Vietnam Remnants Museum

K. Hoar and I have spent most of our time in Ho Chi Minh City relaxing, exploring, and doing some serious eating. We did, however, decide to go to the War Remnants Museum. After reading a couple of ex-patriot blogs about how biased and one-sided the displays were, I was a bit hesitant, but after thinking back to all the articles I read about the Vietnam War in U.S. Foreign Policy (yes, Lehmann I read them ALL), I reminded myself of how imperialist we were.

The museum boasts two main attractions—a collection of American helicopters, tanks, guns, and bombs outside the building and photographs documenting anti-war demonstrations around the world and the after-effects of Agent Orange, a chemical that American soldiers sprayed across the country.

 After walking around the museum for a couple hours, I found myself fixating on a few key ideas/thoughts. The first was that the Vietnamese did a really good job of documenting anti-war demonstrations around the world, and happily there was a whole section on the protests that took place in the United States. When I saw a couple of photographs of young hippies at Berkeley, I thought to myself, my mom is probably one of those fuzzy blobs in the background. A proud moment, I must say. But honestly, it was nice that the people were making a point that not all Americans wanted the war and that many were against it. Yet still, I heard several Europeans muttering about what the United States did. I even heard one woman stop her son, saying look what the Americans did. No lady, look at what our stupid government did.

This little moment brings me to my next point. While reading the information on the wall, I came across several quotes from the French, calling out the United States for committing crimes of war and genocide. This frustrates me SO MUCH. Not that people shouldn’t be keeping America in check, but that I feel like Westerners love to point out other countries’ mistakes while ignoring their own. Like hey France, remember when you built a volleyball court on the mass graves in Murambi, Rwanda after watching people clean the blood-soaked floors. Don’t even get me started on what the French colonizers did. But honestly people. Geez. Like next time you visit Washington D.C. go to the Holocaust Museum and then to the Native American/Indian one. As most of you know, touring the Holocaust Museum is a pretty intense experience, full of horrific photographs, incredibly difficult to watch videos, and, famously, piles upon piles of the dead’s shoes. But take a five-minute walk to the Indian Museum, and you won’t see much about the Trail of Tears. Urgh. It’s just so incredibly frustrating for me. If any country is going to call out another then that government should also investigate its own past. It’s too easy to keep shifting the blame onto everyone else, while not taking a hard look at what we have ignored.

One last thing. I think that what happened in Vietnam was absolutely despicable and ultimately wrong. There is now way around that. But I’m not a hundred percent convinced that what happened constitutes genocide, which is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” And I saw several plaques of quotes from prominent human rights associations that what happened in Vietnam was genocide. And I guess that what I’m getting at is that just because something is awful and horrible doesn’t mean that it’s genocide. I believe that to call it that downplays the events that unfolded in Rwanda, Darfur, and Germany among other countries. Maybe downplays is the wrong word—it just isn’t true to what happened. And it can kind of desensitize people to future genocides if we start calling every awful and bad situation genocide. I sort of think of it as similar to politicians calling each other Nazis. Maybe an official’s decision was authoritarian or even totalitarian and that makes it a bad decision definitely, but it was not a Nazi decision. To say that trivializes the Nazis and all of the experiences of those that suffered under Hitler. I guess that I just think that we really have to think hard about how we label things.  Hmm, I’m not saying this in the best way possible. I know. I apologize. But hopefully, you can kind of get what I’m saying.

Internet Censorship

I first realized that I wanted to be a political science major when I wrote a paper on North Korea. And while I don’t recall the exact subtopic, I do remember reading quite a bit about how totalitarian governments function—how leaders establish legitimacy, maintain control over almost every detail of their people’s lives, and survive in a world order dominated by democratic states. I was also really interested in how such a government psychologically manipulates its people, convincing families to turn on neighbors and children to give testimony against their parents. Understanding that these types of societies are fragile, most totalitarian leaders do whatever it is in their power to prevent rebellions, and I was always fascinated by what means they took and how the people reacted.

