[Norristown, PA on 9/30/13. Those nasty knuckles almost landed on my porcelain mug.] Seeing my photo of Empty Pockets in Wissinoming, Philadelphia, a reader sent a fascinating account: There was an "Empty Pockets" bar on Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn that I went in one evening some years back for a few drinks and the next morning I woke up to find my pockets emptied of everything: cash, keys, wallet, and when I looked out the window, the car was gone too. Then I remembered: an Italian couple befriended me at the bar and near the end of the evening we all went out together in my car and I let them drive because I was so damn drunk and they took me to various ATMs and withdrew my money then after all was done they were nice enough to drop me off at my house then drove away and it was my car. It was an episode to remember of my drinking life. That bar is gone now and in its place is a Chinese grocery store.
Please don't take this as criticism. It's a sincere question that comes up each time you publish something about American underclass culture.
Your subject matter is interesting. Wondering why you chose/choose to focus, in America, on the scummy lowlife dive bars and the down-on-their-luck unfortunates, criminals and soon-to-be-criminals who inhabit them?
Specifically, why that focus in America, while in Vietnam you seem to focus on more wholesome and family-friendly locations and people?
There are plenty of scumbags in Vietnam. Plenty of lowlifes and dive bars. Tattooed gangsters and their hoes, drug-runners, thieves, drunks and druggies, wife-beaters, women beating their husband's mistresses, and much, much more. Why not interact, hang out, and write about them? Your skills at inter-cultural translation could provide interesting portraits of the same class in Vietnam that you so ardently pursue(d) in America.
Also, the US is a very angry and violent country, with a culture that glamorizes violence. Each morning in Philly, I'd wake up to news stories of 1, 2 or 3 local murders the night before. No city in Asia or Europe is like that.
Here in Vung Tau, a person can walk around shit faced at 3 in the morning and nothing will happen.
While I disagree about your assessment of America as a violent country, crime statistics would support the notion that it is *more* violent than most other countries.
I would like to say, during my years reading the news in SE Asia, I did take note that the universal murder weapon of choice was the macheté.
Just hours ago, I got an email from my Scranton buddy, Chuck Orlowski. A school bus driver, Chuck had a horrible job for decades. If someone blew her brains out in a motel room, Chuck had to pick up all the splattered flesh and bones, and I mean everything. If some teen stepped in front of a train, Chuck had to gather all of his remains for even a hundred yards away.
I've written so much about Chuck, I'm practically his biographer. When I briefly toyed with returning to the US, Chuck said I could stay with him. I'm not there for several reasons, and one is I can't afford to live in the US as a canceled author. Sure, I can get another shit job, but I would be so exhausted, I wouldn't be able to write.
As a young man, I was a housepainter and house cleaner mostly. Even if I'm up for those kinds of work again, I wouldn't be hired. By 2018, I noticed nearly all the housepainting crews in Philly were manned by Latinos.
P.S. If you would read my Postcards from the End of America, you'd see that I've written most sympathetically about the American underclass, of all colors. Stoked by a cynical Jew, Unz assholes are so focused on race, they keep insisting I hate whites, so even when I wrote about how poor whites are slandered by Flannery O'Connor, several jumped in to rage at me for hating whites. These morons clearly couldn't even read my article.
P.P.S. A white ex contributor to Unz told me he never read comments under his own articles, since so many were from louts who didn't even bother to carefully read what they were commenting about. They were just ready to be triggered, in short. Seething, they just needed any excuse to take cheap shots anonymously. No wonder the country is going to shit.
A young white writer I was trying to encourage didn't even dare to publish under his own name because, he said, "I don't want to dox myself."
Its a pretty common tradition in literature to not want to "dox yourself", for many reasons. I dont see a problem with it. I agree about the unz comment section though.
Thanks, I guess that I've only read your blog posts, since finding you on Unz. Followed your travels around the world during covid.
