I am going to Vietnam for ten days in March.
I am so excited. I just don't think this is a place I would have taken myself, at least not with any great confidence. I have never been to Asia, and have always been interested in traveling there, and it will be great to go with a purpose and a construct for the trip, and a charge to tell stories about the places and people. This will be happening in the context of a semester-long international reporting class. We'll study Vietnam for the first part of the semester, go there over spring break, and then come back and write (hopefully) publishable pieces. They wanted a mix of print, broadcast and online people. It shocks me like few things do that I am one of three people that I know in my program in the online concentration. THREE. This really shocks me. I truly love print newspapers. Reading the paper, as in holding it in my hand and reading it has been one of my most consistent daily activities over the course of my life. The Washington Post is "my" paper and has been since my grandfather used to bring it home every day, because he had to take a special trip to get it. I don't know if it was ever sent to the house. He just bought it every day when he worked, and then when he retired he had to go to get lottery tickets and "a Post paper" every day. There used to be two papers in the city, and in that case he'd buy the Washington Star, before it stopped publishing when I was a kid.
This is where it started. When I first hit a city I get a newspaper. My whole family reads the Myrtle Beach Sun-Times every day on summer vacation. When my Aunt Dot was at the beach full-force on our big family trip, she'd go down and get the USA Today and the Sun-Times, and drop them off on the doormat of everyone's condo unit. As family members trickled down who maybe had to work over the weekend and couldn't get there until Monday or Tuesday, they'd bring multiple copies of the Post and it would get passed around on the beach, people rushing to claim the crossword puzzle. So I come by it genetically I guess.
I even read the Dayton Daily News every day, and loved it for what it was, which was a truly Dayton paper. I worked at Barnes & Noble where we'd get the Sunday papers from major cities on Monday or Tuesday, and I paid triple the cost of the Sunday Post many weeks of the five years that I lived in Ohio, when the news was a couple days old, just so I could get Book World and the magazine. I LOVE being in cities where I don't live on Sundays, because a Sunday newspaper is like the heart of a town for me, and I like to pretend that I really live there and go to a coffee shop and read the paper. I've done this in Tampa, Chicago, Phoenix and Austin, among other places. And therein you have a window to my strange little soul, and also confirmation that I am really quite easily satisfied.
But as much as I love the actual paper, which I've ended up writing about more than I intended, I am also completely fascinated by and obsessed with, I'll admit, the immediacy of the online environment and what that means for telling stories. So when I talked to the director about this trip, I said I wanted to take photos (on my mythical D80 which now really, really has to happen) and video, and also set up a website, and she was all excited about it. Like it was hard. ;) I honestly think that's a big reason why I'm going, because of my desire and ability to capture the experience on film and in posts. But my new theory is that as long as people view this audiovisual stuff as difficult, I'll have a gig. And whether it's hard or not, mechanically speaking, what matters is that you have a better than average eye, and aren't afraid to take the pictures in unfamiliar places. That, admittedly, is more challenging, and what is thoroughly charging me up about the prospect of this trip.
This is really, really why I went back to school. I didn't set out to go to Vietnam, specifically, or really to travel anywhere, although I admit I was hoping that was going to be part of it somehow, I just didn't know where or when. I've embraced ambiguity on so many complex levels at this point that I'm much more comfortable answering questions with "I don't know," and I mostly don't mind if people aren't satisfied with that answer. I'm still working on whether I'm okay with it, and that takes up enough space that I'm not interested in inviting other people beyond my most important family and friends into my daily psychodrama at this point. ;) But it's amazing that what has been often said to me is true, that when you just jump in, stuff happens. Pretty basic. The hard part is the waiting for it, whatever it is that signifies to you that this, this stuff is the good stuff - the stuff for which all other (often aggravating, boring, daily grind stuff) is preamble. And I just have to say, I am COMPLETELY RIDICULOUSLY FUCKING AMPED about this particular STUFF, and a little bit embarrassed because like Wilbur the pig I am grossly humble, to say that I'm proud of myself for taking the chances I've taken in the past couple years, which have more or less amounted to putting one foot in front of the other lots of times when I was scared out of my anxiety-ridden little mind, and thought I was too old, and thought I was too scared of flying, or whatever.
And I'm also completely grateful to my university, it must be said, who let me back in to get this show back on the road, and who will be paying the freight for us to go, plus for a hotel in Hanoi and translators, who will come in very handy, and also for breakfast every day, I think.
When I sent in the university application forms, I had no conscious knowledge that this was a workable or advisable plan. I just did it knowing it had to be done, because as interesting and thrill-ride-like as I seem hellbent on making a standard trip to the mall, I didn't want to be the same anymore. I knew that the next act, as it were, had to be different, that I had to work that other 80 percent of my brain that maybe was left a little softer than it should be, and mostly deal with a nameless, faceless fear that seemed to have become my primary driver. I needed to go beyond the confines of comfort, outside of familiar mental geography, if not physical, and complete the only thing in my life that I really regretted that was within my control - finishing school. It shocked me when people assumed they knew stuff about me that to me was never a done deal. I never intended to just stay here, although there's nothing really wrong with that either, so there. You can do amazing things up the street as well as you can do them all over the world. There is no point to prove.
We won't have press visas so it's not like I can do any huge expose of anything, and that's not really the kind of story I tell anyway. I'd be happy to write about Vietnamese musicians, or street artists, or what it's like to be over 30 and single in a society that's really just taken off economically - for some? (key words.) I want to take as many pictures or more as I write words. By the end of March I guess I'll know how it should all come together. I have a lot of work to do for this.
Here I am, feverishly researching whether or not there's a Starbucks in Hanoi. Priorities, must attend to priorities:
So now I need to ask for a Vietnamese language program for my birthday, because I have no idea how to even begin with that part. I'm poking around on Flickr (the greatest invention ever) through the hundreds of thousands of photos tagged with Vietnam and Hanoi and Saigon and on and on and on. My very best friend called to tell me that she was so happy that I was in such a different place than I was this time last year, namely a spot from which to handle the things that still suck in a way that is much more hopeful and always with an eye on what doesn't. My mother has (typically) already called the lady who does her nails who is lined up to give me tips on street bargaining. And I kind of love that my family and friends have started wondering where the hell I'll end up next. And that I don't know either.
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