Mai Chau

I was scraping the last bits of rice from my lunch bowl when I heard the first hollow boom of thunder. My sore muscles tightened and I sat still on the bamboo floor of our stilt house homestay in Xo, chopsticks perched over my bowl. As soon as the drumming began on the roof I turned to my friends circled around the lunch platter and announced with unblinking eyes, “I’m taking a shower. Right now.” Miniature soap, shampoo and conditioner in hand, I hurried down the stairs and stood on the cement ground with my sunburned face straining toward the foggy gray sky. Red dirt trickled from my hair, my hiking clothes, my arms and my legs, collecting by my bare feet before mixing with the clear rain and disappearing. I straightened my head to allow the cool water down my spine.

Facing the stilt house, I saw my friend Cole scurrying down the slanted planks of wood to join me. Laughing, we poured shampoo on our heads and watched as the white bubbles cleaned our sweaty t-shirts. Soon more people were shivering barefoot on the stone ground, thankful that there was a force able to relieve us of this menial task. After a three hour trek in the mud, all anyone wants to do is stand under a powerful shower. Since Xô is one of the poorest villages in all of Vietnam, our school of sixteen teenagers were not going to complain about the water basin and buckets. But nature helped us out in the end, stopping the slapping rain suddenly so we could change into dry clothes and march back inside, knowing we saved a substantial amount of cistern water for the Xô villagers. Charity feels wonderful.

The Relentless Plea

“You buy,” the woman always insists, sneaking up behind me or waiting for me at the corner, looking up into my eyes with a woeful expression.

“Dạ, không,” I stutter, shaking my head and scanning the motorbikes combing the street. I have no interest in her sticky orange bag of pineapple chunks, her t-shirts with a bright Vietnamese flag or a sketch of a temple or the phrase “I heart pho,” her toothpicks, or her postcards.

As I attempt to cross an intersection while still keeping all ten of my toes, I feel the postcard on my hand or the t-shirt over the crook of my arm. Giving me the product when there is no money in my hand should not be a smart business tactic, but it allows the desperate vendor (and every vendor is desperate) to advertise her product further, allowing me to see the picture of a densely packed street in detail or feel the cotton cloth against my flushed skin.

It is hard to escape the guilt. It is even harder to escape the street vendor.

Each ‘no’ causes a surge in the vendor’s persistence. This makes the New York City foreigner uncomfortable, since I am used to homeless people dejectedly calling out for money, but staying in one spot. The personal contact here in Hanoi forces me to flee into the paved road of honking Honda Dreams, hoping that the street vendor finds another tourist.

Everyone uses jewelry, fans, hats and cigarette lighters, but the street vendors never seem to harass their fellow Vietnamese pedestrians. Only Westerners can be swayed, and they cannot understand that I do not fit this stereotype.

Whenever I leave the comforts of my room for the sweltering chaos outside, I worry about the vendors. They can be intrusive even without speaking, still forcing me onto the busy street. Small stores densely packed together leak out onto the sidewalk, creating a blanket of shoes or handmade cloth bags or spare motorcycle parts.

No space to move, no space to breathe. Just like home.

¿Que he hecho yo para merecer esto! (What have I done to deserve this?!)

“¡Tengo dieciseis años! (I’m sixteen years old!)” I shouted frantically over the nurses’ chatter and the clatter of glass syringes on the metal cart. “¡No puedo perder tanta sangre! (I can’t lose that much blood!)”

The Spanish nurses ignored me, pushing the IV to a corner of the crowded room to make way for the two-tiered cart of syringes, clear liquids and gauze. “Aspetta, aspetta per favore! (Wait, please wait!)” I babbled in Italian, fear oozing into my language comprehension. I was going to die alone in a Spanish emergency room just because I had asked for a blood test. I don’t remember mentioning “Please drain me of all the blood I have and replace it with a mysterious clear liquid, por favor” in any of the three languages I can speak.

“Una análisis de sangre, sólo para seguridad (a blood test, just to be sure).”