Since you're in Vietnam now, I keep expecting posts about the underclass in Vietnam. But instead, it seems your associates in Vietnam are more likely to be literary figures, the intelligentsia, if you will.
While I don't know your whole story, it seems that you were part of the American underclass because you chose to be part of it. Hanging out in dive bars in Philly is not likely to have been a requirement, but rather a personal choice, as was the choice to write about them. Just as one could make the choice to hang out with the underclass in Vietnam, and write about it.
Thanks for your views and sharing them. All the best.
I was born middle class. Due to my company secretary father getting done for embezzlement when I was 16 I found myself among the housing commission class in my last years growing up. It altered my life's trajectory to the extent that I've also done time, for manufacturing drugs and seen my share of rough pubs, here in Australia and overseas. Asia and Europe. I still speak as an educated man and don't fit in as seamlessly as my comfort among rough crowds and low dives would suggest I might. I'm mistaken for a cop from time to time too. I'm Aspergers, and talk too much, and can't do small talk so I've had some adventures but as a rule tend to find my niche in "that crazy cunt". My reputation with explosives and as a fighter who doesn't ever give up, and who if you and your mates beat on, might just come back with a shotgun or hand grenade later in the night to even the score, keeps me safer than I might otherwise be. I still deal comfortably with the "better class" who generally aren't better, just more dishonest. The truth though is that I enjoy the wild west, the kitchen can be as hot as it can be and I'm in my element. With experience both sides of the track, if I had to write about my experiences and the people among whom I have sojourned, I don't think the middle class, let alone the rich are worth it. All the good stuff happens in the raw, unpolished, un-self conscious society.
I never felt seriously under threat anywhere, at least since I spent some time in prison. Even there I broke all the rules. Those of the system and no less those of the crims. I can be myself, no pretences and stand on my morals, even when they're not common or popular among the street crowd. The middle class are all about deception and concealment, trying to fit in. I can't do any of those things. You've definitely got some very narrow minded readers whose own experience is clearly a lot less than what they estimate.
Drugs and drink are the road to death, not life. But that's not the point of my question for Linh. I'm trying to understand why he chooses to focus on the pitiful dregs in divebars in the US, while ignoring the same class in Vietnam (at least from his blog posts). He's in Vietnam now, why share old stories from American divebars, and not new ones about Vietnamese drunks and druggies?
Sorry, Linh, you're wrong there. I've been there, dong chi! A lot lower than you appear to have ever been, too. It didn't take me long to wake up, though. A couple years of drugs/alcohol, scraping to buy a six-pack, hanging around with scumbags was enough to make me wake up.
Descriptions of divebars hold no fascination for me, I've lived it, and it ain't pretty or interesting, nor are the people cute.
No one forced you (or me, or anyone else) to go into one bar, much less strings of them across the country.
In America, even in the degraded state we've reached, you're only hanging out in such places because you choose to. Get a job, learn marketable skills, stop drinking to excess, control the impulse to rebel, eventually build your skills to the point that you can do your own business, and voila--the American dream!
No matter what sort of bad luck you have, no matter what bad breaks, there is always a chance to re-invent yourself in the USA. Being an English professor with a Phd didn't work out? Oh, well--learn how to pour concrete, lay bricks, frame walls, sell pho, etc, etc. The path to success very seldom is found laid out on the floor of a divebar.
Been there, done that, got the scars and the t-shirts!
I don't agree with patronizing Linh about his life decisions, because I don't see anything particularly wrong with how and with whom he chooses to spend his "leisure time," but I have observed he does dwell on the seedier side. That in itself is not an issue. There's nothing wrong with that, it seems to be his specialty or main area of interest, and can make for interesting reading. But, he often goes on to make sweeping generalizations about American people based only on that perspective. What's perplexing is that he goes to great lengths to point out how it's almost always Jews behind the shaping of our media and depictions of our culture, but then goes on to condemn American culture because what he chooses to focus on aligns with that trashy, violent Jewish imagining of what Americans are.
