Hello. How old are you?

I have this little green memoranda notepad, about the size of a checkbook. I am supposed to have it on me every day. I'm supposed to be making good use of it. I should be writing down the words I need to learn to get around and function in everyday Saigon life. But I usually forget it at home. It's as empty as the second day I got here.

On the first day, I was ready to go. I was like a sponge of vocabulary, with ears tuned to the maximum receptive value. That's when I realized, I had no idea how to spell anything I heard. So I gave up on the notebook, told myself I needed to put some work into learning the phonetics of Vietnamese, and relied predominantly on others to translate and on the patience of the locals in the absence of a translator.

On the first page of the book, I have two entries. The first is the Vietnamese words for one (một), two (hai), and three (ba). The second entry is much much longer, doesn't even begin to scratch the topic's surface, and is a record of the most important thing anyone needs to know when speaking in Vietnamese. This entry is a list of kinship terms.

Kinship terms are pronouns you use to refer to people you're talking to. These terms apply to more than just the people you're related to by blood or marriage. If you're not related to the other person, you still need to know how old that person is in relation to you. Okay, you might have to guess. So you wonder, is this fellow older or younger than me? Could this lady be as old as my mom, or more in the range of an older sister?

There's a lengthy list of questions the Vietnamese tend to ask when they first meet you. They are: Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend? (I'm given to understand this question often follows the first, regardless of what the response was.) How much money do you earn? How much did this/that/the other thing cost? And: How old are you? Generally, no one takes any offense to this question. Being able to address people correctly depends on knowing how old they are. If they don't ask you, then they already know, Lữ says.

You cannot say hello (chào), goodbye (also chào), or thank you (cám ơn) in Vietnamese without adding a kinship pronoun... unless you're a dumb foreigner like me who doesn't know any better. Otherwise, to omit the kinship pronoun is very disrespectful. To make sure I am polite company, I have in my little green memorandum notepad a list of some common pronouns that I'm likely to need during my time here. Now that I have a bit of a good understanding about how to pronounce these words, I'll share them with you.

• Vietnamese: age relationship; kinship [rhyming word]
• con: a child, male or female, at least a generation younger; anyone's child, even your own [gong]
• em: a younger person, male or female, in your generation; your younger sibling or cousin, or refers to the woman in a romantic relationship [yam]
• chi: an elder woman in the same generation; your older sister [jade]
• anh: an elder man in the same generation; your older brother, or refers to the man in a romantic relationship [un]
• cô: an elder woman in your parent's generation; an aunt [go]
• chú: an elder man in your parent's generation; an uncle who is younger than your father [jew]
• bác: an elder person older than your parents; your father's older sibling [back]
• bà: a middle aged woman; your grandmother [baa]
• ông: a middle aged man; your grandfather [aum, like Om]

There are more than twenty different kinship pronouns, but these are all I have in my book, so that's as far as I go in terms of expertise. For father and mother, there seem to be a variety of ways of pronouncing them depending on where you're from in the country. I've heard ba and má most often.

The relationships between cousins becomes incredibly complicated. If I remember correctly, it's permissible to refer to an elder as someone younger than you in given circumstances. The conditions in these cases depend on the age relationships of your ancestors.

I find kinship words related to brothers and sisters to be really interesting. Sweethearts refer to each other as anh (older brother) and em (younger sister). I'm pretty sure this is generally the rule, even when the woman is older than the man. The implications of this relationship says a lot about male-female relationships in Vietnam.

Another interesting aspect of brothers and sisters: they call each other by their rank. Observing seniority among siblings is not uncommon in East Asia. But the Vietnamese, at least in the south, have a unique way of ranking the siblings. Recall the numbers one, two, and three (một, hai, and ba). When the eldest child is a male, he's called anh hai, or second brother--not first brother. Same with the girl. When the eldest child is a female, she is chi hai, or second sister. The sister next in line is chi ba, or third sister. I'm not sure why the siblings start on the number two.

