A child in an adult world
Notes on a week of rabbit-holing
Dear friends,
I’ve unwillingly become a dog mom.
My uncle moved his family to Hanoi, leaving behind two dogs.
The elder, indigenous brother is tended by a barista working for his coffee shop. The younger, of American Eskimo breed is adopted by my parents; and when still on the extended holiday, I’m appointed to be his main caretaker.
He is a mischievous dog with mesmerizing white hair, once belonging to a business man in the northern coastal city of Hải Phòng. We are the third family that he has lived with and that doesn’t count the time when he was kidnapped by a diner who went to a restaurant in my uncle’s neighborhood.
My uncle operated a daring rescue to take him back from the perpetrator. He swung by our house for dinner before bringing the dog, who was trembling, home.
Of all the adventures he has embarked on, I think we will make a super duo.
The delusion is formed after a week of immersing myself in Tintin (Don Quixote behavior much?) to kill Tết idle time.
I’ve been a huge fan of Tintin since I was a kid – that says more than 20 years ago, still not an adult yet – when a couple of Tintin cartoons were broadcasted on VTV2 – the educational channel of the Vietnam national television.
I remember being glued in front of our only TV waiting for new developments in adventures of Tintin and Snowy (Bông Tuyết in Vietnamese – the mini me was like “how cute!”). Since one official episode was too long, the station cut it into 15-minute chapters. It’s not extravagant to say that was the best 15 minutes in my entire day back then.
I re-read Tintin again in 2016 when First News released the Vietnamese collection box of 10 not-so-political volumes.
It was a frustrating summer in Saigon and I didn’t have much to do except for carrying a larger-than-life album to a nearby Circle K and turning pages at the slowest speed possible while sipping Dalat milk peach flavored drinking yogurt.
This year, I made a resolution to read Tintin in a more structured manner with the 3-in-1 English box set published by Little, Brown & Company.
Examining your childhood favorites as an adult is complex, especially after those years of studying and covering foreign affairs as well as being exposed to racial discrimination.
Amidst the Gaza ceasefire demands, 18 frames in The broken ear volume speaks louder than any peace statement.
These frames flip through a plane journey of Basil Bazarov – an opportunistic arm dealer working for Korrupt Arms GMBH – to sell weapons for both San Theodora and Nuevo-Rica. The operation was undertaken in cooperation with General American Oil company to provoke a dispute between the two countries in order to take over the El Chapo oil fields.
Basil Bazarov is created based on the infamous Basil Zaharoff who accumulated his fortune on World War I armament trade. And the company name of Korrupt is an obvious pun of “Corrupt”.
The Blue Lotus pokes at Western misconceptions of China and delivers the socio-political situations in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. The conversation between Tintin and Chang on the riverbank about European misguided depiction of Chinese people stays relevant although the story was published 9 decades ago.
The friendship with Zhang Chongren – a Chinese sculptor – inspired Herge’s creation of Chang while his background of bourgeois society and its prejudices were claimed by the cartoonist to make controversial portraits of colonialism, animal cruelty and racial stereotyping in original versions of Tintin inevitable.
"I was fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me."
– Herge
While the adventures of me and Toni (our family’s new member) are limited within walks around a nearby park, the reflection of one’s own world perception through time is indeed a limitless roller coaster ride with countless possibilities.
Tintin is an adult. Herge was an adult when he composed the series. Those stories took place in an adult world with all of its beauty and ugliness that I was, fortunately, not a part of until now.
Till next time,
T.
P/S: There is a Tintin store in Singapore’s Chinatown that I paid a visit to 7 years ago. Everything was so desirable and expensive. One customer did complain about how costly a T-shirt was and, believe it or not, the cashier replied: “If you want a cheap tee, go to Uniqlo.” I was shocked cuz Uniqlo was also expensive to me, haha; and the person was rude, obviously.
I bought three beautiful postcards with excerpts from Tintin in Tibet and sent one of them to my dear friend in Philadelphia that, thanks to Vietnam Post, was never delivered.
This week’s top picks
An informative video to end my (feminine) urge to buy spring clothes. Love all their videos.
That goes hand in hand with this directory that I’ve used before deciding to buy any fashion pieces ever since my beloved roommate showed me
An intimate essay, new word learned for this type of writing: bildungsroman
https://yalereview.org/article/catherine-lacey-objects-of-desire