land of the past

I am moving South, from the tiny, but always packed streets of Hanoi with its never ending noise and streams of people and vehicles to the magnificent Ha Long Bay, further, further into the very center of this country. The country curves, land becomes ever narrower with the sea threatening to overcome more and more of what people could use to survive. This land has been the dividing line, the front on both sides during the war that lasted so many years. They say, every grain of sand here is soaked with blood, rivers, land and sea, they have all become graveyards of people on both sides. Moving south I feel the air becoming hotter with every hour, bright, perfectly white sand appears alongside little fields in which the rice seems to be less green than the rice paddies in the north. Poverty written on the face of people and land. And yet, it is such a beautiful land, with wonders beyond imagination. I reach out to touch the sun, sweat streaking down my body standing in the heat for only 5 minutes. How do people here survive? How did they survive bombs, battles, sorrow and loss? The same way they survive the hardship of nature, the hot wind that blows not to cool but to dry up every living things and the unbearable heat. The same way they survive against the sea that threatens to take over the last pieces of usable land. They never stop fighting...

Annoyed

Very small things
like people telling you you won't be able to leave on time because half the city is flooded, but then they tell you to take the chance to explore the city, because they did not show you anything from that city...
like you only have good accommodation and food if someone sponsors , even though you overpaid the whole trip
like obligatory charity
like like like

annoyed, disappointed, tired
I don't believe I belong here

Random

It's been a blur. 16 hours over the Atlantic Ocean, 4 days at home, another 17 hours over the old continent and I found myself laughing, eating, hugging, talking and admiring the rain showers that come and go and which i have missed for so long. The same intense embrace of heat and moisture leaves me drenched in sweat everyday, all the while wondering how my cousins can parade in jeans and 2 layers of blouse, plus gloves to protect the arms and mask to hide their face from the sun that seems to burn me darker and darker everyday in my shorts and tank tops. When my younger cousin swung open her hair that reaches her knees I knew I have no rights to complain.






My grandma seems to have become even smaller. Her back a constant question mark about where we have been, when we are leaving and when we are coming back. She seems to draw all her strength from the few days when the family that is away comes back to see her and spends the rest of the time waiting and waiting for us to return again. Her hearing is long gone, so that her world has been trapped in a time and space almost imaginary, which is permanently plagued by the noise of a hammer hitting a piece of metal, day after day.

I breathed in the smell of ripe jack fruits, guavas, longan and so many more fruits and plants and flowers which I sometimes remember and sometimes don't. I relearn the respect for proud cats guarding the kitchen from horrible animals who we must not name, jumping at fish freshly caught and boiled with onion which I have to pull from the garden. Life seems so quiet. Everyday I open my eyes at 4.30 am and walked out on the balcony of a house built in 1991, but which the moisture already colored green at the bottom with moss. Swinging on the old hammock, I watch the silver moon fade away, the stars become less and less bright in the birth of sunlight...