Provender

- breakfast: xôi thập cẩm

- lunch: gỏi cuốn (uuuhhm...I devoured six of them, and altogether they cost $1)

- dinner: rice and cải thìa

Nước - Water

Status update:

1. Riffing Indochina now plays well with IE. Spent 4 hours yesterday futzing with a brand new set of programming code to make the blog look exactly like it did before. Same skin, new chassis.
2. Not really a status update, but I don't think I've posted anything about food since my run in with the runs. Mike says I gotta pick myself up and get back on the horse.
3. Headed to Thailand with the family for a week in July. Will still be posting, 97 and-a-half percent positive.

Droplets of water coalesce
on a lotus leaf.

The word nước is the Vietnamese word for water. It forms the root for many compound words, such as the fluids of the body like tears (eye water), mucus, (nose water), and saliva (bubbly water). Some of the compound words are idiomatic expressions. Directly translated, nước trong and nước độc mean clean water and foul water respectively. However, the connotation refers to a married couple and the state of their relationship, whether the relationship is an easy one, or if it takes a lot of effort to sustain. Finally, the word nước is a homonym for country. Considering Vietnam's coastal location and riverine countryside, I imagine the word country takes the meaning: a place where there is water. But that's an uneducated guess on my part.

It's Wednesday--water delivery day. From the stairwell comes loud resonant booms. The delivery person is hauling five-gallon bottles up the flights of stairs before dropping the bottles -ka-choum- on the landing for each floor. He carried the first one up six flights. Then the next one up five, then four, and so on. Each bottle weighs 40 pounds, so this guy must have legs of pure steel cable and the heart of a horse. Once each apartment has a blue bottle of clear water waiting outside the door, he speeds off on his scooter, the same scooter that hauled an eighth of a ton of water to our place.

Having water delivered is a new thing for me. Generally, everything about water is strange and unfamiliar here. The way we get it, what we do with it. We fill ice trays from the waterbottle stand, and we might refill them three times a day. The 220 volt rice cooker comes to a boil in a flash; we go from washing the rice to eating it at the table in 10 minutes flat. There's a cream colored hose with a spray nozzle, hanging from a fixture on the grey tile wall next to the toilet, to provide a specific service in lieu of toilet tissue (although happy to say the plumbing in this house does possess the capability to handle toilet paper--a capability that most household toilets in Southeast Asia lack).

All around the apartment, water is everywhere like beautiful little microclimates. Dishes drying in the chrome rack mounted to the wall above the sink send droplets like rain down on the sink counter. The muddy, still water in the pot holding Lữ's lotus has duckweed floating on the surface--a perfect miniature pond. And every day the monsoons send down relentless torrents of water that pelt the clay tile and corrogated tin rooves, gather in holding tanks until full, then spill out and down to the courtyard to merge into rushing grey rivers underfoot.

The tops of our neighbors's houses look like water-harvesting setups.

And other aspects of water are so unique to this place. On the roof, you can see dragonflies, born of water, darting about after a rain. There on the roof, the chrome holding tank feeds the solar hot water heater, which in turn supplies our entire building with scalding water when the day is at its hottest, and cold water all night. Then on the ground floor, there is the terraced fountain, nestled in the terrarium window garden in our building's front entrance. It fills the first two floors of the house with the hum of the pump and the tinkle of trickling water. And then there's the retching sound. At first I thought it was the hacking coughs of old man fighting a losing battle with lung infection. Then thought it to be the horrible crowing sound of a bird, like a raven, sitting jealous guard upon its nest. However, I just discovered the retching noise belongs to our neighbor--a nice guy, really--who after his meals, sticks his head out the back window of his kitchen, runs water from a spigot that pokes out of the wall across from his window, and gargles from it, religiously, for several minutes at a time, several times a day. The noise echoes up the alley to our kitchen window.

I suppose the most significant aspect of water is the stuff we use for eating and drinking. We drink a lot of the stuff, maybe close to a gallon each day. Thankfully, the bottled stuff is not too expensive, although I'm aware it's a luxury and privilege most of the Vietnamese could not afford. But we prefer the bottled and fossil-fuel transported water over the water that flows from the tap.

