2009 Essay Contest Winners
1st: The Two-Sided Coin
by Connor Lieb
On a dusty trail, riddled with rocks and potholes, I watched them go by. First, an oxen-powered wagon approached, controlled by a driver in no haste at all. At the same time, a dump truck roared down the road, and with the presence of a grizzly, overtook the wagon, leaving a shroud of dust in its wake. While this happening may seem insignificant, it in fact represented the very contrasts that made my journey through Southern Vietnam intriguing up to this point. What other polarizations would I come across in my excursion?
Upon my arrival into Southern Vietnam via Saigon, first impressions were of the endless quantity of mopeds, slicing their way down streets, alleys and dangerously tiny gaps. Perhaps nine of ten motor vehicles encountered in Saigon are mopeds, an understandable figure when both Vietnamese GDP and a warm, humid climate with fairly predictable rain patterns are taken into account.
The city can be compared to a freeway: a system of organized chaos, where so much can go wrong but usually doesn't. For pedestrians, mopeds pose a unique challenge to the street-crosser. With few stop lights, traffic is less dominated by predictable waves, and more by a constant stream, meaning a clear traffic opening is rare during daylight hours. To compensate for this obstacle, I learned to simply walk across the street at a turtle’s pace, letting drivers see and anticipate my movements, and accordingly avoid a collision. The feeling can be tied to Moses and the Red Sea, parting a gargantuan force of flesh and metal.
Westerners are prime targets for solicitors in Saigon, whether for copied travel books, gum, taxis, or, a personal first, prostitutes on bikes. One night, a companion and I were en route to our hotel, only to be suddenly surrounded by several mopeds, carrying both a driver, and in back, a working women of the night. Some prostitutes would move on after you signaled you were not interested, but many would shadow for a bit, chanting their pre-meditated lines of understandable but rough English. Several no’s, verbally and non-verbally, we needed to convince them of our lack of interest. In situations like these, I wanted to simply appear local, to be another brick on the wall, a feeling that celebrities must often face.
Because our foreign policy arrived well before ourselves, Americans know that traveling abroad can be an experience, sometimes good, usually not. Despite knowing I would understandably encounter anti-American sentiment in Vietnam, I also wanted to keep an open mind, and try to see the conflict from the local perspective. With this attitude, my group visited the War Remnants Museum, formally known as the Chinese and American War Crimes Museum.
Here, you will get a filtered, yet raw glimpse into the Vietnam War, and any pleasant mood brought is quickly crushed under an atmosphere best described as distressing. Images of humanity's terrible capabilities are on full display, from torture techniques to Agent Orange victims. Some pictures made me stop, some made me stare, while a select few literally brought me close to heaving. At this museum, war has absolutely no glory. I will not defend the American goals and reasoning behind the war effort, but I will say only the atrocities committed by American and Southern Vietnamese troops are on display. This obvious filter should be expected from a government that currently favors security over freedom, censoring media where it sees fit. Regardless, even the most die-hard American patriot would exit the War Remnants Museum somber and saddened, as I did.
Continuing the focus of the Vietnam War, our next activity was visiting the former Republic of Vietnam Independence Palace, site of the infamous storming by Northern Vietnamese tanks in 1975. The tanks are still there, immortalized in an adjacent lawn for all to see. The palace has been well preserved, and was presented as a sort of war prize, to be shown off to the world. This was where the Vietnam War ended. My group then set out to see where it had thrived.
Our destination was the Cu Chi tunnels, roughly North of Saigon, near the Cambodian border. The most famous Vietcong tunnels are displayed here with pride. Most of the original tunneling network has since caved in or remains unsafe, and thus the only authentic remains are a few entrances, more suitable for fox-sized beings than humans.
There are re-created tunnels that guided tours channel through, a literal chance to walk, or more often crouch, a mile in someone else’s shoes. Walking soon gave way to squatting, quickly aggravating the little-used muscles in my legs. Meanwhile, the feeling of claustrophobia is only coupled by the imposing darkness, creating a new appreciation for the sun, not to mention the ability to stand.
Afterward, I glanced at pictures of the Cu Chi area taken during the war. Compared to the lush green vegetation of today, the images bore stories of craters and death, a desolate place where even small shrubs struggled to carry on. The region has recovered well, another sharp contrast of past and present. Still, agriculture in the area is still riddled and hampered by the soil contamination, as certain locations remain infertile for crops.
The next adventure began with a bus journey from Cu Chi to the Mekong Delta. I was taught two things during these bus journeys: First, Vietnamese roads are hellishly bumpy, and thus the middle of the bus is an optimal choice for sitting, splitting the difference between the underlying tires. The second realization was that, as far as I could see, there are no freeways in Southern Vietnam, only single-lane streets that stretch to infinity. As a result, urban development has uniquely adapted, developing cities comparable to old Western towns, where buildings hug tightly to the central road but rarely are built very far it, creating long snakes of cities. Honking is a common feature of Vietnamese driving, as ordinary and consistent as checking the mirrors would be for any U.S. driver. And with only a single lane of negotiation, the forced passing of mopeds and slower, larger vehicles makes a bus journey considerably sluggish, thus making American bus rides, in comparison, much swifter.
The Mekong Delta marks the end of the mighty Mekong River’s course, which begins in China, running through Bruma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia before reaching its final stage in Vietnam. The delta is the Mecca of rice production; roughly five percent of the world’s rice is produced here. Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, conducted a series of raids into Vietnam in 1978, with the hopes of eventually acquiring the fertile prize. Understandably, Vietnam was not pleased by the attempts, responding by first invading, and then occupying parts of Cambodia for nearly a decade.
