Life is a Trip

by Fein, Judith

  “It’s wet there,” warned a passenger.

  “So?” I said. I was already wet.

  “Where you put your mat,” he explained, “you’re next to the only men’s bathroom. People have been drinking and . . . they miss.”

  Horrified, I grabbed my mat and contemplated my next move. It was late and the darkness was punctuated by choral snoring. After tiptoeing around the top deck, I finally found another spot, settled down, and as I unwrapped my sandwich, a palm-sized cockroach bolted across my legs. I dropped the food. Be calm, be centered, I told myself, and picked it up again. A roach the size of a regulation softball crawled onto the bread. I screamed.

  A gentleman named Brodney approached me. “Do you need help?” he asked gently.

  Pale and exhausted, I gazed at him, and, smiling sweetly, he offered me a large loincloth. Was I supposed to strip and put it on as a prelude to swinging from the ship’s mast like Tarzan? I felt dumb and dumbfounded.

  “Okay?” Brodney asked.

  I raised one eyebrow.

  Taking this to mean “yes,” Brodney deftly twisted the loincloth into a hammock which he suspended from two nails. Then he helped me climb inside. At last I felt safe, and I closed my eyes. Suspended above the deck in a gently rocking loincloth, I would finally catch some winks. Five minutes later, the rains came—pelting thick ribbons of water that drenched me and Brodney’s loincloth.

  Fourteen hours after leaving Yap I arrived at Mog Mog, where I encountered topless girls in grass skirts and men wearing loincloths. Only the fourth outside visitor in a year, I was chided for changing my shoes on the steps of what turned out to be the sacred men’s house. I hobbled across sharp stones until my feet bled. A few locals took pity on me and invited me to their outdoor cooking areas where they offered me fresh fish, tarot, stew, and as much coconut water as I could drink.

  Eventually, I camped outside the house where the coffin lay amid the ritualized crying of grief-stricken women. As they wailed, they also expressed their feelings about the deceased—which were not always positive.

  A man from Mog Mog who acted as my translator said mourners may talk about the generosity of the deceased and also his drinking and abusive behavior. They can praise his skills as a storyteller and regret his periodic irresponsibility and lying to cover up for his wrongdoing. They can lionize or lambaste him.

  At first I was shocked. Can’t they just leave the dead in peace? I wondered. But I said nothing, sitting and listening to the wailing and talk. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to understand. During a Mog Mog funeral, people are expected to air all of their feelings about the deceased person publicly, so the negative emotions don’t fester. The bad feelings are expressed, rather than repressed, and then they are buried along with the body. At a funeral, people unleash their true feelings, but speaking ill of the deceased outside of this context is taboo. And it is forbidden to bad-mouth the dead person once he is lying in his final resting place.

  “It’s good,” I said to the translator. “It was worth traveling on the Micronesia Spirit. I learned something important today.”

  He grinned and offered me one of two coconuts he had just climbed a palm tree to harvest. I looked around but there were no straws. He tossed his head back and sucked the coconut water from his fruit. I did the same. On Mog Mog, I quenched both my thirst and my curiosity. I had witnessed a very significant ceremony.

  The funeral experience lingered with me for a long time. Perhaps the inhabitants of Mog Mog got it right. A person doesn’t automatically ascend to sainthood just because he has left the earthly plane. Maybe honoring a person for what he did right or wrong during his lifetime isn’t a bad idea. It may actually be inspired.

  People are not perfect. They hurt others knowingly and unknowingly. Perhaps we can honor a person just by being truthful about him. We can allow him to be a human—with strengths and flaws, good behavior and bad.

  I wondered if it would bother me if people said the truth about me after I left the earthly plane.

  If your body likes being worked on, it will love being in Vietnam. And my recommendation is to go to places the locals frequent. You can get a face massage in a beauty shop; it lasts ninety minutes, costs less than a ticket to the movies, and involves an upper body massage, more washings and rinsings than you can shake a comb at, and, near the end, they shave your face with a straight-edge razor. It doesn’t matter if you are male, female, or have facial hair. It’s something you can talk about at cocktail parties for the rest of your life.