This is not to give you the impression that we're water snobs. I know what water snobs are--folks who play right into the hands of the marketers and advertisers who expound in no uncertain terms that bottled water will make you smarter, sexier, and more powerful, and it won't kill you like tap water will. Drink Dasani for life and snub your nose at your tap, so say we all.

I've heard some of our bottled water in the states is supposedly just municipal water with a 3,000 percent markup in price. Here in Vietnam however, municipal water is a different story. The toxins and bacteria in this tap water can and do make people sick. With my own eyes, I can testify there's more that comes through the water lines than water. When the solid clear trunk of water flowing from our sink faucet depreciated to a loose splattery spray, I took the fixture apart to fix it. Peering into the cap, I found the filter screen clogged with all sorts of gunk and debris that came straight from the water system.

That was just the big stuff. The little stuff invariably makes it into the sink, to the place where we wash our dishes and rinse our food. As germ theory holds, bacteria multiply like rabbits with an itch. So not to let standing water sit on our cleaned dishes, we obsessive-compulsively arrange them in the drainrack for optimal air exposure. That seems to do the trick.

I still don't think we're tap water snobs. We do drink Saigon water. Since it's a risk, we filter the water through carbon, then sterilize it on our gas stove. The problem with heating the water is we still end up using fossil fuel. Can't seem to get around that one. And, as a terribly unwelcome side effect, the heat from the stove turns the apartment into a sauna. I might make a couple cups of cà phê sữa đá a day (with water from the filter, not the bottle). But there is a terrible trade-off of sweet, sweet, cà phê for a miserably hot room.

Cải Thìa

Tap water plays yet another key role: for rinsing fruit and veggies. And boy do they need it. Mike rinsed bunches of cải thìa three times the other day, and still, there was so much sand in the bowl of water on the third time, it made me think of a miner panning for gold. Once the dirt is removed though, we still have to deal with contamination. Before coming to market, veggies get washed in the river and pick up infectious bacteria, according to one study. So, we sterilize the fruits and raw veggies too. This usually means a post-scrub soak in a cocktail of vinegar and our treated tap water.

Would you be surprised at what I'm about to say? I think the most significant difference between Saigon, with its six feet of rain a year, and the Sonoran Desert in the Southwest US, a relatively lush desert that gets about 5-10 inches of rain from its two monsoon seasons, is not the rainfall. The biggest difference is the nasty scaly buildup on the shower and tub, which is a nightmare to remove. There is none here. Mike says the municipal water is river water. The Saigon River is the main source of water for the city. River water lacks the minerals of groundwater that react with soap.

When I'm in the shower, I tend to think of the Saigon River, imagining how the water that is running over me once ran free through the city. And when I'm on the roof and scanning south, I think I can just make out the river and its charcoal grey color beyond the rooftops and skyscrapers in the distance. I've seen it up close a few times, on walks around town, and when Mike and I are driving around. It's more brownish up close, maybe 1,000 feet wide, banked by concrete and some riparian zones. The water meanders and deviates along streets and bridges, buildings and markets, past the Saigon Port, and to the Đồng Nai River beyond the city. There the waters merge and together flow to the South China Sea within a day. This river system is too far north to be part of the Mekong River Delta. Saigon has its own river, with its own thing going on. It's a lovely thing to ponder while I'm here.

Provender:
- breakfast: gỏi cuốn
- lunch : bún chay
- lāo miàn with cải thìa

Scoot Out of Luck

This is a parking lot.  It's three rows of scooters. If you showed up early, better plan on staying late.

Xe Buýt: The Bus

I took the public bus to my lesson today. Saigon has an extensive bus system, with over 100 routes. The map of bus routes bears a striking resemblance to the city's haphazard tangles of electric cables. You're never quite sure where you'll end up when you step onto one of these buses for the first time. Not to mention, in order to actually step onto a bus, you will need a running start.

