knows what payoffs go on for the police working that beat.

Now that justice had been served and the three of us had become more discriminating in our ways, we picked a new girly bar safely on the beaten path. No gross Germans, just a naked Thai couple having sex on a Harley in the middle of the serving bar.

I left the slimy back alleys of Bangkok and headed up to scenic Chang Mai in Northern Thailand for a week, visiting mountainous temples, wadding knee deep through monsoon floods, and getting fantastic traditional Thai massages (legit, mind you) for about eight dollars per two hours. I also bought a cassette tape of Em’s songs and bragged to the impressed locals about how she took me out to lunch.

From Thailand I flew to Taipei, Taiwan to visit the family of my friend Sylvia, who was back in NYC. When I arrived her older uncle, who spoke no English, picked me up at the exit (holding a sign with my name) and drove me to her parent’s house. Most of the 30-40 minute drive from the airport was spent conversing through pantomime, grunts, and smiles.

As Sylvia’s father was a doctor, her family lived on the top of a four or five floor medical center in the middle of Taipei. They were very accommodating to this westerner, almost too much. At meals, although Sylvia’s younger sister and her parents ate family style, picking from many little dishes on the table, they always gave me a big plate with a sample of everything and a can of Coke.

The Won’s had an amazing collection of art in one room. Ancient ceramics seemed to be their specialty, but I was most impressed by a framed robe worn by the Last Emperor of China. They proudly displayed the depth of their ceramics knowledge at the excellent Taipei museum which has the largest collection of Chinese art in the world, thanks to Chang Kai-Shek and his buddies who fled the mainland with a pretty comprehensive booty.

Irma, Sylvia’s sister took me out one night to take in the Taipei nightlife. In 1994 it seemed to consist of two things: 1)cruising the outdoor markets for beans and shaved ice, then going to a tea house, or 2) karaoke. We did the former with a nice medical student that Irma was dating –SECRETLY dating apparently.

At the end of the night before we got back home, Irma took me aside and asked that I not tell her parents about the boy. It seems he was only 2^nd generation Taiwanese, from the mainland. Her family was something like 7th generation Taiwanese and would never approve of him, regardless of how good he was for her. Like Maria and Tony, their love was forbidden.

Mid-week they sent me on a flight to take a day-tour of the Taroko canyons in Hualien. Most of the people on the tour were part of an organized group of Koreans who knew each other. That left out me, a young Taiwanese businessman with whom I chatted, and a short quiet Japanese guy who lingered nearby us much of the time.

One of the nicest parts of the trip, though, was when the Wons took me to a local park on the beach late one night for a full moon festival. It seemed bizarre but also appealing to me that families gathered to picnic and socialize under the soft light of the full moon.

I was quite a novelty for the little kids who stared and giggled at me as I stood on the beach with Sylvia’s uncle, engaged in a unique conversation. In lieu of a shared language we passed a stick back and forth, each of us drawing pictures in the sand to illustrate our points.

From Taipei I flew to Tokyo, Japan, which became one of my favorite countries to visit. I pretty much spent the whole week walking around the city by myself, except for a night out or two with Tomiko and her friends, a mix of business expats. ( I remember one was a sort of Chinese-American fratboy who was asked if he spoke Cantonese. “Nah, man!”, he replied, “I ain’t no low-class Chinese. I speak MANDARIN!”)

One of my discoveries on this trip was Japan’s awesome art book publishing world. The books are pricey but they are SO well made. The publishing industry there has such a reverence for visual artists. The art books are printed so nicely and so eloquently designed that it has since been a priority to troll the aisles for these gems every time I’m in Japan.

Another pleasant surprise was the ubiquitous presence of Ultraman, a childhood favorite of mine. When I was a latch-key kid in elementary school, home alone while waiting for my librarian Mom to return from school with my sister, Ultraman was one of my babysitters. He was just such a badass to me and my neighborhood friends, defending Japan from giant rubber monsters by shooting lasers from his hands in a karate-chop pose. In Japan he is as part of their popular culture as MickeyMouse is here. He's on subway posters, in tv commercials, and in toy stores everywhere. I couldn't resist picking up some Ultraman booty for myself.

(postscript: In re-reading this post, I just realized none of the places I linked to are displaying Ultraman anymore. It seems the long arm of copyright law does not want Ultraman consorting with renegade sites.)

I also took a bullet train out past Mount Fuji to Kyoto for a couple nights. Kyoto was absolutely stunning in it's serenity, once you leave the main town for the surrounding temples in the hills. I again checked into a traditional ryokan with tatami mattes, a futon bed and a Japanese breakfast in the morning.

When I checked in , I gave the proprietor a dirty jacket to clean, forgetting that its pockets held some cheap limestone carvings I bought from some kid vendors in Vietnam. When the laundry came back the proprietor realized the carvings had broken. I told them not to worry about it, but the next morning they presented me with a very nice embroidered silk wallet as an apology.
Have to love this country.

I spent a lot of time walking around Kyoto's ancient temples and rock gardens, visiting all the greatest hits. At the Golden temple there were tons of uniformed teenage schoolboys and girls on tours. Part of their assignment was to engage foreign tourists and try to speak a few words of English. In doing so they would present a welcome card they had handwritten which spoke of wanting peace in the world after the tragedy of Hiroshima. I received one card each from a boy and a girl. The messages were similar, but I noticed the boys put far less effort into the card -usually just some handwriting. The girls meanwhile put the boys to shame, decorating their cards with colorful designs and meticulously crafted illustrations of cute geishas.

I had an odd series of encounters in Tokyo. When I flew into Japan initially, I noticed the quiet Japanese man on my day trip to Taiwan’s countryside was on my flight. Later that night after checking in to a small neighborhood ryokan in the Ueno section of town, I was at the front desk when the SAME guy appeared, having checked in as well. We recognized each other and spoke a bit.

Tens of thousands of hotels in Tokyo and this guy ended up at the same place. Very odd. But it doesn’t stop there. Later in the week I went to a baseball game at the Tokyo Dome by myself (Yomiuri Giants versus the Hanshin Tigers – can’t miss that pairing) which seats about 55,000. Who shows up in my section alone? Yep. My quiet hotel-mate.

It was probably just a series of weird coincidences, not, as my parents suggested, that he was a spy for the Japanese government. I have a hard time believing that a nation known for pursuing unattainable levels of honor and perfection would produce such a lousy candidate. He had absolutely no talent for covert action.