I'm not particularly enamored with American "culture" myself, I just feel it requires a little more diplomacy and objectivity when assessing its people as a whole.
You're an American. Lose your pride. Linh is pretty spot on about the place. Being an outsider who yet spent many years there, I'd trust Linh's point of view over someone born/trapped inside the leviathan. Americans even look like nobody else when in other countries. Of course there are exceptions but there are average outlooks and behaviours with all people's.
By the way I gave up trying to educate you on nuclear weapons. Your video of the magnesium explosion was irrelevant as the camera was only a couple of hundred meters away, not kilometres and the US military isn't in the habit of dropping flash grenades on their victims. Nor can high explosive make the flash you describe with aluminium and magnesium and titanium as a matter of fact. To pyrolyze these need much slower burns, hot but nothing so rapid as HE which simply obliterates things and doesn't involve a flash unless what it blows up has something in it. I make flash grenades mate. However I couldn't make something capable of giving that magnesium flare big enough to white out a screen from 6 Km away. You'd need a truckload of flash powder. As I said, why would the US military drop giant flash bangs on people?
"No matter what sort of bad luck you have, no matter what bad breaks, there is always a chance to re-invent yourself in the USA. Being an English professor with a Phd didn't work out? Oh, well--learn how to pour concrete, lay bricks, frame walls, sell pho, etc, etc."
LOL, is that some sort of boomer comedy routine? Well, I suppose that there are still people who believe in the "American dream", without quotes and cynicism... But it's becoming very rare.
P.S. I doubt Linh (or anyone) tries to find "success" in a dive bar, just cheap beer and people to talk to for a while. What's wrong with that? (Also, the differences of his life in Vietnam and in the US seem pretty self-explanatory).
"LOL, is that some sort of boomer comedy routine?"
What's funny, Tommy?
The lives of millions of Vietnamese refugees in the USA give lie to your cynical view of the American dream. Success is not guaranteed, and there are bad breaks and bad luck. Millions of Vietnamese have achieved the American dream. Pissing away your life and money on "cheap" beer (at $5+ per 12 oz, it ain't cheap) and hanging out with drunks and drug addicts is sure as hell NOT the way to achieve it.
What does one try to find in a divebar? You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
And no, it's not self-explanatory why Linh hangs out with drunks and drug addicts in the US, and with the literary set in Vietnam. Why do you think it is?
There are plenty of drunks and drug addicts in Vietnam, bars and criminals. If it's so satisfying to write about those folks in America, why not in Vietnam too?
"A Vietnamese expression: A man without alcohol is like a flag without wind." Lots of lives ruined by alcohol there. Lots of stories to tell. Why not share those stories with American readers?
“learn how to pour concrete, lay bricks, frame walls, “
At 58 years old? You are quite the knuckle head. I think Linh accurately tagged you as the type that completely misses the point of his writing, and just reacts to it with your own personal biases, then lashes out. If you want to learn about high end WalMart shoppers that go by Misses Robinson - study it and write us an essay.
As I said, I don't know the details of Linh's story, but it seems he was not 58 the whole time he was in the USA. I'm guessing he came as a refugee when he was in his teens or before. He had several decades to build his skills and get out of the gutter. I don't know why he made the choice to piss away his life and dollars in divebars, but it was his choice.
If painting was not the road to success for him, then other avenues were open. He chose not to follow them.
You do not write like someone who woke up to anything. You're a day tripper. Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones? Worst is that you think you do.
From a literary perspective, the underclass can be more interesting than the middle class or the rich (see Orwell and Twain, who hang out with bums and vagrants and wrote interestingly about that). The middle class is usually more boring or depressing as a subject, although of course there are exceptions. Even Borges, an artistic writer if there ever was one, who hang out with upper-class people and the literati, but his preferred stories among the ones he wrote were about gaucho thugs fighting with knives in taverns (or vikings fighting with swords, which is more or less the same thing). The rich... Well, Fitzgerald wrote about it but his famous novel seems a bit fake to me. Proust is interesting in his childhood recollections but as he drags on and on later about princesses and dukes in their salons, it becomes a bit boring. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if he went to some Parisian low-class bar of the time to see "how the other half lives".