The first step is figuring out how to get where you want to go. I flipped back and forth between the city bus map and Goggle maps. After a while, I was sure I wanted the 6, heading northeast. The 6 takes me to District 2, across the bridge and over the flat barges that cruise down the sinuous Saigon River.

I skimmed the bus website to find the schedule, but there doesn't seem to be any. That's alright though. From what I can tell, the buses arrive every 10 minutes or so.

I found the nearby bus stop. It was not yet nine o'clock, and the business folks were not yet in the offices. They were on the sidewalk, sipping their breakfast coffees. They wore collared shirts or business dresses, sat on squat plastic stools, and rammed spoons into tall glasses to stir their icy brown cà phê sữa đá. They held morning conversations that were lost under the din of endless scooter engines, honking horns, and the general breath of the city.

The bus stop overhang arched forward, but did little to shade the waiting people from the morning sun. When I got there, three people sat on a bench fashioned from a set of chrome pipes. They ache to sit upon. I have found, during my travels, that bus benches in Asia are not designed for comfort. The bus stop seats in Singapore were a marginal four inches wide. Those were an extravagance compared to Hong Kong, where there were no bus stop seats to be found anywhere.

Xe Buýt

A bright green bus approached. One of the people at the stop stood and waved. She looked like she was patting the head of a child. The driver of the bus took it as a sign to pull over. The bus muscled past a swath of scooters to get to the curb, slowed to a crawl, and opened its doors--still rolling. The woman who had waved took a few steps in high heels, matched the speed of the bus, grabbed the rail inside and leapt in. The bus never stopped.

When my bus arrived, I was prepared to have to jump on as well. But the bus pulled over and stopped, and a half-dozen people pushed their way through the doors. As soon as the last person was off, the bus started to pull away again. I snatched the rail, jumped, and found myself onboard and en route. I found an empty seat in the back, next to a window. The seats were old nagahide and pleather, like a school-bus from the 1980s. The paint on the rails was worn off by countless hands. I slung my guitar off my shoulders, sat down, and set it between my knees.

A ticketperson in a blue uniform approached me, one hand full of ticket vouchers, the other with a wad of cash. No words were spoken. I handed over a 10,000 note, and she tossed me a blue ticket and 6,000₫ in change. That's roughly 20 cents. I think New York buses may be close to $3 by now.

I settled in to view the city from the bus window. We passed shophouses, corner stalls, more beverage vendors with crowds of business-folks on their plastic stools, stirring their condensed milk into their iced coffees. We passed flashing neon lights in electronic stores, vegetable and fruit carts with hand drawn prices by the kilo, steaming noodle shops, grimy repairmen, scooter drivers barefoot and passed out on their bikes. We passed dealerships and markets, endless scooters and bicycles, narrow alleys and cross streets stretching off into the distance with more of everything. And we passed throngs of people--in the streets, on the sidewalks, strolling about, squatting, shopping, selling, laughing, bargaining, arguing, shoveling, urinating, pedaling, carrying, moving, living, being. The city has no limit. It's as if one could see anything on the Saigon bus.

As the bus rumbled through the streets, I sat gazing at everything, at nothing. But I noticed a taxi driver, pulled over to the curb across the street. He had glanced up from the driver's seat and looked in the direction of my bus. At the sight of me, his head jerked back, his eyes widened, and a smile slowly spread across his face, as if to say, no freaking way. He probably thinks you can see anything on the Saigon bus, too.

Code Switching

This next post is going to be something a little bit different than usual. It will be a blog about blogging. Weaksauce, some might say. But some hurdles were cleared in order to make this post, and the end result is going to mean a more visually appealing blog. At least, that's my hope.

Today, (as some of you already know) I posted a preliminary test blog. I wanted to see if I could post through e-mail. Blogger, or Blogspot (I just realized that I'm not really sure what it's called), has a setting that allows bloggers to post by e-mailing their blog to a secret address. Ooooh, it's a seeecret.

