by Matt Gross
Those excuses, however, were just excuses. I couldn’t go back to Stuart with such lousy complaints. But what could I do? What did he and the Times expect from me? It’s not like I’d ever trained to do this work. I’d become a travel writer almost entirely by accident. I’d become a writer because I didn’t know how to do anything else. And I’d learned how to travel frugally because I had no other choice.
The lecture hall was a cement cavern that stretched at least fifty feet, and my voice would have echoed throughout the space had it not had to compete with the roar of trucks, the honking of motorbikes, and the barking of wild, sad dogs that bled through the paneless windows and open doors. My students—young, fresh-faced, barely able to understand a single word I said—filed in and took their seats among rows of wooden desks. There were fifty of them. Maybe sixty. It was the first day of my Introduction to Literature class at the Ho Chi Minh City Open University.
I wrote “Matt Gross” on the blackboard, but the humidity and my light touch—I have a visceral hatred of chalk—rendered it nearly illegible. I began speaking, then almost shouting to be heard over the noise from outside, trying to keep my syntax simple. We had a textbook, a tragically photocopied thing bound in transparent plastic, and its first short story—the first work of English-language literature I would be teaching these kids—was about a girl and her dog on a presumably Australian sheep farm. To my eyes, it appeared to have been written for middle-schoolers; although I can’t remember the plot specifics, it was earnest and uncomplicated, with minimal subtext. The students, Ms. Thanh had told me, were supposed to have read it already, but like freshmen everywhere, they hadn’t.
To get them accustomed to speaking in class, I had each read aloud a paragraph. This was, as I’d expected, a slow and painful process. No one spoke English particularly well, and fewer still were comfortable performing for their peers. But little by little, we got through the text.
When I started asking the class questions about the story, it immediately became clear we were all in trouble. Silence—utter silence. Even the barking dogs and honking mopeds seemed muted. As I asked more questions about the story’s theme and meaning and characterization, I could tell these concepts were too sophisticated for students struggling not only with a foreign language but with a teacher who, probably unlike every instructor they’d ever had, wanted them to participate in the discussion of the work. I had to change tack.
In my EFL training course the previous summer, I’d been taught that students—or “learners,” as we were supposed to call them—often felt shy speaking imperfectly before a native speaker, and that the way to get them more comfortable was to have them speak to one another. So, I had an idea. I broke them into ten small groups and assigned each group an investigation based on one of the five W questions: Who was in the story? Where was it taking place? When was it taking place? What was happening? And why did the author choose to tell the story?
Incredibly, they understood, and got to work breaking this flimsy tale into its constituent elements. For ten minutes, they brainstormed, and I even heard English phrases and sentences floating among the Vietnamese. When I asked each group to present their work, they actually got things right, dissecting the characters not only of the girl but of her dog, too, even if they were slightly confused about where (France?) and when (present day?) the story took place.
But the question of Why? was more complicated. Both of the groups assigned to contemplate the deeper meaning of the story saw it solely as moral instruction—this was a tale designed, as all tales were, to show us how, or how not, to behave. The girl’s actions were representative, symbolic, with no weight or impact outside of their commentary on society and an individual’s proper place within it.
This was, of course, pure Marxist-Leninist literary thought, as taught to generations of students throughout the communist world. Literature exists to improve us and our country; it is unambiguous; it is written with purpose.
There were only a few minutes left in class, so I spoke, again raising my voice to be heard over the outside noise. Maybe, I suggested, the author of this story had written it for other reasons—to try to understand the thinking of the young girl, to make sense of something perhaps she herself had gone through as a child, to capture a particular historical moment in Australia, or even, possibly, for the pleasure of conveying a minor drama in elegant language. These were not deep interpretations, but I needed to get the students to consider other possibilities—anything but the “moral lessons” of literature.
Class ended. I’d survived it, and invented a reading framework that I could apply throughout the semester. The students had spoken aloud, and one, a cute girl named Marie who spoke English surprisingly well, thanked me personally afterward. My anti-Marxist-Leninist approach to literature might one day bite me in the ass when I applied for Communist Party membership, but for now I was relieved. In the past sixty minutes, I’d earned a whopping thirty thousand Vietnamese dong—just under $3.