I had become mildly concerned when I had watched first a swarm of tiny bumps march up my feet stopping at my knees, up my back starting at my waist, and from my shoulder to my elbow. Then I had noted the bumpy pink carpet as it completely covered my chest and arms. And now, my hands were so swollen with boils that I had to ask a friend to put my shoes on and open my water bottle for me. I surrendered and tattled on my mysterious rash, alerting my summer program’s staff.

But finding the cure was more painful than the affliction. A day earlier, a dermatologist had gouged out one of the boils on my hand for a lab biopsy and then stitched it up with coarse black thread--a scratch, he had told me in comforting English. Really, a lie or a mistranslation. I naively nodded consent, a universal signal.

Now I had learned from my error and no longer trusted Spanish doctors. They are notoriously lazy in Barcelona, working from 9 to 2, followed by siesta time, and then maybe returning back to work. Weekends? Debe estar bromeando (You’ve got to be joking). Emergencies must be at a convenient hour. I had walked into the emergency room with flaming hands and a mini Spanish-English dictionary on a Saturday afternoon. Not the time for an emergency, silly American girl.

A young doctor with dyed blonde hair had rolled her eyes at me, and explained step by step in a high pitched, overly enunciated voice that she was going to prick my arm and fill only a small vial with my blood and then using the same needle point to minimize pain, she was going to make my hands all better with a cortisone drip.

I looked at her beauty and squinted. Though she was the antithesis of the chubby, wheezing dermatologist with wispy white hair from the day before, she was Spanish and he was Spanish.

“¿Puede esperar un momento? (Can you hold on a moment?)” I dialed long-distance to my parents and explained the situation. Then while my aunt, a retired pediatrician, called me, my parents tried to reach my doctor. Then my aunt hung up so that my parents could call again, and my aunt called my mom’s cellphone to discuss the matter.

“Vale (Fine),” I agreed, holding out my right arm tentatively. Would this prick really be a prick? Or would it be a hole in my vein and then, oops lunch break, come back again in two days during the mid-morning and she’ll finish sewing up the wound that she herself, a professional doctor, inflicted?

I lay back, certain my picture would appear in medical textbooks throughout the country and throughout the world. Bad adjustment to Spanish tapas? Doubtful. Eczema? Perhaps. Allergy to gluten? Possibly. Herpes? Patient repeatedly denies, but doctors remain skeptical.

These professional diagnoses were just as ridiculous as the non-professional ones I had received earlier in the week. That Thursday afternoon, I had been in the computer room waiting for my friend Matt to finish his Google fix. “Do you have menopause?” he yelled to me. Heads turned. I shook my head no and awkwardly laughed.

“Then it’s not your progesterone.”

“Thanks, Matt.”

My second non-professional diagnosis: meningitis scare. For an Andalucian museologist, the best way to tell if someone has fatal brain and spine swelling is an indication of a fever.

At a quarter to two in the morning on that Saturday, one of my Spanish teachers, José, sprinted to my dorm room calling my room to tell me he was coming. As I waited outside my door in my pajamas, tired and utterly confused, he raced down the hallway flailing a thermometer. Without a word, he jabbed the thermometer into my armpit and waited for thirty seconds with deep concern carved on his young face. Before I could even ask, the thermometer was yanked away and held up to the ceiling light. “Estás bien (You’re okay),” he stuttered and left. “Buenas noches, (Good night)” I called out to him.

Now as the large IV bag drained into my bloodstream, my hands and arms were no longer hot, but the cortisone drip did not immediately make everything all better like the nurse had promised. The boils stubbornly refused to yield. In time the carpety rash turned from pink to white and shrank into little acne pimples. The boils on my hand turned from red to purple to white, shrank into squishy lumps and disappeared. The bumps on my legs and back became a tannish yellow color and left dotted remnants--a souvenir.

I had paid 100 euros for the emergency room, 70 euros for each of three dermatologist visits, 110 euros for the lab biopsy and 30 euros for meds. Diagnosis? Priceless. I was allergic to the sun.