But the test results were sub-par. The post was full of line breaks, so it looked jagged and unpleasant to read. Clueless as to the cause, I consulted that glorious modern day oracle, the one called "Google" to tell me the reason for those distracting line breaks, and how I can get rid of them.

As it happens, the Oracle was wise about what causes the breaks. The reason is Google itself. In the plain text e-mail editor, Gmail imposes a 78-character limit on lines of text. Apparently this has to do with downward compatibility with older e-mail clients. Not too sure, not too concerned. Like a tire with a hole, I just want a fix.

The seemingly obvious solution is to use Gmail's rich-text editor, which has no character-limit line breaks. But (isn't there always a catch?) the reason I want to post through e-mail are for those times when my only access to the internet is through my phone. And since Google and Apple don't play well together, my phone has no rich-text support. In other words, the Oracle is telling me to go fly a kite.

Somewhere in the back of my mind there's the voice of this computer guy I knew at Vandy-land telling me, there is a way there is a way there is a way. Uuuusssse the coooode, Luuuukeee.

Actually, he would probably have used less of a Star Wars allusion and more of a Street Fighter reference. But I digress. If I could figure out how to send an e-mail in HTML, I thought the code would bypass the character limit. I found an app that would do the trick and sent a test run to my e-mail account. Eureka! It worked! So I leveled my X-wing fighter, switched off my targeting computer, put my finger on the trigger, and unloaded two HTML torpedoes down the exhaust port of this internet/iPhone frak-up and... dragon punched that beeyatch in the chinny-chin-chin. (Star Wars, Street Fighter, and the Three Little Pigs--I promise, folks, I'll get back to Vietnam with tomorrow's post).

Anyway, voilà, no more line breaks. However, this was not the first of my trials and errors with coding. For the first couple of posts, I used the native picture uploader in Blogger. But I was really unsatisfied with it. Blogger is way behind the ball on design functionality, and there was no way to my knowledge that I could slap a caption on a photo and have them both nested in a paragraph. I figured out an alternate way by setting up my design template with a CSS code (whatever that is). And voilà, I have captions under my pictures nested in the paragraphs. Better yet, I can make the pictures hyperlinked to anything I choose.

But like the Lernaean hydra, computers have a way of spawning two new problems for each solution. I just realized I'm running into browser issues with Internet Explorer. The pages load perfectly on the Chrome browser. But IE is being a royal pain. The captions are halfway or completely missing, the tables have borders, and the title element encroaches on the leading image. If you're running IE, I apologise. I still have to tweak with the code to make it look right. If you're surfing with Safari, Firefox, a mobile browser, or some other program, I hope Riffing Indochina is showing up right. Or at least readable. If you're on Chrome, well, it'll look right until it doesn't. I think Yogi Berra said that.

As a matter of fact, I'm still hoping this post sans line breaks works as well. If it does, than the next step is to figure out how to attach a photo to an HTML e-mail. And if I figure out how to do that, my techie friend's voice in my head will gurgle, code is strong with this one.

Vietnamese Pronunciation: Part 4 -- Tones

On my first trip to Germany, I heard people saying a word that made me question whether I was really in Germany. People in the market, in the street, in the cafes, all said goodbye with the Italian word ciao. I didn't even know ciao was Italian. I always thought it was French. We say ciao in English too. It's even in the Scrabble dictionary. If you can use a word in Scrabble, it must be English, right? So, I looked up how many languages use ciao as a greeting or farewell. Our favorite open source internet reference tells us that it's a Venetian word, that it once meant, "I am your slave" (wow), and that it's spoken in no less than thirty six languages. As another surprise, the list includes Vietnamese. The word ciao, spelled chào in Chữ Quốc Ngữ, is the word people in Vietnam use to say hello and goodbye.

