Half Assed Ferality At Best

[Vung Tau, 11/29/24]

In 1974, I read about a Vietnamese women’s soccer team playing against some foreign squad. Though it was at Saigon’s main stadium, the Viets had no cleats. I was amused and touched. As a child, I routinely played soccer on concrete without shoes. After three years in the US, I still often played basketball barefoot. A Puerto Rican neighbor, Yvonne, thought this was hilarious. Motherless, I had a crush on this older girl. We lived next to the city dump in San Jose.

Yesterday at a café on Nguyễn Kim, I heard a woman talk about her childhood, “Around Tet, we would run out to catch fish. We speared or trapped them with a nơm basket. We ran barefoot through rice paddies!”

Man, “Everybody walked around barefoot then.”

“We’re lucky there was no broken glass.”

“There was no broken glass then.”

“Now, that pond in my village has been filled in. We caught lòng tong fish (of the carp family) and blue clawed prawns.”

Another woman, “Blue clawed prawns!”

“They’re all gone.”

Familiar with such fun, several people chimed in. Like billions around the globe, they’re rural folks displaced to the city. Already, many would starve if left with live chickens during a famine. With eyes sewn to screens, their kids have never stood in mud. Forced to concentrate, they snap or even bite classmates. Programmed for the end, their ferality is merely half assed.

Mine, too. On my way to the café on General Uprising, I must pass more than a dozen dogs guarding shops selling offerings for the dead. About six months ago, these beasts turned on me, so now there’s a cacophony of barking as I glide past them, barefoot, in the dark. It doesn’t help that I often bark right back. Sometimes, I must admit, it’s me who start barking.