- Published on Friday, 28 March 2014 10:11
- Written by Anthony Morreale.
Everyone
should, at least once, climb to a high rooftop in Saigon. On most days,
the subtle fog on the horizon recedes just far enough to let you
glimpse a motley patchwork of aquamarines, drab and pastel greens,
cerulean blues, and mustard yellows. All these colors are set against
the intermittent grey rawness of unpainted concrete, red and clay brick
facades, and the seemingly arsenic laden purplish patina of the
perennial corrugated aluminum rooftops. So much of Ho Chi Minh City is
like this from above: a constantly active blossoming, a visual sign of
the abstract city’s flourishing.
On the ground, we replace our
god’s eye and its penchant for a flattening, homogenizing gaze with a
set of tools, a pile of organs, a breathing and pulsing intercourse with
the object of our endearing stare-- in short, with a role. So we climb
up onto our scooters, squealing through the arteries, spinning an oily
steel chain, sputtering and spitting black coughs behind us, weaving
through the fabric of the that motley quilt we saw from the sky. We add
ourselves to the solution, and we are always full of feelings when that
happens. I wonder whether we ever feel as individual as we do when we
are acting on behalf of an almost undifferentiated mass humanity.
Cynicism
happens fast, but don’t worry, I don’t write to exhort you to revel in
the wonders and beauty of some exotic land, or to be humble, or even to
be mindful of some vaguely described magic of the universe. I can’t
shake the nagging feeling that if you aren’t constantly lying,
exaggerating, gloating, and denouncing one another for frivolous
trespasses, then you aren’t even giving life an honest effort. I was
once advised, “If you ain’t cheating you ain’t trying”. I think this is a
nice definition of the ‘
culture’ concept: the breadth of one’s possibilities for imagining cheating. Some cheating, after all, is simply unthinkable.
Joe Buckley recently wrote a piece entitled “Expats, tourists, and Western superiority” for
Thanh Nien News.
The piece, though largely correct, was filled with a few startling
revelations, such as: most people on holiday come here to party and not
to learn about Vietnamese history and culture, many expats are often
being racist dicks without even knowing it, and people are often rude to
service industry employees. The reactionary blowback to these
apparently unthinkable and presumptuous accusations mostly continued
down the same predictable channels, a mix between: “I’ve been here
longer than you; therefore you’re stupid”, “The Vietnamese are dicks
too!”, and “Wow, you’re an unbearable lefty jackass”. The replies were
hardly any more enlightening than the revelations themselves, perfectly
in line with what one should expect, which is the exercise of true
culture as described above.
This is well and good, a totalizing viewpoint, a
no way out, a fatalistic perspective; we’ve returned to the roof. But what can we glean about our (
westerner) place in this sprawling, flowering bud? Other then the continuous left/liberal
superegoistic urging to be humble, what sort of contested space do we maintain with our privileged, though perturbed, subjectivities?
Two
YouTube music videos, in particular, do the work of sublimating the
tension of our presence. I know what you might be thinking and no, I‘m
not referring to Facebook poltergeist and Bizzaro Realm English teaching
doppelganger Joey ‘The-Original-Oatmeal’ Arnold and his more than 5,000
uploaded videos. I’m referring to the Vietnamese instant classic “Anh
Không Đòi Quà” and the incredibly uplifting
#SAIGONISHAPPY version of Pharrel’s “Happy”.
For those that aren’t familiar, “
Anh Không Đòi Quà”
begins with a beautiful and luxuriously dressed woman exiting a
suddenly stopped, flawless, silver Mercedes. A smartly dressed man exits
and tries to stop her. She ignores him and continues walking toward the
camera, down the street, shedding the layers of clothes and jewelry
that tether her to the man. While she walks, a rapper and an R&B
singer serenade her with a tale of their material poverty but
overflowing affection, contrasting the conjugal bliss of their true love
with the object like existence she would have to live while she exists
under the trappings of the rich man’s wealth. It’s a classic story of
authenticity in poverty, the wholesome comfort of tradition returning to
condemn the hollow seduction of affluence. It’s a story of redemption
from decadence.
Vietnam is the woman, and naked authenticity is
the suitor. We’re a component of the wealthy man. This is not a complete
correspondence, we do not symbolically complete him, we’re only
appropriated into the parameters of his territory, we’re only a small
member of this coalition against authenticity. This video is emblematic
of the tension of our presence. We are among the constellation of forces
reshaping an erroneously idealized and supposedly prehistoric Vietnam;
trading the conical hats for Mercedes Benzes.
In the beautiful
#SAIGONISHAPPY remix of Pharrel’s song and video “Happy”, we are
presented with a dance filled tour of our beloved Ho Chi Minh City.
Locals shuffle through cafes, clap through classrooms, dance through
schoolyards, and do backflips off the post office. In this video, we
have the pure expression of exuberance. The people are at one with their
desires, content in the world of the here and now, and referencing an
encounter with life itself, unmediated by the lengthy explanations of
moralism and strategy. The city itself combines with the pulsing
excitations of its residents and tumbles along the quivering path of
ecstatic jubilation. “We are happy, come join us!”
Like the
original Pharrel Video, people from all walks of life are represented as
stakeholders in the collective baptism. No class divisions are
explicitly emphasized; instead, the people are united in the common goal
of enjoyment. Unlike the original, the #SAIGONISHAPPY remix begins with
a reference to “Anh Không Đòi Quà”. Instead of using the anxiety
embedded in the woman’s future to drive the dramatic tension, a perverse
pact is delivered by the incoming ‘Poor Boy’. The woman is shoved into a
bag and carried off screen by a group of shovel wielding assassins. The
two would-be rivals celebrate together, and begin the dancing that
inaugurates the happiness of Saigon. At the end of the video, the
assassins are seen patting a freshly dug pile of dirt in an anonymous
construction site. A job well done, the men are free to return to their
leisure.
The class-based tension of the former video is not only
explicitly referenced, but also brutally purged. The filthy work of
eliminating the barrier to a mutually disintegrating blissful enjoyment
is willfully engaged in by both parties, to the rejoicing chorus of
undulating bodies and twirling acrobatics. The westerners are there,
somewhere, maybe behind the Mercedes logo or through Pharrel’s spoken
voice. But they aren’t even actors in the story, they’re only the dusty
traces that remain in the background. Let’s not fool ourselves; we
aren’t behind the handlebars of this
xe máy. Though we often
tend to imagine that we’re important enough to be guilty, we’re just
another one of the many dancing maniacs flying along the walls and
walkways of our new home. Now we see a reconfigured colonial arrogance
return, this time it’s not as a condescending attitude, or as an
essentializing stare, or even as a berating word or act of physical
violence. Today, I wonder, if it’s not most perfectly exhibited in a
sort of monastic asceticism, a refusal to enjoy that boasts of personal
responsibility. It turns out, I think, that Saigon is going to be happy
either way.
[Photo via
Galen Stolee]
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