Linh, given your fascination with the American underclass, what do you think about the writing of Charles Bukowsky?
I share your fascination with the American underclass because I find that they are more likely to be individuals - not airways particularly pleasant ones to be around but less driven to strictly conform than the middle and upper middle classes.
I grew up working class but by middle age had landed in the middle then upper middle. I found that the higher I went up the economic ladder, the less pleasant and quirky the people. I have found, for the most part, the same as an expat.
I just wish you would spend more space in your writing profiling Vietnamese off all stripes, especially, non conformists too.
The only 2 close calls I've had in VN in 15+ years were an Aussie and a Viêt-Nam born American, even though I used to go out a lot, in all kinds of places. What I can tell is that generally in Asia, initiating a fight/violence is losing one's face and a dishonor. "Thou shall win the war without waging war", wrote Tzu or something like that.
Nice to see an insurance company (Berks) finally do something good.
I've had all kinds of near misses in bars.
Once, after exiting a bar, I found myself in South Phoenix, surrounded by half a dozen Black guys who wanted to know WTF I was doing in "their" neighborhood ? Gulp. I was looking for cocaine, and I was with a Mexican woman (who I had only met 20 minutes before) who was looking for (as I would find out a few minutes) heroin. Oh yeah, those were the days.
"For all the shit bars I’ve stumbled through, not just in the US but outside it, it’s a miracle I never got rolled or roughed up."
I've been wondering at this ever since I was halfway through "Postcards." I was certain that if it had ever happened to you, you would have written about it somewhere along the line. I suspect it has at least a little to do with your easy-going manner--many others frequently patronizing such establishments probably wouldn't have dodged the bullet for so many years. However, I can likewise claim to have never gotten in a dust-up even once, despite having visited numerous questionable establishments both in the US and abroad during my 8+ years in the US Navy.
All I can say is that some characters in those places are positively looking for trouble, and if one is attentive, it isn't hard to spot and avoid them. After awhile one can also get a sixth sense about when trouble might be about to start, and take the opportunity to retire gracefully before it hits.
My Postcards book begins with an account of me almost strangling a cowboy in Cheyenne. Though I had my reason, he probably would have killed me had he recovered his senses. We ended the night as buddies, though, so all was well.
When a lady bought me a drink, I returned the favor a bit later, which pissed off her boyfriend, but maybe it was something else I did. I can't remember everything, man. I didn't mean any harm.
I remember my captain on the little crab boat called the Echo getting into an argument in a bar in Kodiak with another captain on another boat crewed by Samoans. My captain, Capt. Morgan, or as one deckhand called him big M little organ was a mouthy bastard. He was chastising this other captain for taking the book, Urantia, as the truth, Mo being a bible believer, was trying to convince this guy that Jesus did not come here on a spaceship and just how stupid it is to think so. I was also watching the 350 pound Samoan who was listening and clearly becoming irritated. Then the 120 pound barmaid jumped on the bar and told everyone to leave! Sometimes the entertainment level can override self preservation...
Linh,
Please don't take this as criticism. It's a sincere question that comes up each time you publish something about American underclass culture.
Your subject matter is interesting. Wondering why you chose/choose to focus, in America, on the scummy lowlife dive bars and the down-on-their-luck unfortunates, criminals and soon-to-be-criminals who inhabit them?
Specifically, why that focus in America, while in Vietnam you seem to focus on more wholesome and family-friendly locations and people?