A Step Forward for Europe: Amendment on Ban of Ugly Produce

When I first read the headline “Europe Relaxes Rules on Sale of Ugly Fruits and Vegetables,” I couldn’t believe I was not reading The Onion but the International News section of the New York Times with the dateline from Brussels. Apparently, “misshapen fruit and vegetables won a reprieve on Wednesday from the European Union as it scrapped rules banning overly curved, extra knobbly or oddly shaped produce from supermarket shelves.” I was relieved to find that food not meeting “European norms” will still be allowed into the country--with a warning that the food is “substandard,” of course.

It is good to know that Europe has begun to embrace diversity. In an act of tolerance and acceptance, twenty six types of marred fruits and vegetables will now be legally available for purchase. The unprejudiced food markets will help the European economy as well as alleviate the hunger of millions. Such an act of benevolence, though countered by roughly half of nations under the European Union, has shocked me. The reprieve can only leave me begging Europe for more of its selective kindness.

Europe took a big step forward when it scrapped the law against abnormal and weird-looking food. Could Europe maybe extend its recent unbias to human beings as well? Far-fetched, I know, but maybe the European nations will make a connection between that twisty carrot and that man from Somalia. If unique is the new uniform, then maybe the Italians won’t stare at the Asian-Italians on the bus or the Spanish won’t glare at the Russian couple speaking Russian on the street. French Muslims might be able to wear their burkas in school and all Albanians or Romanians won’t be labelled as pickpockets.

My school in Viterbo and a local Italian high school sponsored a forum where we could practice unfamiliar languages and compare cultures. In December, thirty teenagers sat in a circle, pondering how we were similar. “We all celebrate Christmas?” an Italian student offered, gracefully practicing her British accent. Enthusiastic agreement was met by two shy nos: one Italian and I both shamefully admitted that we had never celebrated Christmas. With persistent urgings from her English teacher, the girl explained to the group in halting English how her family would celebrate Eid-ul-Adha that December instead of Christmas. I wanted to ask her where she would find a mosque. I wanted to ask her how it feels to be the only Muslim. Does she hide her religion to evade taunts? She turned her head to me and gave the pointy-eyebrow-bulging-eye sign common amongst students desperately but subtly asking for a life line. Eager to help her out, I began my lecture. The Italian teenagers were unimpressed with the miracle (burning oil versus immaculate conception?) and the dreidel seemed pointless and boring. The description of sweets and presents were met with curt approval. The five American students were blasé, concentrating instead on my Italian grammar and pronunciation. Luckily, I had rehearsed this speech already to my host family, so only one category of alien revealed itself through my lecture.

Brooklyn is known for its squat and stocky mass of dense, squishy dough: the bagel. The bagel is known as Jew food--with shmear, of course. Growing up in bagel-ridden Brooklyn, I felt the Jewish presence all around me. The triumphant beige synagogue with its adjacent complex was just a few blocks away and I never hid my religion. I would compare with my classmates our favorite Jewish holidays and “bar mitzvah season” came and went like a 90’s fad. I was unprepared for the role as the Jewish representative. I did not know the entire Israeli history or even a recipe for Haroset! For shame, for shame.

What should I have done when my host sister Sarah’s friend Simone once showed me a swastika pin his father gave him? Sarah’s rowdy group of friends and I had just finished our pizzas and we were dawdling in a piazza, waiting for the next morning to begin. Simone was not one of the neo-Nazi skinhead teens that lived in Viterbo. His hair was long and straightened: a typical goth just like the others in the “Black Label Society” to which Sarah also belonged. He had given me jewelry and had always shouted my name whenever he saw me, playing with the very American ‘er’ in Goldberg. We had been friends. I quickly diverted my eyes from the pin and looked at my sister. She tried to explain to him the significance. He shot her down. I opened my mouth, breathed out the cold air, and that was that. Should I have ranted about my grandfathers in Auschwitz and the tortuous three years my grandmother and aunt endured as children? Probably. But maybe I was looking at those jagged and geometric lines as an American Jew. Maybe I was being overly critical about the sharp shape of two pieces of metal placed on top of each other. It’s just a symbol, Simone said, and put the pin back in his pocket. The Hindus use it too.