In the Mekong Delta, lifestyles are more traditional, in contrast with Saigon’s embrace of everything modern. A river cruise down brown-colored water alleys eventually brought us to our home-stay, which was half hotel and half living with a local family. The location was excellent, far removed from other Western tourists, dead-center in a neighborhood populated only by other Vietnamese. Rising early the next day, my company and I took a boat tour of the nearby delta channels and canals, with concluded with a visit to a floating market. Essentially, a floating market is similar to a regular market, only each stall is privately-owned boat, and customers paddle and motor their way from shop to shop, exchanging mainly agricultural products such as potatoes and rice.
As market shoppers weaved their way toward and away from vendors, the presence of both paddle oars and boat motors reminded me of the contrasts I had seen earlier, such the dump truck and the wagon, as well as the landscape of Cu Chi. And these polar opposites, the present versus the past, is the paradox, and magnificence, of Southern Vietnam. This is a place where yesterday and today both exist, colliding each and every day, and in the process creating of fusion undoubtedly unique. Shortly after witnessing the floating market I left Vietnam. But not before one last bus ride, with it honking and swerving down the chaotic road.
2nd: Madame Hamouda
by Kate Peterson
This morning, I attended "Immigrant Identities in Contemporary France" to see if I want to take
it or a different course offered tomorrow morning. I haven't decided yet, but the professor of the
class this morning is quite the character...
She was wearing some sort of tweed bag, over a black turtleneck and a pair of very fuzzy
leggings with black, chunky sneakers. Her hair took the form of a poodle on her head, or perhaps
a pile of chocolate pasta, that tumbled into an abrupt stop above her ears. The vermillion lipstick
was chunked on; I have visions of the application process being carried out the way a one-armed
chef would pound beef into a patty. While lecturing, she almost never stopped moving. Her arm
movements exceeded even those of an airport traffic controller. With her dark clothing, they were
more akin to that of a raven whose wing happened to be both on fire and filled with helium. The
tweed bag had a belt of tweed strings, but she hadn't fastened it; so, as it matched her wild
movements, it raged through the air on her side, having the ride of its tweedy life. It had a metal
tip, and she could have easily bludgeoned a toddler in the face for the force and speed with
which it flew. Occasionally, she would sit for a few moments. She did this by lifting the hem of
the tweed bag, straddling the chair, and plopping into a squat.
Throughout all this, however, her mountainous bosom remained stalwart. As she zipped about, it
consistently presented itself as a horizontal, bountiful and unmoving mass, like a marble shelf. It
is the sort of bosom that is just that-- a bosom. It is not accurate to use the term "breasts" to
describe such solidarity. In fact, her bosom wishes you to know that it once killed a man for
having called it "boobs." The term is both demeaning and offensive to the unified, log-like nature
of this particular bosom. United we stand. Ask not what your bosom can do for you, but what
you can do for your bosom. Powerful. Daunting. There.
As far as her speech goes: if I had known Shamu was going to be jumping so high today, I
wouldn't have sat in the Splash Zone. But there I was, in the front row, wishing I had known that
a shower would be included in class today before I had awoken early in order to take one. A
veritable cacophony of vowels and consonants and hacking and gagging and spitting and
Frenchness seized her speech. This magnificently spitty woman literally transformed
"Alors..." ("So...") into a three-second long, "AlooooooooooHHHHHHHRRRRRRRs...."
followed by a frenzy of consonant sounds, which I could not decipher, but were accompanied in
my head by the flashing lights and bells of a pinball game. Then, a vowel would show up, hang
out, resound through the air for a full three to five seconds, and finish in a marathon of throaty
suspiration before the whole process of hacking and gagging and spitting and Frenchness
repeated itself.
Madame Hamouda. Algerian. Francaise. Oddball extraordinaire. Bienvenue à la France.
3rd: Cycles
by Ansley Clark
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
- Little Gidding
(No. 4 of 'Four Quartets') T.S. Eliot
On the last night
I just sit in my bed and listen
to the foreign words on the television outside my room,
to the humming, solemn stars, to an echo of
thrumming throbbing cicadas once tucked in warm fields. I ache
at the slippery nature of time, at its fine fragility, exquisite
in its transience like drops of clear champagne
remaining around the edge of a flute.
Time passed very, very quickly here.
I will miss falling asleep with my face smashed
into my French-English dictionary. I will miss
the way my host mother arranges letters on my desk –
propped up to be seen when I come home from school.
I will miss the rounded red swells of piled market apples,
the scent of bread and cigarettes, the blue-colored breeze,
thick wood smoke leaving its shredded, earthy netting wound
around the trees, and the perfumed moon,
milky and intoxicating as white wine.
Outside my window the world is on a constant rotation, the fields
spinning, turning, changing, passing. The white-wine moon
waxes and wanes, and tonight it is so white-full it is about to burst
and like tears drip itself creamily into the night. Soon it will be only an eyelash.
And I am beginning to feel that this cycle of happiness is ending,
shriveling and curling in on itself like the dusty wings of a dying moth.
Still,
I think I know the secret of time, to the elusive nature of its fleeting cycles. It is this:
Little pieces remain – unchanging and sweet –
Of the twilight-turning fields, the milky passage of the moon, and
I will remember the quiet cool
of my host mother’s hand soothing my fevered forehead
long after I’ve started
the long flight back.