Eight Years On...

A MOMENT OF SILENCE, BEFORE I START THIS POEM

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002.

A texting conversation between Tyler and I on Wednesday evening. All grammar and punctuation is accurately represented below.

Tyler: What? There’s so chien gion! Have you ever had that?

Eric: Sounds tasty… Did you try it?

Tyler: It’s delicious! Like popcorn.

Eric: Mmm… Sounds similar to my ca linh chien gion… or my fish french fries

Tyler: What? Where did you get those? Or make them? Meanwhile after those years of teasing at…? I’m finally eating kangaroo. what was the name of that place in LX?

Eric: What place in LX? Are you tipsy now?

Tyler: What? My grammar was very correct in that one. I was carefully reconstructing it.

Eric: Just the fact that you were editing it carefully says something about your sobriety

Tyler: Haha, seriously. Because i had a different construction. Proving carefully i am sober… which is true.

Eric: You’re reminding me of an onion article… I’ll have to look it up and send it to you

Tyler: Haha, ok. Save these texts for our future website. Which reminds me if we wanted to start some ‘project’ here i just found a great website. I’ll send you a link tomorrow.

Eric: Sounds intriguing…


And just for the record, here are the two websites that we had in mind:

Eric's link: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/area_man_uses_big_buck

Tyler's link: http://www.kickstarter.com/

After what seemed like a month of cloudy and drizzly days here in Long Xuyen, it's been sunny and warm the past couple of days, which I certainly have appreciated.

This summer I've been keeping a very hectic schedule and trying to save a little money. What I mean by hectic is that I work from 8 a.m. to 8 or 8:30 p.m., depending on the day, Monday through Friday. However, I don't work straight through the day and have some nice breaks and try to squeeze in some badminton time when possible too.

And speaking of badminton, this morning (Sunday), I was invited to go shopping for badminton clothes, and ended up with my first badminton shirt, along with some badminton shorts that are approaching the "uncomfortably short" length. I'll try them out this afternoon when I go work on my smashing skills...

It's been awhile since I last updated this blog, and since I've been in a new residence for the past month or so, I thought I'd post some pictures of the new place that I call home.

A former student of mine, Phuong, recently opened a shop in a market area of Long Xuyen. However, the house that she's renting has a few extra floors, and she said that I could rent a floor if I wanted. As I was waiting for the documents to be finalized at the Construction Department (I really don't understand the ridiculous laws in this province concerning foreigners renting houses), I was notified by my previous landlord (the room near the lake) that I had one day to vacate the room. So, kind of in a rush, I moved to this new place, and here are a few pictures. And the documents are finally finished so I'm very legally living here now.



The sign of the shop as seen from the street.



The nerve center of the shop. From left to right: Duyen, shop assistant; Phuong, owner and my landlord; Tin, salesman and newly avid English student.



Looking up the staircase from the first floor (I live on the third floor).



My bathroom, small but adequate. Those are frozen hot dogs thawing in the sink. Today is the Forth of July after all...



The entrance to my room.



The front hall.



My bedroom.



Another view of the bedroom.



The main room.



Another angle in the main room.



A view from my balcony.

I'm sitting in an air-conditioned cafe near my residence watching the motorbikes and bicycles pass by on the street as the warm afternoon draws to a close and the warm Long Xuyen evening begins. Over the past couple of months I've been eating more "standard" Vietnamese food for lunch. When I worked at An Giang University, I tended to stick to a cafe near campus and the line-up of foods was pretty standard for me, like rice with grilled pork or a fried egg with a sardine in tomato sauce. However, more recently a guy who works in the office below my room has been inviting me to have lunch with him and I've been eating quite a few different things that I rarely used to eat during my previous tenure here in Long Xuyen.

One thing that I really do enjoy is the intensity of the flavors of some of the things I eat. I think I'm obsessed with dipping things in fish sauce into which I've chopped a fresh chili pepper; it certainly adds a different zest than A1 sauce, for example. Another thing that I've taken to eating almost every day now is something that's translated as bitter melon in English. As the name suggests, it has a very bitter flavor that I've grown to love, and it's even better when I dunk it in the fish sauce-chili concoction that I mentioned above.