But now that the bulgy pears are bitten with the same or almost the same delight as a juicy and perfect one, I can imagine walking the streets of Italy without passing the “Viva Hitler!” declarations, or even bringing my friend home for dinner without my Italian host sisters commenting on how he looks like a squirrel. I can now imagine my host family introducing me to guests as “Aliza” instead of “The American, who is Jewish. Oh, her name is Aliza. With a z.” The possibilities seem enormous (perhaps a liberal immigration policy?) but it is too early to lift my hopes.

It’s just a banana with abnormal curvature. It’s natural and the Hawaiians don’t seem to mind.

Dictionaries

Dictionaries are plane tickets. Flipping through the alphabet, I find words that will come in handy. Bathroom, tissues, soap, where, street, please, sorry, that, there, stop. I enjoy guessing an English definition by listening to the sound of a foreign word. Fango. Faaaaango. FanGO! The Spanish word for mud sounds so exciting, soothing and inviting. Edepol. Dull and dreary. Yet, it is the Latin word for “by Pollux!”

My favorite words are the ones that are rarely used in its language. Living with Italians for nine months, I never heard passerella, the Italian word for catwalk, or divampare, meaning to burst into flames, or loculo, a burial niche. I love the words that don’t exist in English, like fanfarronear, the Spanish verb for to show off in an arrogant and haughty way, or the Latin word sonipes, meaning prancing steed.

While reading my history homework or punching a function into my calculator, my friend slumps in a library chair and proclaims “I’m bored”. I stare at her, motionless. I want to take her chin in my hand and swivel her head so she can see the possibilities around her. I want to point out the entertainment like I point out the good movies at Blockbuster. But everyone uses dictionaries. No one, however, uses them with glee and fervor. Except me, of course.

I carry a foreign language mini-dictionary like ladies carry lipstick, as a permanent staple in my bag. My attachment to perusing dictionaries confuses the strangers on the subway: is she an American tourist trying to brush up her Spanish or a diligent Spanish student trying to grasp the exotic English language? If I speak to a friend in English on our way to Manhattan, I’m either secretly applauded for my impeccable American accent or ignored. If I speak to a friend in English on our train ride to Rome, I’m either glared at for being American or quietly commended for my dedication to master English.

I don’t skim dictionaries due to frustration with my own language; in fact, I love English as well. English has its own quirks. Though my other dictionaries boast of inane and onomatopoetic words, English takes the roots of these ancient and romance languages, adding an entirely new dimension. Yes, the Latin verb effervescere, to boil up, is quite lovely. But an effervescent personality? I bet those Roman scholars didn’t see that one coming. Bankrupt is derived from the Italian words meaning broken bench. Alarm used to mean to the arms, taken from those melodramatic Italians. Dictionaries are seen as dull books brimming with dry facts. But what about the mysteries and stories? Italians, for no explained reason, use the verb to make a bottle in the sense of to fail in a performance. So that verb, fare fiasco, has graciously given us the sharply consonant word fiasco. With a bent and coffee stained mini-dictionary in hand, no fiascos can come my way.

Kill the Pigeons!

No one knows this, but last year while I was in Viterbo, I was a pimp. No, it was not a project for my class trip to Pompeii. Nor did I benefit from the job. In fact it was forced on me by...pigeons.

I was lying on the floor of my room, struggling with a confusing image of Mercury told by Virgil in cruelly complicated Latin: he, headlong, sent himself towards the waves with his whole body, similar to a bird which, around the shores, around the fishy rocks, flies low lying near the sea? The Cyllenian progeny coming from the maternal bird? While debating whether to ask my host mother for help, knowing this usually proved more complicated and frustrating since I rarely said “headlong” or “progeny” in Italian, soft cooing distracted me from the Aeneid. I looked up from my laptop and spied a pigeon sitting comfortably in the flower box on my balcony.