Since I can’t travel to North Korea or Eritrea, countries like Vietnam are just about the closest thing to a totalitarian state that I can get to, and it is still a long way away from that. I know that Freedom House is not the be-all-end-all ranking system, but I like to use it. For 2011, it ranks Vietnam as “Not Free.” For those of you who don’t know, Freedom House does reports on just about every country in the world; it looks at political rights and civil liberties among other things to give each country a score, and then it ranks them as “Free,” “Partly Free,” or “Not Free.” Here is its most recent report on Vietnam from 2011: http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/vietnam

But basically, I started thinking about all of this when I realized that facebook is somewhat banned here. You can’t access it if you type in www.facebook.com but, if you google proxy facebook sites, there are TONS. So it’s not really that difficult to get on.  So I started reading about internet censorship in Vietnam, and I found that the government refuses to acknowledge that it has blocked facebook and, therefore, the blocks are pretty weak. If the government really wanted to take a harder stance on preventing access to the site, it would have to take much stronger measures and admit that it is behind it all. That would be a very unpopular move amongst the Vietnamese youth. So instead, the government just limits access to the “common folk.” Here’s some more reading for those of you that are interested in this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/11/facebook_vietnam.  Also, I think I read that the people are formally guaranteed a kind of free speech, but that protection is often contradicted by local laws or government actions.

I guess that a lot of governments like Vietnam worry not that people will say awful things about leaders on facebook, but that they will use the site as a way of uniting people against governments in power. This all happened before the Arab Spring Movements, and I won’t say that facebook was absolutely instrumental in the rebellions, but I do think it made them logistically easier. But I guess, my point is that made Vietnam feared that the site would be used in a similar way.

In other news, as I’m writing this, the theme song to Titanic is blasting. AHAHAHAHA! Preparation for the movie coming out in 3D, I guess.

Catching Up on Lost Time

Hanging out with Legs and Mikey in Vietnam only confirms what I already knew—the only way to really understand/see a place is to live there. Or, if you’re interested in shortcuts, to visit someone living in that place who will show you around. Ho Chi Minh City has been pretty great thus far; it’s honestly more like Bangkok than Phnom Penh. And while it’s not yet as built up as Thailand’s capital, Ho Chi Minh City seems to suggest that Vietnam is definitely a newly industrializing rather than developing country. Traveling overland, I was struck by the juxtaposition between Cambodia and its neighbors. Obviously, I’m no expert on Southeast Asia or anything, but I think that by driving across these three countries, you can really see just how devastating a conflict can be and how far genocide can set a country back. I’m sure that that is too much of an oversimplification of a very complex situation, but it’s still something to think on.

On to less serious subjects, Legs and Mikey live in an amazing apartment a short ride away from the backpackers district. I swear, this place would run you at least a couple thousand in D.C. or New York City. 

 Katie and I have already taken over our room. 

 And this lovely poster that Mikey and Legs put up over our beds really made us feel at home. It’s supposed to help up have baby boys. 

Anyways, we haven’t really done much sightseeing, which is honestly fine by me. I’m a little pooped. After a bit, temples, forts, and palaces all start to look the same, and the history is lost on me. Although, I do think that we’ll probably go to some war museums and see the tunnels. But for the past two days, we’ve just been hanging out, going to the movies, and eating. Tonight, for instance, we stayed up playing hearts until 2 am, and it was so hot that none of us were fully clothed. Legs, Katie, and I were pantsless and Mikey was only wearing a towel. Felt like we were back at Hamilton again, except this time around pants are bogus. New trend??

That’s all for now. We’re planning out adventures right now to a water park, Hanoi, and Halong Bay. So I promise more pictures and interesting stories to come.

Trio Reunited

If you had asked me March of senior year, where will you be in one year, I probably would have said in New York City or Washington D.C. living with Legs and Katie and working at some research institute. Either I am seriously failing or definitely winning depending on how you look at it, and I honest to god never would have predicted this. But in less than 9 hours, the great, wonderful, terrific, amazing trio will finally be reunited in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. 