I've taken to eating more fish as well, which is something that I used to avoid at all costs before because of the profuse number of bones that one has to contend with. However, with some help and lots of observation, I'm slowly learning the ways to pick bits of fish flesh from the bones and eat it with little or no danger of choking to death.

The first significant rain of the year. It's been sweltering lately, including today at lunchtime. Yesterday I went to lunch with a couple friends and one of them said that it was 38 degrees Celsius out (for those of you still back in the States, 38 Celsius is 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit). So imagine the weather being over 100 degrees every day for at least two weeks, along with the air brimming with humidity that comes before the rainy season, along with several days were the sky made some pathetic attempts to rain. I think it was affecting the mental well-being of people, not only me...

Well, after sweating my way through lunch and coffee today, I was teaching the noisy kids and I saw the lightning and heard the thunder. And then, finally, I heard the rain start to fall. Not only heavily but also consistently, which is what has been lacking for so long.

At the moment it's been raining about 1.5 hours and it's tapering off, but still drizzling. The atmosphere has changed, like the humidity has been sucked out, and it feels so much cooler.

However, the rain also brings wet motorbike seats and flooded streets (remember that Long Xuyen is only like 2 meters [again, for those in the States, 2 meters is almost the same as 2 yards] above sea level. But right now I'm enjoying the relief from the heat.

Exercising in the Orient

I received an invitation to play badminton nearly two months ago, and after making excuses for some time, I finally agreed to give the sport a shot. So far I’ve been to play a few times now, and it’s fun, even though I end up sore and soaked with sweat.

Badminton is best played indoors so that the shuttlecock isn’t affected by the wind (even though there is hardly ever what I’d call a brisk wind in Long Xuyen). One of these arenas is near the People’s Committee for the city. It looks like the auditorium was initially intended for basketball, but now five badminton courts are set up on the floor of the gymnasium.

The building itself looks like it was meant for something else; there are two unused rooms near the main doors that were intended for selling tickets that are now locked and full of junk. And because there can’t be any wind, the windows at the top of the building are mostly kept closed. The building seems almost like a ruin or an artifact of some kind. It has a feeling of ancientness about it with peeling and faded paint and dust-covered cement bleachers.

For me especially, after I’ve been moving and sweating for 15 or 20 minutes, the atmosphere inside this monstrous building feels like a sauna or a sweat lodge. Every pore of my body drips sweat and everything that I’m wearing is soaked within a few minutes. And because there can’t be any wind, the doors are kept closed and there are no fans, and of course no air-conditioning.

It was an interesting experience the first time I went there. I thought I would only encounter strangers, but instead I ran into several people who have studied or are studying English with me, and since then I've even struck up a few conversations with people I don’t know.

So after leading a mostly sedentary life for years, I’m giving badminton in the monstrous sauna a try.

Some new stuff:

-My second-hand iron horse. I haven't thought of a name for her yet, but sometimes I think of her as "The Beast," mainly due to the red lights that glow from near the engine at night. My only critique is that it's lacking some low-end torque, but I just need to get the RPMs up and she flies.



-My nicely appointed room near the man-made lake in the middle of town.



It's already getting my own personal messy touch, but it's great to have a place that's legal after living in a combination of three different houses and three different hotels in Long Xuyen over the past five months.

The view from my balcony:



Oh yeah, and I'm 26 now. I was quite surprised by all the birthday wishes that came my way, but my cynical side gives credit to facebook for reminding a lot of people... But regardless, thanks everyone. Come visit me!!!

Some brief recollections about my fourth Tet in Vietnam...

I got a few days off from work before the lunar new year and shot up to HCMC with friends for a couple days of fun and seeing old friends and eating pizza (which I'd been without for like five months and really craving). However, as I learned the morning after eating a greasy Pizza Hut pizza that your stomach really needs to be conditioned first and had a nice stomach ache.

