They remind of Dignan in that way

A few days ago, I was having dinner with a student who I’ve come to count as close friend. Amidst this meal, stocked with a queue of cuisine that I no longer consider curious, I asked for what seemed to be a simple and straightforward favor. The request was for a small compilation of various phrases, chosen at his own direct discretion, which would serve as fashionable accessories to the bare halter-top that is my Vietnamese lexicon.

He excitedly agreed and, after several swelling servings of food ingested and words spoken, hurried home to hone his fantasy expression roster. A lot of the heavy hitters that dominate many of the everyday exchanges had already been drafted, but I knew there were still some quality picks resting just below my rudimentary radar. I wasn’t necessarily asking for an Air Bud or an Icebox, but rather, simply something solid, like Gary Busey in Rookie of the Year.

Well the next day I received the list and was taken back a bit by the conversational content. The only phrase translated in entirety was as follows, “At the bottom of my heart I want to say that I love you so much,” a statement quite forward for anything short of a Hallmark card.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite partial to the people that daily peruse the bustling street on which I live. It’s largely a cast of familiar characters and, at least mentally, each time they come into view and offer their own salutational catch phrases, given pronounial distinction by their age and gender, I hear a healthy appropriation of applause. However, in response to these friendly fragments of hellos and goodbyes, I just wouldn’t feel anything close to comfortable offering up this newly learned bit of language. In fact, I suppose there’s only one person I could sincerely say this to, and sadly, he stopped being in charge of my days and my nights, my wrongs and my rights, long ago.

Later that day though, pondering hard at my desk, this bit of translated romance began to make sense, in light of something larger. It was a talkably tangible representation of a tendency evident in many of the students here. It made me realize that I was the one who was a little off. I was the cynical American. All I had was Charles, but they had so much more.

I thought back to a teaching episode that had transpired last semester. It had been a week of much work, which had left me faintly fatigued for the final class of that stretch. Afterwards, some of those in this course asked me if I had lost love. It was their first and most confident suspicion to explain this lack of teacherly tenacity. It was a little awkward, and since then, just to be safe, during those days of densely scheduled duties, I’ve taken to mainlining the most extreme energy drink legally available. That’s right, Commando Bear. And my platelets have never been so ferocious. Seriously, they will clot your freaking face off.

(It really is a drink. I saw a billboard for it on the way to a city named Ninh Binh: http://www.alibaba.com/catalog/11955465/Commando_Bear_Energy_Drink.html)

On another such occasion, I was with some friends enjoying some ice cream. The weather had not yet turned for the frigid, but we were clearly on the cusp of this change. The conversation went from the weather to the ice cream to a combination of the two. I learned that it was regarded as romantic to eat this snowy snack in cold conditions, a fact I consciously filed in a folder already thick from other such notions. I carefully slid it behind the last entry: the romance attached to glasses on guys via the Fabios from Korean films.

However, this too is a piece of something bigger.

In Vietnam, karaoke seems to be the preferred activity for most nights out. As such, the nationals can belt ballads like nobody’s business. The lists of songs vary greatly from place to place, but there seems to a be a few pieces present in each and every papered procession, likely laminated and usually enclosed inside a thin plastic binder. One of these consistencies, often selected and subsequently sung, is “Heal the World” by Michael Jackson. It’s performed with the utmost sincerity, each lyric a layout for global improvement. However, sitting among a room full of swaying shoulders, each in beat with the rhythm and the message, I always find it difficult to take this song seriously.

All that to say that there’s an idealism here quite unlike anything I’m Americanly accustomed to, and I really do admire it. Back in the states, I wouldn’t have counted myself a cynic, but in this land, at least by comparison, I feel like the Larry David of Chua Lang Street. Tomorrow is a new day though, and perhaps, just maybe, each and every person passed will, to me, become a Baio.