I am seriously overstimulated. Just a 6 hour bus ride away!! Many many many adventures to come!!! EEEEEEK!

The Killing Fields

During my semester abroad in Rwanda and Uganda, I studied conflict and genocide—how a country collapses into violence, how an individual can murder a neighbor with a machete, how a people move forward, how reconciliation begins, and how justice must be made. And after numerous trips to both Western and African memorials, I came to accept and understand my reactions to the pictures of children and broken skulls. Yet I am still surprised at how easily I can walk on dirt littered with bone shards, sit underneath a tree that the Khmer Rouge threw babies against, and side-step pieces of decaying clothes. I can so quickly emotionally detach myself from the horror of genocide, and I haven’t yet decided if that is a great strength or a great weakness.

My SIT program focused a lot on establishing a collective memory and how that memory shapes the political, social, and economic transformation of a country post-genocide; in short, does it bring the people closer towards reconciliation and lasting peace or back towards violence?  A subtopic within this conversation centers on how a nation memorializes the atrocity.  In the West, museums (think the Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C.) are often incredibly factual, filled with videos, details, photographs, and artifacts. They strive to paint a clear picture of how something like the Holocaust happened, and they try to get visitors to grasp the scale of the genocide. But they are careful not to be too gruesome. Yet in Rwanda and Cambodia, many of the memorials are simply rooms with bodies preserved in lime, bones, and skulls. These sites force people to confront the atrocity—to stand in the same place as the victims and to see the physical evidence of their machete-beaten bodies.

Both have their strengths and weaknesses. I think that Western memorials allow us to put up a screen between our lives and the lives of the victims. We cannot see their bodies. We are not walking on the ground they walked on. We are not confined in the rooms that they were confined to. And we do not directly speak or interact with the survivors. But this attachment allows us to get a well-rounded understanding of the genocide and that might help us see warning signs in the future.  African and Asian memorials force us to confront the brutality and horrific nature of genocide. They force us to see the body of one individual so that the statistic of a million may sink in. At the same time, I think that seeing a body or a skull is so traumatizing that many of us simply shut down immediately, preventing us from making that connection that is so essential.

I often wonder why I shut down. Does it mean that I can’t fully comprehend the enormity of each single life lost? Can I not move beyond the statistic? And if I can’t when I’m literally standing on a path of shattered bones, then how can I expect anyone else to. Because achieving that—mourning the individual rather than looking only at the statistic—really is the best way to prevent dehumanization and genocide. 

Shards of bone and a tooth. Every so often, the groundskeepers must walk the paths to collect bones that surface. They say that the dead are still not at peace yet. 

This is the tree I mentioned earlier--the one that the Khmer Rouge threw babies against.

Remnants of the victims' clothing.

Photographs of the victims at the Tuol Sleng, which was named S-21. Here, the Khmer Rouge systematically documented the lives of their victims before torturing them and forcing them to sign confessions before taking them to the killing fields.

The cells that victims were forced to live in for months during their torture sentences. 

A quick side note before ending, I'm sure that many people believe that it is impolite to take photographs of a site where such atrocities were committed. They think it is rude and disrespectful. But I would counter that I know in my heart of hearts why I take these pictures, and I believe that showing them to others who cannot come and visit is really an extension of these memorials' missions--never again.

Angkor Wat and Rural Cambodia

Walking across the Cambodian border, I first thought, well, I’m back in the developing world, and two hours in a shared taxi later only confirmed my initial feelings—trash everywhere, miles of land set aside for agriculture, and every so often the occasional small town of buildings constructed of sheet metal and crumbling concrete.