There are plenty of scumbags in Vietnam. Plenty of lowlifes and dive bars. Tattooed gangsters and their hoes, drug-runners, thieves, drunks and druggies, wife-beaters, women beating their husband's mistresses, and much, much more. Why not interact, hang out, and write about them? Your skills at inter-cultural translation could provide interesting portraits of the same class in Vietnam that you so ardently pursue(d) in America.
Thanks.
Hi Kent,
Also, the US is a very angry and violent country, with a culture that glamorizes violence. Each morning in Philly, I'd wake up to news stories of 1, 2 or 3 local murders the night before. No city in Asia or Europe is like that.
Here in Vung Tau, a person can walk around shit faced at 3 in the morning and nothing will happen.
Linh
While I disagree about your assessment of America as a violent country, crime statistics would support the notion that it is *more* violent than most other countries.
I would like to say, during my years reading the news in SE Asia, I did take note that the universal murder weapon of choice was the macheté.
its the american government and their cohorts in the military industrial complex that are the real scumbags...not the people per se
Hi Kent,
Just hours ago, I got an email from my Scranton buddy, Chuck Orlowski. A school bus driver, Chuck had a horrible job for decades. If someone blew her brains out in a motel room, Chuck had to pick up all the splattered flesh and bones, and I mean everything. If some teen stepped in front of a train, Chuck had to gather all of his remains for even a hundred yards away.
I've written so much about Chuck, I'm practically his biographer. When I briefly toyed with returning to the US, Chuck said I could stay with him. I'm not there for several reasons, and one is I can't afford to live in the US as a canceled author. Sure, I can get another shit job, but I would be so exhausted, I wouldn't be able to write.
As a young man, I was a housepainter and house cleaner mostly. Even if I'm up for those kinds of work again, I wouldn't be hired. By 2018, I noticed nearly all the housepainting crews in Philly were manned by Latinos.
Linh
Hi Kent,
I wrote about the American underclass because I was a part of it. These were my people, and most of them were not "scumbags." Far from it.
As for the underside of Vietnamese life, I've written about it also. Check out my novel, Love Like Hate, to begin with.
Linh
P.S. If you would read my Postcards from the End of America, you'd see that I've written most sympathetically about the American underclass, of all colors. Stoked by a cynical Jew, Unz assholes are so focused on race, they keep insisting I hate whites, so even when I wrote about how poor whites are slandered by Flannery O'Connor, several jumped in to rage at me for hating whites. These morons clearly couldn't even read my article.
P.P.S. A white ex contributor to Unz told me he never read comments under his own articles, since so many were from louts who didn't even bother to carefully read what they were commenting about. They were just ready to be triggered, in short. Seething, they just needed any excuse to take cheap shots anonymously. No wonder the country is going to shit.
A young white writer I was trying to encourage didn't even dare to publish under his own name because, he said, "I don't want to dox myself."
Such courage, eh?
Its a pretty common tradition in literature to not want to "dox yourself", for many reasons. I dont see a problem with it. I agree about the unz comment section though.
Thanks, I guess that I've only read your blog posts, since finding you on Unz. Followed your travels around the world during covid.
Since you're in Vietnam now, I keep expecting posts about the underclass in Vietnam. But instead, it seems your associates in Vietnam are more likely to be literary figures, the intelligentsia, if you will.
While I don't know your whole story, it seems that you were part of the American underclass because you chose to be part of it. Hanging out in dive bars in Philly is not likely to have been a requirement, but rather a personal choice, as was the choice to write about them. Just as one could make the choice to hang out with the underclass in Vietnam, and write about it.
Thanks for your views and sharing them. All the best.
Hi Kent,
You write, "While I don't know your whole story, it seems that you were part of the American underclass because you chose to be part of it."
I wouldn't mind being a billionaire, but where would you drink if you were a housepainter?
It seems you've always been at least middle class or above, hence your puzzlement about the American underclass. None of them chooses to be poor.
