Vung Tau Today, Phnom Penh Tomorrow

[Phnom Penh, 11/10/22]

Before dawn tomorrow, I’ll go to Saigon. The van company’s name is Toàn Thắng [Always Winning, or Invincible]. Across its depot in downtown Saigon is a reliable money exchanger, but since the US dollar is widely accepted in Cambodia, I won’t need to use it.

Walking to my Saigon/Phnom Penh bus, I’ll pass the Museum of Fine Arts, a magnificent building once belonging to the fourth richest Chinese in Vietnam. Starting out as just a scrap dealer, Huỳnh Văn Hoa would own 20,000 buildings in Saigon.

To explain this rise, there are legends about Uncle Hoa finding gold inside a mattress or statue, but the most intriguing story about him concerns a daughter who was either insane or afflicted with leprosy, for she was confined to a room, it’s said, then became a ghost still haunting Uncle Hoa’s mansion.

In 1973, there was a South Vietnamese film about this. A servant is tasked with bringing food and clean clothing daily to this cursed woman, while removing blood and pus stained garments. How can someone so diseased live for so long? he wonders. What’s behind that silent door?

It’s super scary, I tell you. I shudder just thinking about it and probably won’t sleep tonight, or tomorrow night, or ever again.

Stories, even stupid ones, make a nation. They bond each population. Songs, too, and before this entire world was shoved into inanity and barbarity, even poems, for they embodied each nation’s clearest and most resonant self-definition. Of course, to arrive at a redeeming poem, one must plow through a million brain damaging ones.

Before this paragraph and last, I had to go to the bank to withdraw readers’ donations, what have kept this canceled writer going all these years. Leaving Vietnam in hours, I would be stuffing my face with favorite Viet dishes, you’d think, but last night’s dinner was a plate of linguine with pesto and bits of serrano ham, plus carpaccio sprinkled with all sorts of extras. At Don Quijote, both dishes set me back just $13.07. Vietnam affords such luxuries.

Just a decade ago, foreign restaurants in Vietnam served foreigners almost exclusively, but are now filled with Vietnamese, eager to explore the world sans passport. At a smartly appointed cafe, Thềm Xưa [Old Veranda], I picked up a book by one Tony Buổi Sáng [Tony Morning] to read him advising young Vietnamese to try foreign dishes, so they can be more successful in business or even become a global citizen, an aspiration of the more ambitious everywhere.

The author’s name alone signals his arrival, as does one of his books, Trên Đường Băng [On The Runway]. There is a vogue among younger Vietnamese celebrities of Anglicizing one’s name, sort of, so there’s a popular writer and singer who calls himself Hamlet Trương, for example.

Globe trotting to enter the global village is being phased out, however, for globalists don’t want useless eaters clogging their climate-engineered skies. When not murdered by Jewjabs or war, we’ll only putter so far in electric cars that explode. Pulling back curtains, we’ll see more neighbors barbequed. Only thing recognizable afterwards is the BABY ON BOARD sticker. That lithium battery was fun while it lasted. Having conditioned populations for lockdowns, they’ll impose them again under more bullshit pretexts.

After 9/11 then the Nigerian underwear bomber, flying has become an ordeal. Though pat downs have become less common, baby formula, bottled water, expensive wine, skin lotion and even toothpaste are routinely robbed from paying passengers and dumped.

By comparison, taking the bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh was a dignified experience, with passport checks smoothly handled by an employee of Giant Ibis. My crossing from Ukraine to Poland in 2016 took 6 hours, and from South Africa into Namibia last year subtracted 4.5 hours from my frittered span. This ingression into the land of Angkor took just over an hour, with much of it spent eating decent enough Chinese at Prestige Duty Free, so just like that, I was in!

From my bus window, I could see zooming by Bavet’s hideous casinos, Crown, Le Macau and Win Win, etc., then the charmingly named Manhattan Special Economic Zone. I take back what I said about Manhattan possibly disappearing. There will always be a Manhattan, but down a dusty, plastic trash-strewn road in a sixth-rate Cambodian city.

Approaching Phnom Penh from the southeast, I could see more skyscrapers than just 4 1/2 years ago, when I was here last. Several are under construction, with the tallest, the 133-Godpoking-story Thai Boon Roong Twin Tower World Trade Center, only starting now after Covid related delay.

Phnom Penh Post, “The commercial centre will comprise 557 five-star hotel rooms, 448 luxury apartments, 1,737 condominium units, office space, mixed-use shopping malls, restaurants and other entertainment venues.”

Here I am constantly frothing about ballistic missiles, mass starvation, Jewjabs and climates gone amok when others are planning for monstrous towers to accommodate jetsetters with Platinum, Altitude and Sapphire Reserve credit cards. Phnom Penh’s rattier dwellings will still be here, however, though even harder to espy if you’re nearly 2,000 feet in the air. I guess that’s the plan. We will own nothing and be so disoriented and browbeaten with Jewjabs and lockdowns, we’ll lose all notions of happiness.

“Honey, is it raining again?”

“No, that’s Klaus Schwab, Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, Rochelle Walensky and Yuval Noah Harari pissing on us from the penthouse disco of the Thai Boon Roong Twin Towers.”

“Honey, will you take me up there just once when we win the lottery?”

“Sure, but just for one can of their Special Edition Angkor Beer. It costs, like, 20 bags of rice, I hear, then we must tip the celebrity waitress du jour. Ava Max, Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande all have shifts there. Lady Gaga works old timers’ nights. Madonna shows up on Halloween.”

Meanwhile, a regular can of Angkor is still only $2 at Hotel Zing, where I’m sitting. From my 4th floor room, I get an excellent view of Jean Desbois's Central Market of 1937. So lovely, its massive tiered dome. In 2018, I made a joyous pilgrimage to Vann Molyvann’s Olympic Stadium of 1964. Great art exudes love.

Let me catch my breath, will you? I just got here.

Hotel Zing’s cafe is cheap and pleasant enough, but when there are guests, they turn on some crappy American music. Unlike in Saigon, there aren’t three or four cafes each block, but I’ll find some quiet and civilized place, where each man can be left alone with his own thoughts.

The night clerk at Hotel Zing has been jabbed four times, he told me. Astra Zeneca. At least they weren’t Pfizer. Back in Vietnam, a friend told me a nurse had confided Jewjabs were often diluted to increase profit, so this cheating may have saved life, or at least prolonged it.

Cesar Vallejo:

I would like to live always, even flat on my belly,
because, as I was saying and I say it again,
so much life and never! And so many years,
and always, much always, always, always!

Still underappreciated, he died at 46.

Nazim Hikmet:

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived"

One’s relationship to any literary passage is highly personal. What moves me may leave you cold, and who says anyone’s taste is even worth half a bowl of undercooked rice?

Surviving a true genocide, Cambodians are still here, for it’s nearly impossible to wipe out any nation with a clear sense of themselves. Going way beyond words, self-definition is everything. Lacking that, you’re at best a joke.

Barefoot, the receptionist is mopping the tiled floor before the counter. From the kitchen comes sporadic laughter, as is common, too, in Vietnam. How can this be, for these people are so much poorer than Westerners?

On this side of the earth, they look so cool and confident, but these are the ones with the means and decisiveness to trek this far. Too many of those stuck at home must binge on booze, drugs, crappy music and/or porn to get through another day, for a life with only degraded or nonexistent human interactions hardly qualifies.

Outside Zing, Phnom Penh awaits, while inside this cafe, I’m still being afflicted with American tunes, so outside I must flee, right now!

[Phnom Penh, 11/10/22]

[Phnom Penh, 11/9/22]