After a couple days of madness and fast food in the big city five of us found seats on a bus back to The LX. Tyler and I had an invitation from the vice-chairman of the province to come visit his house, and we made it back in time for me to take a shower before heading out to his house for a nice evening of seeing some old friends and students and sipping beers and a special kind of dark purple rice wine from some central province that I can't seem to remember the name of.

For the lunar new year's eve they shoot off fireworks in LX, and I'd made arrangements to meet up with some of my former students to find a good vantage point to view them.



At our agreed vantage point in downtown LX, we had a nice view of the streets that were absolutely packed with motorbikes to the point where they couldn't move, much less cars. There were even a couple ambulances stuck in the mess that could barely move even with the help of the police.


(note the taxi stuck in the middle and unable to move)

But finally, about 10:20 p.m., we got to see what we were waiting for. The fireworks began blasting off of the roof of the Dong Xuyen Hotel, one of the tallest buildings in LX. And they kept blasting and going. At one point we thought they were finished, even though it didn't really seem like a finale, and then they started up again...



The first day of the lunar new year I went to visit an old friend who was on duty because he works for the government, this led to eventually going back to his house and meeting other friends, some old for me and some new. After that, I was invited to a quick coffee but after a short time was called away again to another friend's house for a few more beers before turning in.

The second day of the year of the golden buffalo was nice and relaxing and I was feeling lazy but was eventually convinced to go sing karaoke with a former student and a former colleague that I'd never gotten to know well. The place had a very nice selection of English songs and after singing for a couple hours we went and had a dish that I hadn't had for ages: beef grilled on a roofing tile. It might sound slightly weird if you aren't familiar with it, but for those of you who've had it, you know what I mean...

The third day of the lunar new year Tyler was back in LX with his fiancee responding to an invitation from the vice-rector of An Giang University. I arrived at 9 a.m. and was greeted by a bottle of brandy which descended into visiting two more friends' houses, including a Mr. Trang, one of my oldest friends in LX. He and his wife have a new two-month old baby, and he was joyous.



Our final activity for the day was more singing of karaoke, and I got back to my room slightly after midnight.



For the past few days I've been taking it nice and easy and I'm back to work tomorrow.

In final conclusion: Happy New Year!

----------------
Now playing: Ramblin' Jack Elliott - Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
via FoxyTunes

There have been so many things since I last updated this blog months ago. Every time I thought about updating, I just felt more and more overwhelmed with things to write, and kept putting everything off. But there are two major things to note now, if one wishes to be "updated" on my life:

-One: I've been to Europe
-Two: I'm back in Long Xuyen and have a job as an English teacher in a private center, which pays much more than volunteering ever did

The latest issue that I've been waltzing with is that of housing. When I first came to Long Xuyen, I was living in my manager's house. After a few days there, I was informed that I had to move on police orders. After that I was living in a house along with two other Filipino teachers, but the house was far from downtown, hot and noisy. Finally, I found house for rent for less than 200 USD a month, and I also found a French roommate. The two of us lived there for around a month and a half before the landlord finally got scared of the laws of the province and gave us three days to leave. As it had taken me a month to find the house for rent in the first place, I knew I couldn't find a place in four days. So for the past several days I've been living in a hotel (where having cable TV is very distracting) and waiting for the paperwork to be finished so I can move to a well-appointed room that overlooks the lake in town.

I still enjoy my life here in this small city that was once described in a guidebook as "the black hole of the delta." I never cease to be greeting with smiles from people of all ages and have several times been surprised when I am told that people know me even though they've never met me.

However the holidays were rather meager for me as I only got one day off for Christmas and another day off for New Years. I suppose that I should just get used to things like that as doctors and police don't get holidays off either.

And I've been wondering what career path in the future is actually meant for me. I still enjoy teaching, but I don't have as much freedom in my current job as I did when I worked for the university. Sometimes I think back to the time I spent as a reporter in Ohio and wonder if I could write in Vietnam. I was in email contact with Lonely Planet, but finally was told that I hadn't been accepted to write for them either. Oh well, so it goes. At least in this place my patience isn't being stressed and squeezed to the point of breaking like it was back in the states.

So, this wasn't much of a detailed update, but I'll try to keep them coming more regularly now.