Linh
I was born middle class. Due to my company secretary father getting done for embezzlement when I was 16 I found myself among the housing commission class in my last years growing up. It altered my life's trajectory to the extent that I've also done time, for manufacturing drugs and seen my share of rough pubs, here in Australia and overseas. Asia and Europe. I still speak as an educated man and don't fit in as seamlessly as my comfort among rough crowds and low dives would suggest I might. I'm mistaken for a cop from time to time too. I'm Aspergers, and talk too much, and can't do small talk so I've had some adventures but as a rule tend to find my niche in "that crazy cunt". My reputation with explosives and as a fighter who doesn't ever give up, and who if you and your mates beat on, might just come back with a shotgun or hand grenade later in the night to even the score, keeps me safer than I might otherwise be. I still deal comfortably with the "better class" who generally aren't better, just more dishonest. The truth though is that I enjoy the wild west, the kitchen can be as hot as it can be and I'm in my element. With experience both sides of the track, if I had to write about my experiences and the people among whom I have sojourned, I don't think the middle class, let alone the rich are worth it. All the good stuff happens in the raw, unpolished, un-self conscious society.
I never felt seriously under threat anywhere, at least since I spent some time in prison. Even there I broke all the rules. Those of the system and no less those of the crims. I can be myself, no pretences and stand on my morals, even when they're not common or popular among the street crowd. The middle class are all about deception and concealment, trying to fit in. I can't do any of those things. You've definitely got some very narrow minded readers whose own experience is clearly a lot less than what they estimate.
"...where would you drink if you were a housepainter?"
And that's the choice, right there.
You choose to drink. Drinking (or drugs) does not solve any problem. Put it down, stay out of bars, and it's a whole 'nother world out here.
What is the issue with Linh writing about people in shady bars? Read Bret Easton Ellis or whomever if you want stories about the upper middle class
Judgemental wanker. Go live a bit and grow the fuck up. Drugs and drink are the only things which make life bearable for many.
Judgemental? Take a look in the mirror, bunny.
Drugs and drink are the road to death, not life. But that's not the point of my question for Linh. I'm trying to understand why he chooses to focus on the pitiful dregs in divebars in the US, while ignoring the same class in Vietnam (at least from his blog posts). He's in Vietnam now, why share old stories from American divebars, and not new ones about Vietnamese drunks and druggies?
Sorry, Linh, you're wrong there. I've been there, dong chi! A lot lower than you appear to have ever been, too. It didn't take me long to wake up, though. A couple years of drugs/alcohol, scraping to buy a six-pack, hanging around with scumbags was enough to make me wake up.
Descriptions of divebars hold no fascination for me, I've lived it, and it ain't pretty or interesting, nor are the people cute.
No one forced you (or me, or anyone else) to go into one bar, much less strings of them across the country.
In America, even in the degraded state we've reached, you're only hanging out in such places because you choose to. Get a job, learn marketable skills, stop drinking to excess, control the impulse to rebel, eventually build your skills to the point that you can do your own business, and voila--the American dream!
No matter what sort of bad luck you have, no matter what bad breaks, there is always a chance to re-invent yourself in the USA. Being an English professor with a Phd didn't work out? Oh, well--learn how to pour concrete, lay bricks, frame walls, sell pho, etc, etc. The path to success very seldom is found laid out on the floor of a divebar.
Been there, done that, got the scars and the t-shirts!
I don't agree with patronizing Linh about his life decisions, because I don't see anything particularly wrong with how and with whom he chooses to spend his "leisure time," but I have observed he does dwell on the seedier side. That in itself is not an issue. There's nothing wrong with that, it seems to be his specialty or main area of interest, and can make for interesting reading. But, he often goes on to make sweeping generalizations about American people based only on that perspective. What's perplexing is that he goes to great lengths to point out how it's almost always Jews behind the shaping of our media and depictions of our culture, but then goes on to condemn American culture because what he chooses to focus on aligns with that trashy, violent Jewish imagining of what Americans are.