  A whole body massage may entail soaking in red herbal liquid in a wooden tub, and since you are forewarned, you won’t think you are bleeding to death. Afterwards, the masseur or masseuse will find and knead body parts you didn’t even know you had. When was the last time you had your ear lobes or nostrils massaged?

  I became addicted to these long, languorous, quirky body treatments, and I still laugh about them, but one particularly stands out in my mind: it was the time I reclined in a leather lounger in a communal room in a foot massage parlor in Hanoi. With me were three ex-Viet Cong guerrilla fighters from the Vietnam War; during the conflict, they were our officially-designated enemies. Now we all wore striped shorts that looked like prison issue, and we were groaning with pleasure and pain as our sore spots were massaged by young therapists.

  As I lay there, I flashed back to the day, more than three decades before, when I left the U.S.A. because I was so angry and disturbed about the loss of young American lives and the millions of Vietnamese we had killed and maimed with our arsenals of weapons, defoliants, deceits, and disinformation.

  I went to live in Paris, where negotiations were going on between America and Vietnam, and the anti-war protests were vigorous. I stayed out of the country for nine years—living in Europe and Africa—and have always been haunted by that war.

  Two years ago, I finally went to Vietnam, driven by the necessity of finding out what had happened since then, and how they felt about Americans now. My guide, Cuong, had been a Viet Cong guerrilla fighter, and it was through him that I met ex-soldiers, Communist Party members, kids, and elders; he had set up the foot massage so I could hang with his old military cronies and find some answers to my questions.

  “Are you angry about the war?” I asked my foot massage buddies, as our tootsies soaked in little tubs.

  They gave me the same answer everyone had given me all over Vietnam.

  “It’s over.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “We welcome Americans.”

  “Sometimes, when we drink with our military buddies, we talk about the past. But then we come back to our daily lives. We don’t forget the past and the war, but we don’t think about it either. We look to the future.”

  “After the war, I hated anything with an American trademark. Now I like it. During the war, we saw distorted caricatures of bloodthirsty Americans in propaganda cartoons. Now when I meet Americans, I think they are so handsome and friendly.”

  “We have even met with American soldiers who came back here. They arrived full of guilt and some went to apologize in villages where they had killed people. We embraced them and we even cried together.”

  “Some of us still have bad memories and sometimes nightmares, but we don’t suffer as much as the American G.I.s.”

  I turned away and a few tears coursed down my cheeks. There are several hundred thousand Vietnam veterans living on the streets of America. Purportedly, more committed suicide after the war than had died in combat. PTSD wrecks relationships and ruins lives. The conflict in Southeast Asia is an open wound on our national conscience. But in Vietnam, there’s another story.

  They welcome Americans, French, Japanese—all their former enemies—and look to the West for inspiration. The Communist Party still holds sway, but there is roaring free enterprise, a thriving stock market, open discussion and criticism of the party, and unstoppable individualism and ingenuity. Vietnam is high on the tourist radar because
it is safe, beautiful, varied, modern, tribal, and exotic.

  In Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh once walked the streets in his rubber sandals and did strategic war planning, you can now shop, take a ride in a human-propelled cyclo, see a water puppet show, and watch break dancers. In the Gulf of Tonkin—where our government’s bogus claims that an American ship was bombed became our excuse to enter the war—you can now cruise Halong Bay with its 1,969 spectacular sandstone islands. You can fly to Da Nang, once home to forty-five U.S. military bases, and have a custom wardrobe made in twenty-four hours in nearby Hoi An.

  You can also go on the trail of the war, as I did. The infamous Hanoi Hilton prison is open for visits. There’s a plaque marking the spot where John McCain’s plane went down, and the wreckage of a B-52 bomber is still in Huu Tiep Lake in Hanoi. You can learn about what they refer to as “the American War” at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), and crawl through the claustrophobia-inducing tunnels at Cu Chi, where the fighters from the north conducted their guerrilla war against the American troops. They have even accommodated American visitors by enlarging the tunnels because the Vietnamese were and are so much smaller and thinner.