This, I knew as I rode my Chinese-made bicycle back to the Lucy Hotel, was going to be a problem. Ms. Thanh had come through with this teaching gig, but a weekly hour-long lecture wouldn’t come close to paying my bills, even if I covered other teacher’s classes now and again. The $15-an-hour courses I taught for ELT Lotus helped, but those were still only two or three days a week. And Suzanne, an Indonesian woman who lived at the Lucy Hotel, had hooked me up with a friend of hers who needed a tutor for Ferdinand, her chubby eight-year-old son.
Altogether, I was bringing in a few hundred dollars a month, barely enough to pay my fairly meager expenses. Foremost among these was my rent at the Lucy: $300, which was reduced to $210 when I asked not to receive three liters of bottled water per day. Still, I investigated even cheaper options in the backpacker zone. Following a tip, I walked down one of the alleys that thread through Vietnam’s urban blocks, climbed several interior staircases, ascended a ladder, and popped my head through a hatch into a dark attic where a young Japanese guy sat in his underwear. Sharing the room, explained the landlord who’d led me there, would be $4 a day.
“I’ll think about it,” I lied.
Beyond that, the Vietnamese food I was trying to learn to enjoy cost very little; if I spent more than $5 or $7 on a meal, I was splurging. Beers and gin-and-tonics ran a dollar or two, depending on whether I bought them at a dive like the Saigon Café or at Q Bar, a cavernous, multichambered lounge installed under the city’s Beaux-Arts opera house.
And that was really it. I had a small cushion—$2,000 my parents had given me—but that was slowly disappearing as I dealt with issues both serious (flying to Bangkok to arrange a proper long-term visa) and trivial (buying a nice Aiwa CD player). I even had an American Express card, although opportunities to use it in undeveloped, unconnected Vietnam were few indeed.
Soon, I knew, something would have to give: I was making almost nothing, and I was unwilling to ask my parents for a cash infusion (although I would let them pay the occasional small Amex bill). All my life, they’d given me everything, and apart from the money I’d earned in college—as a delivery guy for Domino’s and a video clerk in Baltimore—I’d had to rely on them. For years, I’d looked forward to finishing college and striking out on my own, and now, in my first stab at independence, halfway around the globe, I was flailing.
More frustrating still, I was surrounded by glamorous expatriates with flashy jobs. At Q Bar, I met bright young architects and graphic designers and video game producers and filmmakers and entrepreneurs and admen (and women) staffing the newly opened offices of Saatchi & Saatchi. They bought vintage Vespa scooters and lived in castle-like villas in the suburbs and ordered Scotch and sushi and foie gras like those were everyday snacks for twenty-five-year-olds. They bought tailored suits in Hong Kong and went scuba diving in the Philippines. I didn’t resent them—I wanted to be them, for they all seemed to have come to Vietnam knowing what they were there to do: make money and live awesomely. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even t
uck my shirt in and had to turn down bottled water to make the rent.
There was, of course, another option: I could become a backpacker. When I moved to Vietnam, I hadn’t even known such a lifestyle existed, but I became aware of it quite quickly. They were everywhere throughout the Pham Ngu Lao area, bearded guys in tank tops and tie-dyed pants, willowy girls in long skirts, all tanned, all musty, all with enormous high-tech, high-capacity backpacks towering over their skinny bodies. They drank the cheapest beers, slept in un-air-conditioned misery, and subsisted not on street food but on banana pancakes and french fries in the restaurants that catered to them. They would hang around seemingly forever, then vanish to the next low-budget destination, or maybe back to finance jobs in London or New York, leaving behind thumb-smudged bootleg copies of last year’s Lonely Planet.