I'm not particularly enamored with American "culture" myself, I just feel it requires a little more diplomacy and objectivity when assessing its people as a whole.
You're an American. Lose your pride. Linh is pretty spot on about the place. Being an outsider who yet spent many years there, I'd trust Linh's point of view over someone born/trapped inside the leviathan. Americans even look like nobody else when in other countries. Of course there are exceptions but there are average outlooks and behaviours with all people's.
By the way I gave up trying to educate you on nuclear weapons. Your video of the magnesium explosion was irrelevant as the camera was only a couple of hundred meters away, not kilometres and the US military isn't in the habit of dropping flash grenades on their victims. Nor can high explosive make the flash you describe with aluminium and magnesium and titanium as a matter of fact. To pyrolyze these need much slower burns, hot but nothing so rapid as HE which simply obliterates things and doesn't involve a flash unless what it blows up has something in it. I make flash grenades mate. However I couldn't make something capable of giving that magnesium flare big enough to white out a screen from 6 Km away. You'd need a truckload of flash powder. As I said, why would the US military drop giant flash bangs on people?
"No matter what sort of bad luck you have, no matter what bad breaks, there is always a chance to re-invent yourself in the USA. Being an English professor with a Phd didn't work out? Oh, well--learn how to pour concrete, lay bricks, frame walls, sell pho, etc, etc."
LOL, is that some sort of boomer comedy routine? Well, I suppose that there are still people who believe in the "American dream", without quotes and cynicism... But it's becoming very rare.
P.S. I doubt Linh (or anyone) tries to find "success" in a dive bar, just cheap beer and people to talk to for a while. What's wrong with that? (Also, the differences of his life in Vietnam and in the US seem pretty self-explanatory).
"LOL, is that some sort of boomer comedy routine?"
What's funny, Tommy?
The lives of millions of Vietnamese refugees in the USA give lie to your cynical view of the American dream. Success is not guaranteed, and there are bad breaks and bad luck. Millions of Vietnamese have achieved the American dream. Pissing away your life and money on "cheap" beer (at $5+ per 12 oz, it ain't cheap) and hanging out with drunks and drug addicts is sure as hell NOT the way to achieve it.
What does one try to find in a divebar? You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
And no, it's not self-explanatory why Linh hangs out with drunks and drug addicts in the US, and with the literary set in Vietnam. Why do you think it is?
There are plenty of drunks and drug addicts in Vietnam, bars and criminals. If it's so satisfying to write about those folks in America, why not in Vietnam too?
"A Vietnamese expression: A man without alcohol is like a flag without wind." Lots of lives ruined by alcohol there. Lots of stories to tell. Why not share those stories with American readers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICc-9WaKBcU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n4wShhOLKQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY03yhMOmSU
“learn how to pour concrete, lay bricks, frame walls, “
At 58 years old? You are quite the knuckle head. I think Linh accurately tagged you as the type that completely misses the point of his writing, and just reacts to it with your own personal biases, then lashes out. If you want to learn about high end WalMart shoppers that go by Misses Robinson - study it and write us an essay.
As I said, I don't know the details of Linh's story, but it seems he was not 58 the whole time he was in the USA. I'm guessing he came as a refugee when he was in his teens or before. He had several decades to build his skills and get out of the gutter. I don't know why he made the choice to piss away his life and dollars in divebars, but it was his choice.
If painting was not the road to success for him, then other avenues were open. He chose not to follow them.
You do not write like someone who woke up to anything. You're a day tripper. Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones? Worst is that you think you do.
there are scumbags everywhere...but the halls of congress are infested with them...the end of empire is nigh...plan accordingly
From a literary perspective, the underclass can be more interesting than the middle class or the rich (see Orwell and Twain, who hang out with bums and vagrants and wrote interestingly about that). The middle class is usually more boring or depressing as a subject, although of course there are exceptions. Even Borges, an artistic writer if there ever was one, who hang out with upper-class people and the literati, but his preferred stories among the ones he wrote were about gaucho thugs fighting with knives in taverns (or vikings fighting with swords, which is more or less the same thing). The rich... Well, Fitzgerald wrote about it but his famous novel seems a bit fake to me. Proust is interesting in his childhood recollections but as he drags on and on later about princesses and dukes in their salons, it becomes a bit boring. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if he went to some Parisian low-class bar of the time to see "how the other half lives".