I smiled and remembered fond Latin class memories in room 28 with an irate and exasperated Ms. Durham, banging on the air conditioner to soften the blasting coos. Pigeons were the only familiar link between my Italian life and my American life. But after the one singing pigeon, more came. Soon six pigeons would flap around, ruining the plants and belting out unrhythmic chants. They were flirting with each other and using my balcony as a brothel. Every day they gathered right outside my window earlier and earlier to start the disorganized chorus, just as every day I worked my way through another book of the Aeneid.

In May, I excitedly flipped to book 12, the final book. Having read the fantastically gory war scenes, I wanted to take action. A new epic poem would be written about me, called the Alizid, about sex, violence and pigeons rather than arms and a man. But on the bus, I read about Aeneas’ injury. Venus, his mother, shrouded herself in mist in order to come down from Mount Olympus and save her son from the seemingly incurable arrow wound. I looked up from my lovingly crumpled book and sighed. My mother was farther away from Italy than Mount Olympus seemed to be and she did not have the magic powers to heal my pigeon scratches and bites. Pigeons are evil creatures -- I could lose an eye!

Early one mid-May morning, I stumbled to the glass door that separated me from the feathery prostitutes. My alarm clock blinked 5:30 as I glared out at the pigeons. My new alarm clock had no snooze button; they had won the day.

Even though I was planning to wake up two hours later to take my Italian AP exam, I marched four steps into the bathroom to take a shower and soothe my anger. Even from the opposite end of my apartment building, I felt their conniving presence. Careful as I always was to not splash any water on the tiled floor, I thought I noticed the floor shaking slightly in rhythm with my archenemies.

My previous passivity had been like Aeneas’ initial hesitation when Turnus pleaded for mercy. But these pigeons were not pleading for mercy--they knew the anguish they were causing me and they were reveling in my pain. They had to die. So I drove my sword deep into their chest, just like Aeneas did. Well...I bought colorful metallic windmills to scare them away.

Months later, in my white splattered brownstone, my host family emailed me pictures of the fist-sized “piccioncini”. Among the shiny shrink paper that crackle in the wind were yellow fuzzballs lying lazily in the dead flowers of my balcony flower boxes. How could I still be angry? Besides, killing off an entire community of birds would probably have altered the entire food population and I would have become a biologist’s worst enemy. Thankfully, walking through Brooklyn is not as terrifying as walking through Saint Marco’s Square in Venice, where the pigeons actually rest on pedestrians if they stop moving. So I will just have to shake my head in a sympathetic manner like I did when the Italian government fell for the 61st time since Mussolini, and let Italy deal with its own problems.

An American Jew’s First Christmas

“Dov’è l’albero di Natale? (Where is the Christmas tree?)” I asked my father. It was Christmas Eve in Sora, a small city surrounded by snow-capped mountains 200 kilometers south from my apartment in Viterbo, and I had been planning to sneak my family’s Christmas presents under a big, green pine tree covered with flashing lights and homemade ornaments later that night.

My father apologetically rushed to his bedroom closet and I watched, bewildered, as he rummaged through dress shoes and work tools, looking for my Christmas tree.

“Ecco qua (Here it is),” he announced, brushing the dust off his pants and holding up a small cardboard box. My father delicately took out a miniature plastic tree and placed it on top of the television in the kitchen. He yanked the black cord into a nearby socket and the tips of the fake pine magically flashed bright colors. I forced a smile, and reluctantly placed my carefully wrapped gifts under the cabinet that held the television that held the Christmas tree.

I had been waiting for this night ever since October, when I noticed my mother literally roasting chestnuts over an open fire, preparing our dessert for that night. I imagined my grandfather dressing up as Babbo Natale (Father Christmas) and my entire extended family gathering together to sing Christmas carols and drink eggnog. I would bake sugar cookies in various festive shapes with my two sisters, and we would share a friendly laugh whenever I would spill flour on the floor. My teachers would assign me no homework over the vacation and I would casually speak rapid Italian to everyone I met.