Siem Reap, however, is such a tourist hub that is seems to break the mold. Here, there were a number of fancy hotels, western-style restaurants, smoothly paved clean roads, and wireless internet everywhere. Our guesthouse, in particular, was run by a couple of ex-pats, and it felt just as nice if not nicer than places I have paid 20 dollars for, not 4. It just goes to show how much tourism can really change the trajectory of a town; Angkor Wat, a temple complex just outside of Siem Reap, has at times been and may still be the largest tourist destination in southeast Asia. And while, these sites will always been around to generate money, it doesn’t seem like any of this capital will extend outwards into other parts of Cambodia. 

These two photos are from Angkor Wat. It was built in the 12th century first as a Hindu Temple, but later converted to a Buddhist temple. Really interesting tidbit of history that I think speaks to Cambodia's relationship with India: the myth of how the country was created basically centers on an Indian prince marrying a Cambodian princess, and her father drinking up all the water over Cambodia to give the Indian prince a dowry. 

I took these at the Temple Bayon, where there are literally 40 engraved faces of Buddha. 

These are from what I like to call the Jungle Temple, and I even asked a fellow traveler if he knew where the "jungle one was." Really, though, it's called Ta Prohm, and it seemed to be even more popular than Angkor Wat. I wish that we had done this first, because we decided to bike from our hotel to the temples and, once inside the complex, we took the long route. In total, I think we did about 15+ miles and, so by Ta Prohm, I was sweating buckets/ready for a cold shower.

Anyways. After two days and three nights in Siem Reap, Katie and I took a bus to Phnom Penh, where we will stay for another three days before leaving to Ho Chi Minh City. The ride totaled about six hours and, while listening to some jams, I got to really observe the rural countryside. In comparison to Rwanda and Uganda, there are a lot more towns, which are closer together and, although the houses seem just as dilapidated, they are bigger and look more solid. Trash, though, is everywhere, and the worst is that much of it is so close to water. But I won’t get started on my water tangent now.

One thing I did notice is that the only nice buildings in these townships are temples. Now, maybe these buildings reflect a united effort of each community to build something lasting a beautiful, and to have ownership over something, what’s the word, nice. I completely understand that. But another part of me wondered if having such an ornate place to meditate or focus on religion somewhat contradicts the principles of Buddhism. Now, I’m no expert. This is all just thinking aloud. But doesn’t a big tenet of Buddhism focus on letting go of both material and emotional attachments as a way of reaching enlightenment. Why, then, would it be important to have such a beautiful temple with such (expensive?) detail when it seemed that some members of the community were begging? Just something to think on.

Final Thoughts on Thailand

Upon leaving Thailand, I tried to think about the lasting impressions that the country had had on me. It goes without saying that Thailand is one of the most naturally beautiful places in the world—lush jungles, endless green rice patties, limestone rock faces, turquoise waters, white sandy beaches, and palm trees as far as the eye can see. And while I cannot wait to go back, I don’t really have much to say about Thailand in the same way I did about India. Maybe it’s that I’m not as familiar with the country’s political history, that I wasn’t there long enough to get a full picture of development and inequality, or that I just really didn’t fall in love with the people in the same way that I did in Rwanda. For me, putting aside the beaches and waterfalls, Thailand is nothing really to write home about. And in all honesty, I think it’s a good thing, as I tend to be more interested in a country’s challenges rather than its successes. Right now, for instance, I am LOVING reading all about Cambodia’s history to get a better understanding of why the violence happened before spending a day visiting the killing fields.

On a more personal level, I think I was a bit too distracted by things going on back home to really be present in Thailand. As frustrated as I am with myself and that situation, I just have to recognize that that is just a part of traveling, because as much as we might try to get away, we really are almost always going to be connected to and emotionally involved in what goes on back home. And I feel like having to move beyond everything that is happening two oceans away is a challenge in and off itself that has really taught me a lot about myself. If I’m being absolutely honest with myself, I’m still pretty much at an all time low and struggling to come to terms with how lost I feel, but I think the fact that I have been able to do that in a foreign country is a good thing. I haven’t yet gotten on a plane home to fix everything.