Unlike ciao in any other language, there's only one way to say it in Vietnamese--with authority and determination. Say it any other way, and you won't be saying hello or goodbye. Say it any other way and you could be saying "rice porridge," "oscillate," "lampshade," "rope," or "frying pan." Or, you could be blabbing in meaningless baby talk. The reason for the variation in meaning is a property of Vietnamese language called tone. Vietnamese is one of many tonal languages that span the globe. In East Asia, tonal languages include Chinese, Thai, Cambodian and Laotian. I was surprised to find out that a bunch of African languages are tonal, as is the language of the Southwestern American Indian nation, the Navajo.

In tonal languages, the pitch and pitch dynamics determine the word and its meaning. The idea isn't as exotic as you might think. We actually use tones to convey meaning in English. Think of the word "yeah." There's: Hey, I just won a coupon for free ice cream. Oh yeah? And there's: would you like some ice cream? Yeah! Or: are you sure you're not a werewolf? Um...yeaaah?

Unlike in English, tonal languages use tone to determine the word itself, not just the meaning. The useful part about each word having its own tone is there is no ambiguity--there is only one way to say a word, so it will always have the same meaning. It would be as if yeah always meant yeah and only yeah, instead of really? or awesome! or, are you freaking kidding me?

The Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Latin letters, with a few alterations. One of the defining characteristics of Vietnam's written language is the diacritcal marks. In an earlier post, I mentioned how some diacritics chance the sound value of a vowel. There are other diacritics as well, and they determine the tone of a syllable. There are six tones in standard Vietnamese, also known as the dialect spoken in the North.
They are:

no mark = flat	` = falling	´ = rising
̉ = asking	~ = breaking	. = constricting

Take the word chào. The tone is falling, which means the pitch starts high and drops. This sounds like, yeah! as in, let's go get ice cream! Chào! This is what you say when you want to say hello or goodbye. You could say cháo with a rising tone, like really? You won a coupon? With a rising tone, the meaning is completely different. If you greet someone by saying cháo, with a rising tone, you're saying "rice porridge." And chảo, with an asking tone, means frying pan. Big difference, no?

The tones in a tonal language are fascinating. When spoken with a gentle voice, a tonal language carries an inherent musicality. And the certainty that tone delivers to meaning is as if the language was designed to eliminate ambiguity. It seems to me that a speaker must choose the words to say what they mean, since there is no way to bend the pronunciation or inflection to convey a different message.

Hope you liked this series on the Vietnamese vowels, consonants, and tones. I'm looking forward to doing more of these kinds of series in the future. Stay tuned!

End of a Two Week Streak

Three days ago, I posted about the gấc, that bright red fruit, which people at the market said would give us stomach aches if we ate it. I was glad for the warning. I had been in Vietnam a week-and-a-half without food illness, and I didn't want to break the streak. But I jinxed it.

I woke up at five in the morning on Saturday. Something wasn't right in the belly. I lay in bed for a second trying to get back to sleep when the pain hit, wham, and the muscles my face contorted. I threw the covers across the room and darted for the toilet. Despite my consternation, I heard Mike mumble almost in a half dream, "you're not going to go work out now, are you?" No. Not today. I wouldn't be doing anything all day except praying for the sweet arms of death to take me away in his loving embrace.

Since then, it's been 28 hours. I spent most of the time in bed, letting the megadophilus dose and ginger tea, which Mike made for me, work their magic. I haven't eaten since Friday night. But I wasn't going to let a little gastronomic disaster cause me to flake out on my lessons. Thanks to Imodium, I made it to both, with no unpleasant distractions.

Food poisoning seems to be pretty common in Vietnam. People I know have gotten it at least four times in six months. This being my first time, I feel I need to step up my game. In a way, I lost a day of my life, and it's my own fault. I don't want this discomfort, inconvenience, distraction to happen again. I'm still not feeling well, and I'm afraid it might keep me from doing some things I need to do today, like write an application to teach at a local music school, and research the tones of the Vietnamese language. For now, all I wanna do is detoxify.

Something I ate on Friday was contaminated. Here's a list of possibly culpable food products:
- lady finger banana
- mango
- dragon fruit
- lime
- lou han guo tea
- fried noodle with oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce and sriracha
- rice and omelette