Linh, given your fascination with the American underclass, what do you think about the writing of Charles Bukowsky?
I share your fascination with the American underclass because I find that they are more likely to be individuals - not airways particularly pleasant ones to be around but less driven to strictly conform than the middle and upper middle classes.
I grew up working class but by middle age had landed in the middle then upper middle. I found that the higher I went up the economic ladder, the less pleasant and quirky the people. I have found, for the most part, the same as an expat.
I just wish you would spend more space in your writing profiling Vietnamese off all stripes, especially, non conformists too.
Thanks Linh, great read as usual!
The only 2 close calls I've had in VN in 15+ years were an Aussie and a Viêt-Nam born American, even though I used to go out a lot, in all kinds of places. What I can tell is that generally in Asia, initiating a fight/violence is losing one's face and a dishonor. "Thou shall win the war without waging war", wrote Tzu or something like that.
Linh
Nice to see an insurance company (Berks) finally do something good.
I've had all kinds of near misses in bars.
Once, after exiting a bar, I found myself in South Phoenix, surrounded by half a dozen Black guys who wanted to know WTF I was doing in "their" neighborhood ? Gulp. I was looking for cocaine, and I was with a Mexican woman (who I had only met 20 minutes before) who was looking for (as I would find out a few minutes) heroin. Oh yeah, those were the days.
Bill
the jew jabs are working...get ready for more for the fake monkey pox....https://expose-news.com/2022/08/14/gov-reports-prove-hundreds-thousands-dying-covid-vaccine/
Such interesting comments!
Porcelain mug. Took me a while.
"For all the shit bars I’ve stumbled through, not just in the US but outside it, it’s a miracle I never got rolled or roughed up."
I've been wondering at this ever since I was halfway through "Postcards." I was certain that if it had ever happened to you, you would have written about it somewhere along the line. I suspect it has at least a little to do with your easy-going manner--many others frequently patronizing such establishments probably wouldn't have dodged the bullet for so many years. However, I can likewise claim to have never gotten in a dust-up even once, despite having visited numerous questionable establishments both in the US and abroad during my 8+ years in the US Navy.
All I can say is that some characters in those places are positively looking for trouble, and if one is attentive, it isn't hard to spot and avoid them. After awhile one can also get a sixth sense about when trouble might be about to start, and take the opportunity to retire gracefully before it hits.
Hi Bill,
My Postcards book begins with an account of me almost strangling a cowboy in Cheyenne. Though I had my reason, he probably would have killed me had he recovered his senses. We ended the night as buddies, though, so all was well.
When a lady bought me a drink, I returned the favor a bit later, which pissed off her boyfriend, but maybe it was something else I did. I can't remember everything, man. I didn't mean any harm.
Cheyenne is one city I would love to visit again.
Linh
P.S. My good friend Jay once got his face stepped on by a bouncer. Each time he recounts this episode, Jay laughs so hard. Shit happens.
I remember my captain on the little crab boat called the Echo getting into an argument in a bar in Kodiak with another captain on another boat crewed by Samoans. My captain, Capt. Morgan, or as one deckhand called him big M little organ was a mouthy bastard. He was chastising this other captain for taking the book, Urantia, as the truth, Mo being a bible believer, was trying to convince this guy that Jesus did not come here on a spaceship and just how stupid it is to think so. I was also watching the 350 pound Samoan who was listening and clearly becoming irritated. Then the 120 pound barmaid jumped on the bar and told everyone to leave! Sometimes the entertainment level can override self preservation...