Clogged interlude
I've moved, again.
Dear friends,
It’s violent – the act of uprooting the rooted.
When you receive this letter, I’m slurping bún mọc on a hidden alley in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, donning a weird combination of garments for touring the city with an old friend by day and rocking (!?) a music fest by night.
It might be a normal weekend if you don’t know 6 hours before, I just ended a 12-hour ride from Central Vietnam to the capital, bringing along two suitcases, a backpack and a styrofoam box full of frozen food.
I’m ready to be grounded into Hanoi again, for the next three months. The rest of the story will tell or, in other words, I have lost the capability to envision ahead my own life.
I reunited with the friend who is slurping bún mọc in front of me at this very moment early 2023, after eight years of communicating solely via messengers.
I went visiting an Asian metropolitan city where he has lived all his life, carrying a heavy heart, busting with emotions and telling him how much I had missed this urban vibe. I had been back to Vietnam for roughly a month. It was not the geographical distance between New York City and Quang Tri, it was the disruption in mentality of others that upsetted and tore me into pieces.
I wasn’t sure if I could tell straight what I was feeling back then until I read Sontag’s response to Rolling Stones’ Jonathan Cott early this week about her move to NYC from California.
“There are more people here doing things than in any other single place. So if you live in this place, it’s like saying, Okay, I want to live in a place where more things are happening than I can possibly have time for. It’s not that I’m going to do all of them, but I want to know that I could do them, and I want to have that choice. And another reason for being here is that I want to run into people who are ambitious and restless. You meet a Californian and they say, Hi!... and then there’s a big silence [laughing]. That’s okay. But I get restless.”
That steamy hot not-spring-not-yet-summer night, as we walked back to my hotel, the friend told me about his plan to soon leave the city, the country.
“Why?” I asked, embodying the mixed emotion of a poor, hungry kid looking at those candies of which his rich peer is fed up.
The stuffed political atmosphere, longing for strange lands and stagnant pond of old self among other things fueled the vision, he said, easing the departure sorrow.
It gets harder when you go to a place by choice, grow fond of it, establish an orbit to end up being forced to move elsewhere. Think about refugees, think about exiles, think about young people in strange lands that are governed with regulations not in favor of aliens.
I feel sorry for being so clouded with thoughts lately when I can still talk about trips, moves, changes, vaguely albeit, but not impossible. I’m still able to finish a bowl of bún mọc in peace (if no motorbike will pass by and splash dirty drainage water onto my party attire).
Brodsky said: “However, if we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting—or at least imitating—the manner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.”
Let us see how big the role I can play from now on. Shall we?
Till next time,
T.
P/S: Thank you for your kind words. I read them again and again whenever I want to be comforted. Do send something over.
This week’s topic picks
Three albums I’ve been streaming intensively lately.
One – I once avoided since I didn’t buy into the artist’s persona.
One – I was surprised by the artist’s maturity, remembering his mainstream debut a couple years ago: fun song, below average rhymes.
One – my guilty pleasure, beautiful human being, never act smarter (speak philosophy!!) than they is.
Not necessarily in that order. Give them a quick guess.
Easiest Sontag’s thing to read? Thinking about her a lot these days. You don’t need to read any of her books to find her relevant. Thuỳ Minh might find this interview helpful.