  These tunnels were the only place I saw Cuong express strong emotion about the American War.

  “I will not go inside with you,” he said adamantly. “No way.”

  He had spent weeks in the earthen warrens, sharing space with rodents, starving, his body and soul gasping for air and light. He said he felt like a rat. Down at the third level of the caves, it was like Hades. “When you came out,” he said, “it was like returning from Hell.”

  “Aren’t you angry, Cuong, that our war forced you to live there?”

  “Nope!” Cuong insisted. “But it’s not a place I would ever want to visit again!”

  And then he went on to describe a day when he was so famished he ran out of hiding and into a river where, with his bare hands, he grabbed two fish that had been killed or stunned as a result of bombing. At that moment, he was spotted by the U.S. military.

  “The shells went off in front of me,” Cuong said, “and I could hear whizzing and shredding. I dove underwater. I held my breath, waiting.”

  “What happened next?” I prodded him, totally caught up in his narrative.

  “We knew the pattern of the enemy fire. I knew they would move thirty yards away, and, if I could just keep holding my breath, I would be safe.”

  “Sounds like a close call.”

  “Very,” Cuong said, nodding. “And then it was over. They had moved on. I came up from the water and two buddies of mine stood there looking at me. They started to laugh. I had just escaped death, and why were they amused? Because after all of that, I emerged with the two fish still clutched in my hands. That’s how hungry I was.”

  “Were you thinking about death all the time?” I asked Cuong.

  “I read Epicurious,” he said, and “one sentence really struck me. I made it my own. It was: ‘Why worry about death?’ When you are alive, it doesn’t come. When it comes, you aren’t conscious. So why worry about it? I told this to my war friends and it helped a lot when we were waiting for the enemy on the front.”

  “How have you managed to put the American War behind you?”

  I asked everyone I met. The answer was always the same. The Vietnamese are so happy not to be at war or under foreign occupation that they are concentrating on the present, on making money, and bettering themselves. Their focus is on the now and the future. The war represents the past.

  “Do you mean you really have no resentment against us?” I asked again and again.

  “No,” was the answer. “You are forgiven.”

  It was an enormous relief to know that Vietnam has survived our war and is thriving. It was reassuring to learn that life has moved on, and even when a country is bombed, defoliated, and destroyed, it can come back with great vigor. I was humbled by a people who have suffered so much and have chosen forgiveness over fury.

  One night, in a park in Hanoi, I met a silver-haired man dressed in beige pants, sandals, and a white, short-sleeve shirt. His grace suggested someone who had practiced Tai Chi for decades. In fact, he had been a Viet Cong soldier and then did menial labor most of his life. He spoke with the wisdom of a philosopher. “I was eaten up by anger when I was younger,” he said. “So I spent many years meditating and thinking about anger and whom I was angry at. Were the soldiers who came here to fight any different from me? I didn’t want to go to war. But, once I was forced to, I did whatever I had to do in order to survive. There was no difference between the American soldiers and me. We were both caught up in a situation and circumstances. When I realized that, I could give up my anger. Now, I think of those soldiers with compassion.”

  My guide, Cuong, chimed in. “I didn’t want to go to war either. What did I know or care about Lenin and socialism at age eighteen? I wanted to stay home and play rock ’n’ roll songs on my guitar. I loved the Beatles. I sang ‘Let It Be.’ I lived in the jungle, on the verge of starvation for five years with no news of my family. In my squad of twelve, only two of us survived. I have a scar from a grenade on my scalp. My leg was wounded. It wasn’t the fault of the soldiers. Life is good now. Forget the past—I live in the present. After what I went through, I never take anything for granted. I appreciate everything, every little thing and each moment. I forgave the soldiers a long time ago.”