The Vietnamese called them tây ba lô—literally, “Westerner with a bag”—and looked down on them for their shabby attire. As did I and the other semipermanent expatriates. Though we inhabited the same quarter of town, and often the same bars and restaurants, I rarely spoke to any backpackers, and so most of my impressions of their lifestyle were just assumptions. Were they really as cheap—and as trust-fundedly rich—as everyone said? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I wanted to keep away from them, for fear of being perceived as a filthy transient myself. And I knew, too, that unless I could improve my circumstances, the distance between us would shrink to nothing.
One morning in mid-November, I biked to the offices of ELT Lotus, housed in a middle school whose female students all wore white ao dai, the long, nearly transparent traditional gown of Vietnam. At the long table in Lotus’s common room were strewn local English-language publications—Vietnam Economic Times, Vietnam Investment Review, the Saigon Times, and Viet Nam News, the staterun daily newspaper. After murmuring hellos to Dave and Adrian, I took a seat and flipped through the Viet Nam News, my eyes settling on an intriguing story. Next month, it seemed, the Hanoi International Film Festival would be taking place. Over an eighteen-day period, it would feature movies from Germany and India, China and Italy—even the United States was involved: Warner Bros. was premiering The Bridges of Madison County, the first major American postwar production to be subtitled in Vietnamese for official distribution.
This was intriguing. In college, I’d been a serious movie geek: film society, student shorts—the whole mid-nineties cinéaste schtick. But I knew movies, and in a way I figured few others in Vietnam did, and I hatched a plan to exploit that knowledge.
A week later, I’d quit all my jobs—to no one’s real surprise, it seemed—and was on a Vietnam Airlines plane to Hanoi. At my side was Ms. Thanh, who had an academic conference to attend in the capital. Her visit gave me the perfect opportunity to combine job hunting and sightseeing; if the former didn’t work out, well, I was going to do the latter anyway. For the next few days, she and I rode cyclos down tree-shrouded lanes (Ms. Thanh didn’t trust motorbikes), strolled past the cafés around Hoan Kiem Lake, ate remarkably good vegetarian “duck,” and toured the Ho Chi Minh Museum, whose exhibits included a replica of Uncle Ho’s one-room cottage and a selection of industrial products manufactured in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The electric fan behind one display window was, I noticed, identical to the fan blowing humid air in front of it.
One day after lunch, I took a break and visited the offices of the Viet Nam News, in one of the gray concrete buildings, stained with damp, which contrasted so sadly with the capital’s surviving French colonial structures. I climbed a few flights of stairs to the newsroom, a wide-open space where young Vietnamese and a few older foreigners were bustling around computer terminals. It looked, it felt like a real paper—the first I’d ever visited.
I introduced myself and asked to speak to Nguyen Cong Khuyen, the editor in chief, and was led over to a thin, distinguished man with smart glasses and a sharp black mustache. In careful but perfect English, he asked what I was doing here. And I told him—about my background, about my love of film, about the festival, about my desire to write. I handed him a résumé. I explained that I hadn’t come empty-handed: I’d brought some fodder for Dragon Tales, the weekly humor column written by one of the paper’s expatriate staff; it was a copy of a hilariously mistranslated menu from one of Ho Chi Minh City’s most expensive French restaurants. Dishes included such delights as “Brains to the citrus fruit” and “Pave of wolf in his sauce Dutch.”
“Okay,” Mr. Khuyen said calmly and quietly. “Our features editor has just quit. You can have her page.”
Features page? Sure, why not? And so, like that, I became a newspaper columnist. A night or two later, after Ms. Thanh had flown back south, I attended my first film festival screening: Aguirre: Wrath of God, the Werner Herzog masterpiece in which Klaus Kinski plays an increasingly unhinged conquistador in search of El Dorado. On grainy video. Without subtitles. In a mostly empty theater whose air-conditioning was set somewhere between “walk-in freezer” and “Arctic whaling station.” The result, as I hurriedly wrote a couple of hours later in an attempt to fill up my page (my page!), was absurdity—a frozen theater playing an insane and unintelligible (but awesome) movie to a bare handful of shivering weirdos.
