More or Less Homeless Survivors

[Vung Tau, 6/26/22]

Yesterday, I finally bought breakfast from a woman I had walked by for years. If only for 15 minutes, our destinies collided. Naturally, we tried to figure out where the other was from. She’s a native of Bình Định, known for its martial art and the poet Hàn Mặc Tử (1912-1940). Most still believe he died of leprosy. It’s more delicious that way. All vanities must be punctured.

Writer Trần Thanh Mại (1911-1965) clarifies, “Suddenly, the poet woke up one morning to find his fingers numb, stiff and unable to bend, his face in the mirror leathery and rough, with his cheeks bright red. He stopped seeing all his friends, and even Mộng Cầm, after admitting to her his gross transformation. Of course he also used the most noble words to disentangle all their old promises, so she could regain her freedom.” He died only five years later with all his fingers and toes.

In Saigon, there’s a Mộng Cầm Café where I sat twice. Trần Thiện Thanh’s 1961 song about Hàn Mặc Tử is still heard all over Vietnam. It begins, “Who wants to buy the moon? I sell you the moon.”

After the last sentence, I had to evacuate Cóc Cóc. There’s a spreading plague of older men listening to news loudly in public. After making sure De Hans Coffee and Tea was quiet, I entered this linguistic disaster. De is only an article in Ebonics. Hans is a German name, but here, it’s just Hải as inflected or deformed by some Harry Potter character. It’s Hai’s Café, then, but with a missing apostrophe.