  Only once, in a remote Black Hmong village in the mountains in the north of Vietnam, did someone ask me a question about the American War. I was sitting on a bamboo floor, in a house on stilts, laughing with a woman named Mai and her family. Mai was a lithe woman who wore her hair in a knot—called a tang cau—on the left side of her head, which is the tradition for married women. Her children giggled as they rolled up my shirt sleeves and the legs of my pants to stare at my white skin. Mai chided them gently, but when she saw that I wasn’t offended, she chuckled too. She served me tea, and, after I had inquired about her tribe and traditions, I invited her to ask me any questions she wished. Mai hesitated for a moment and looked over at a rifle which hung on the wall, a relic of the war in which her father had fought against the Americans. Then she asked, in a barely audible voice, “Why did the Americans come to my country during the war?”

  My mind wandered to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and I felt the same anger I had felt during the war in Vietnam. As we talked and exchanged ideas in a house on stilts, how many innocent civilians were dying? How many families were being wrecked and futures cut short in a burst of gunfire?

  One day, when the insanity has stopped, when Iraq and Afghanistan finally know peace and have been rebuilt, will they, too, thrive? Will we be taking trips to Baghdad, Kabul, and Islamabad the way we now go to Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi to see remnants and reminders of the war? Will guns hang on walls as decorative relics? Most important, will they be able to forgive us?

  The fact that the Vietnamese can forgive Americans caused me to look at myself and how I feel about people who have hurt or offended me. There is one woman, an angry, misguided person, who, in the past, slandered me both privately and publicly, in writing. She caused a lot of pain and distress in my life. And, from what I heard, she was at it again.

  I thought about retribution and how I could get back at her. I put my hands on my keyboard, ready to spew out a nasty, angry letter. I wanted to tell her that she was a blight on the face of the universe, a ball of negativity, a self-righteous, racist liar. Furthermore, that she used up too much air on the planet and created divisiveness everywhere she went. But before doing it, I stopped for a moment to consider my actions. And in an instant I realized that I didn’t have to write the letter. In fact, I didn’t need to do anything at all.

  I got up and walked away from my computer. I understood that I could spend a lifetime harboring anger and resentment, or I could accept what happened to me and move on. It felt good to be in the present. It felt good not to focus on the past. It felt right to u
nplug from past hurts and bitterness. My trip to Vietnam inspired me and reminded me of that.

  There are plenty of things I am scared of, but people usually don’t intimidate me. As I travel the world, I’ve been fortunate to meet with ministers and mystics, rock stars, scientists, and shamans. I was never really nervous until the auspicious day when I was invited to a private audience with the High Priest of the ancient Israelite Samaritans. It was as though someone had opened the pages of the Torah or Hebrew Bible and invited me to step inside.

  The Samaritans are northern Israelites whose deep tribal ancestry goes back to Joseph, the son of forefather Jacob and great grandson of Abraham. Today, more than 3,800 years later, they still pray at the site where Joseph’s bones are said to be buried. The first High Priest was Aaron, the brother of Moses. The current High Priest, Elazar B. Tsedaka, traces his lineage back through 131 High Priests to Itamar, the second son of Aaron. Abraham. Joseph. Jacob. Moses. Aaron. You can begin to understand why I was a little skittish about an audience with a man of such prestige and pedigree.

  Roughly half of the 729 Samaritans in the world live in Holon, a town south of Tel Aviv, and the other half live on the West Bank on Har Gerizim, the holy Mountain of Blessings mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. And there I was, standing on their mountain, heading toward the gate of the High Priest’s house. Like all Samaritans, he had verses from the Torah inscribed outside his dwelling.

  I was welcomed into a lavish Oriental-style living room. Moments later, the bearded High Priest entered, wearing a gray robe and red turban. A dignified man in his early eighties, he was accompanied by his family and his deputy High Priest, Aaron B. Ab-Hisda. He beckoned for me to sit next to him. The audience had begun.

  “What can I do for you?” he inquired.

  “You have an ancient tradition of Biblical interpretation and I wonder if I can ask a few questions,” I said cautiously.