For two and a half weeks, this was my approach—to write not only about the movies themselves (which were playing only once or twice) but about the weird delight of watching them in this foreign context. One afternoon, I found myself in a theater full of hyperactive Vietnamese eleven-year-olds who, when they discovered me, rushed up to practice a single sentence in English: “Give me money!” Another day, another theater, I sat down next to a small, round eighty-something-year-old Vietnamese man bundled up in vest, jacket, and beret. He and I were seated next to each other, and when we began a conversation in French, I had to tell him repeatedly I was American—whether because he couldn’t hear well or simply couldn’t believe it, I don’t know. Then the old man reached into his jacket pocket, removed a small notebook, and handed it to me. I opened it to find page after page of French poetry, written in a neat hand. I picked a poem at random and as I read through it realized: this was serious stuff, precise in its rhythm and diction. Then I flipped the page, reached the end, and saw how he’d signed it: “—Charles Baudelaire.” The whole notebook, it turned out, was transcribed, with contributions from every major French poet. For a moment I was disappointed—but only for a moment. Okay, so he hadn’t written his own poems, but his dedication to poetry, his obvious love of the language, and his attachment to this foreign culture were in some ways more impressive, more touching, more beautifully sad.
Every evening I’d rush back to the newsroom to pound out my reviews and lay out my page. Occasionally, I’d supplement the reviews with reported sidebars—about how ticketless foreigners were often let in but paying Vietnamese customers turned away, or an interview with an Italian director, conducted in a three-way mishmash of English, French, and Italian. I loved the adrenaline rush of working late at night, fighting the approaching deadline.
Frankly, I don’t know if the writing was any good, but it served a purpose. Most of the time, the Viet Nam News was heavy on the Viet Nam part, light on the News. Official visits by minor foreign functionaries, dubious agricultural statistics, abstract health initiatives—these were the paper’s meat and potatoes, not the kind of hard reporting (I thought) the country needed. “Ca Mau Province Gets New Tractor” was the joke headline I’d use to convey the tedium of the paper’s subject matter, and it’s not far off from a real one I read today: “Children and Mothers Given Vitamin A and Iron on Micro-Nutrient Day.”
In this context, the mildly humorous writings of a young, movie-mad American—and, moreover, a native speaker of English!—were a balm, something that the paper’s expatriate audience could actually read, beginning to end, and understand. So what if it was rushed, juvenile, or at times inaccurate? It was at least a break from socialist propaganda and a glimpse of the strange fun lurking under official surfaces.
Occ
asionally, those official surfaces thickened and hardened. One movie I loved was Back to Back, Face to Face, an obscure Chinese comedy in which the acting director of a local cultural center fails, due to corruption, cronyism, and bureaucracy, to officially take over the organization. When Mr. Khuyen read my review, however, he asked me to tone it down—the governmental system stymieing the movie’s protagonist was awfully similar, he said, to that of Vietnam. But if I praised the movie in less universalist terms—this particular fictional theater troupe, not the Chinese communist bureaucracy—all would be okay. So I did. His paper, his country, his call. Also, I liked Mr. Khuyen’s quiet, fair attitude, and would have hated for him to get in trouble with the paper’s censors, who allegedly gathered each morning to go over every word of every story—an after-the-fact strategy to encourage self-censorship.
And, naturally, I would hate to lose this gig that was putting money in my pocket. The Viet Nam News paid ten cents a word for articles—barely a tenth of American standards, but since I was writing roughly a thousand words a day, every day for more than two weeks, the cash was building up faster than I could spend it. The hotel I was staying in, on one of Hanoi’s ancient 36 Streets, cost $8 a day, and the Halida beers and fat burgers at the Roxy, a dark, funky theater-turned-nightclub, didn’t add much more. By the end of the festival, I was being handed thick white envelopes full of cash—enough so that, when I went back to America for a brief visit after Christmas, I had more than $800 to spend on whatever I wanted.
Finally! I had money. Finally! I didn’t have to depend on my family for support. Finally! I was doing work that I loved, that I had some measure of talent for, and that gave me a certain status in the eyes of my peers. I wasn’t just a college grad bumming around Vietnam—I was a writer, a working journalist, living off the words I put together.