As I stood in front of a small, boxy, white house which would be my new home for the next week, clutching in one hand a plastic bag containing two pairs of clothes and a toothbrush and another bag filled with presents in my other hand, my newly accustomed familiarity with Italian life zoomed away down the adjacent, noisy highway. Memories of my first day with my Italian family overwhelmed me, and I remembered my mother force-feeding me the contents of the refrigerator while my father yelled at me for not knowing the significance of the American flag and not believing in UFOs and aliens and my sisters nervously translating his rapid dialogue. As I piled blankets on the cot set up next to my sisters’ bed, I hoped my introduction into my extended family would be more graceful and silently prepared myself for various scenarios.

On Christmas Eve, my grandmother had prepared a traditional Christmas meal for the family. Most of my Christmas knowledge comes from the annual Christmas musical I was in for five years, The Christmas Revels, so I could only imagine that we would be eating a Christmas goose or a Christmas pig. I was not expecting a plate of rice teeming with steaming seafood, still with their pale red shells, beady eyes, curved tails and some even with spiny legs. But I pretended I was eating chocolate, a survival technique I had learned from Anne Frank’s diary when I was eight, though my sister Sarah still had to hold my hand whenever I encountered a particularly large and lifelike part of my meal.

During dinner, though I was being as Italian as I could possibly be simply by eating and not saying anything stupid and nonsensical with my bland American accent, my mother proudly described to her family all the strange things I do. My aunts and uncles gaped at me as my mother announced all my eccentricities, such as not using a hairdryer, running in the garden without a coat on, waking up at seven in the morning and still catching my 7:20 bus to school, and living in Brooklyn--right next to where the Twin Towers stood.

After dinner, my new cousins distracted me with difficult conversation in an unfamiliar dialect that sounded more like Yiddish than the Italian I had been studying for four months while my parents and sisters snuck out to buy me Christmas presents after discovering that I knew enough to buy presents for them. The next morning, my family picked up the four packages I had placed on the freezing, speckled grey linoleum floor and in return they handed me a large, ostentatious, bright pink felt purse and an Italian espresso maker, already preparing for my impending return back to America. Since moving in, I have given my family other presents, so I knew how they would treat my Christmas presents. On a trip to my garage one day to look inside all my suitcases for my American brother’s missing glasses, I noticed a shelf with all the gifts I had meticulously chosen for their specific needs: slippers scientifically designed for comfort, bilingual Italian-English books, patterned silk headbands and glass rings. There is also a small shelf in my kitchen for the regional wine, cookies, mushrooms and chocolate I pick up for my family during school field trips. I knew my sister Sarah and father would never wear the shirts I bought for them, my sister Erika would never listen to the tango CDs I burned for her or use the thick winter scarf I purchased, and the DVD for my mother would soon be covered in dust from the garage.

But like my Christmas festivity predictions, these too were slightly off. As soon as we returned from Sora, my father unloaded the sparse luggage and copious leftover food crammed in the trunk and immediately sat down on the couch to watch my mother’s Christmas present with me. My mother, who is usually soft spoken and tiptoes around me with only the occasional bout of confidence and sarcastic humor, seemed only vaguely interested in her Christmas gift and left my father and I in the living room to enjoy the present that wasn’t ours while she did the laundry. I explained Reese’s Pieces and pizza delivery services to my father, and he explained to me how aliens really do exist.

“E.T. telefona casa,” Spielberg’s character robotically begged.

Once the movie was finished, my father made room in the cabinet under the television for the DVD, nestled between a mini-series about the life of Jesus Christ and an educational video about physics. Though I was not pasty and withered like E.T., I called home and excitedly recounted to my American mother what my father had just done, relieved and shocked that I had finally purchased something that my family would actually use. Though I still do strange things, I’m learning to be less of an alien.