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Breakfast was 'broken rice'; cơm tấm in the Vietnamese:
It's called 'broken rice' because the rice is little pieces, not the whole grains that we're used to in our packets of rice. The 'slice' in the front is a kind of Vietnamese frittata (egg filling, with various bits tossed in), the white wiggly things are pickled radish, and there are, of course, cucumber pickles there, the meat is pork, and I have no idea what the thing on the side was, but the texture was a bit weird and off-putting. And as someone who has no issues with 'texture' most of the time, that's saying something.
After breakfast, we went to the War Remnant Museum - the repository of photos and relics of both the Anti-French Resistance War (1945-1954) and the American War (1959-1975). They're more commonly known as the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War in the west, but war has two sides, and the Vietnamese perspective isn't one we look at very often.
It's certainly not an easy museum to walk through. My father thinks of it as "the dreadful futility of war". I think of it as "the horror of ourselves".
I didn't take many photos, and what I did I'm mostly keeping for my own records. Women marching in the resistance, 1975; a female photographer who also worked in WWII with the Marines; several other bits and pieces.
The photographs in the display are frequently unforgiving, but I looked at all of them - even the ones that horrified me: the trophy photos were particularly ugly - hunters with their dead displayed, standing proud beside their kill.
And sometimes the captions were worse: like the photographers who took photos of the about-to-be-executed, then walked away with the sound of bullets firing behind them.
I discovered that some Vietnamese freedom fighters spent years in cages during the Resistance Wars. Years of deprivation, being beaten and mistreated, malnourished, and tortured.
I learned that some anti-Vietnam war protesters believed so fiercely in the wrongness of the war, they set themselves on fire to bring attention to the situation. None of this 'reblog and signal boost' stuff that we do on FB or Tumblr.
And I learned that my stepmum was born in My Lai the year after the massacre.
Is it angled propaganda? Some of it is. Some of it is no worse than anything that pockets of Western media feeds us about our current ongoing wars. But it reaffirms my belief about humanity: that we are all as bad as each other through all times, through all ages. The killer in me is the killer in you.
And this is why I put my faith in the saving grace of a personal relationship with Christ Jesus. We can't redeem ourselves or each other - we're all as bad as each other, or at least, no better than anyone else. It can only take divinity to lift humanity out of the darkness of ourselves.
After the War Remnants Museum, the rest of the day was boring by comparison. My stepmum and her best friend took me to get a massage and a facial - the other end of the spectrum and the reminder that yesterday is not today - but that yesterday it will always be part of our history, foundations that can't be ignored.
We can move forward, but we can't erase the past. What has happened has happened, and you can't change it, but no piece of time can be unwound from the tapestry that came before. That's not the way history works.
I had a lot of thinking time while they were doing the massage and the facial. It was really helpful in terms of some things I've been mulling over for the last six months. Time to put them in action when I get home.
And, after all that, there was dinner:
This is bánh canh ghẹ - crab noodle soup. And I had an allergic reaction to it: my hands were tingly from about an hour afterwards until past midnight. Although the tingly was gone the next morning, it seems I'm going to have to be careful with shellfish in future.
Emotional rollercoaster post is draining. It was exhausting to write but it needed to be done, and I imagine it will be equally difficult to read. (And quite probably enraging for some.)
Finally, I don't feel like arguing with people about this post, so I'm turning comments off.
It's called 'broken rice' because the rice is little pieces, not the whole grains that we're used to in our packets of rice. The 'slice' in the front is a kind of Vietnamese frittata (egg filling, with various bits tossed in), the white wiggly things are pickled radish, and there are, of course, cucumber pickles there, the meat is pork, and I have no idea what the thing on the side was, but the texture was a bit weird and off-putting. And as someone who has no issues with 'texture' most of the time, that's saying something.
After breakfast, we went to the War Remnant Museum - the repository of photos and relics of both the Anti-French Resistance War (1945-1954) and the American War (1959-1975). They're more commonly known as the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War in the west, but war has two sides, and the Vietnamese perspective isn't one we look at very often.
It's certainly not an easy museum to walk through. My father thinks of it as "the dreadful futility of war". I think of it as "the horror of ourselves".
I didn't take many photos, and what I did I'm mostly keeping for my own records. Women marching in the resistance, 1975; a female photographer who also worked in WWII with the Marines; several other bits and pieces.
The photographs in the display are frequently unforgiving, but I looked at all of them - even the ones that horrified me: the trophy photos were particularly ugly - hunters with their dead displayed, standing proud beside their kill.
And sometimes the captions were worse: like the photographers who took photos of the about-to-be-executed, then walked away with the sound of bullets firing behind them.
I discovered that some Vietnamese freedom fighters spent years in cages during the Resistance Wars. Years of deprivation, being beaten and mistreated, malnourished, and tortured.
I learned that some anti-Vietnam war protesters believed so fiercely in the wrongness of the war, they set themselves on fire to bring attention to the situation. None of this 'reblog and signal boost' stuff that we do on FB or Tumblr.
And I learned that my stepmum was born in My Lai the year after the massacre.
Is it angled propaganda? Some of it is. Some of it is no worse than anything that pockets of Western media feeds us about our current ongoing wars. But it reaffirms my belief about humanity: that we are all as bad as each other through all times, through all ages. The killer in me is the killer in you.
And this is why I put my faith in the saving grace of a personal relationship with Christ Jesus. We can't redeem ourselves or each other - we're all as bad as each other, or at least, no better than anyone else. It can only take divinity to lift humanity out of the darkness of ourselves.
After the War Remnants Museum, the rest of the day was boring by comparison. My stepmum and her best friend took me to get a massage and a facial - the other end of the spectrum and the reminder that yesterday is not today - but that yesterday it will always be part of our history, foundations that can't be ignored.
We can move forward, but we can't erase the past. What has happened has happened, and you can't change it, but no piece of time can be unwound from the tapestry that came before. That's not the way history works.
I had a lot of thinking time while they were doing the massage and the facial. It was really helpful in terms of some things I've been mulling over for the last six months. Time to put them in action when I get home.
And, after all that, there was dinner:
This is bánh canh ghẹ - crab noodle soup. And I had an allergic reaction to it: my hands were tingly from about an hour afterwards until past midnight. Although the tingly was gone the next morning, it seems I'm going to have to be careful with shellfish in future.
Emotional rollercoaster post is draining. It was exhausting to write but it needed to be done, and I imagine it will be equally difficult to read. (And quite probably enraging for some.)
Finally, I don't feel like arguing with people about this post, so I'm turning comments off.
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