I’m doing a fun thing for myself whereby I choose a country each week and find out something new about it.  It won’t necessarily be a representative overview of that place, but a little something eclectic, eccentric or interesting.  I have a list of countries, and country-like areas that I feed into random.org.  My country for the week is the one that gets placed randomly at the top of the list.  This week it was Vietnam.

I started out thinking that all I knew about Vietnam was the war.  I had even forgotten that it had also been colonised by the French at one point in it’s history.  I began wondering how the Vietnamese people feel about the war now, and how they remember it.  I found one answer to this, but not before I discovered something more cheerful: the poems of the 18th Century poetess Ho Xuan Huong.  These are usually erotic in an intellectual kind of way.  These two translations of The Jackfruit give the idea.

 Jackfruit, trans. John Balaban

My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
My skin is coarse, my meat is thick.

Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
Caress me and sap will slicken your hands.

The Jackfruit, trans. Nguyen Ngoc Bich

I am like a jackfruit on the tree.
To taste you must plug me quick, while fresh:
the skin rough, the pulp thick, yes,
but oh, I warn you against touching –
the rich juice will gush and stain your hands.

You can find several translations of her poems on the Internet, but I liked this page because it reproduced the poems in the original language side by side with an English version, and you can get an idea of the original rhythms.  I wish there were sound files of the originals so we could get an even better idea.

This turned out to be one page in a very beautiful project, a site with articles about 54 things that the author chose as representative aspects of Vietnamese culture.  The choices include individuals, like Ho Xuan Huong, concepts like education and everyday objects like bamboo and boats.  There is also a page on Griefs of War and one on French Men, so it was interesting to get a perspective on those two aspects of Vietnamese history.  There are enough references to all sorts of literature, film and history here that anyone following them all up would certainly learn a great deal about Vietnamese culture.  For now, I just enjoyed reading the site and musing on all the ideas.  It was also interesting to think about what I would choose as representative of my own culture if I had to make a similar list.  It seems that the author of this site may be currently living and working in France.

Vietnam seems to be one of the more densely populated countries on the planet, but it still has a lot of natural beauty.  I enjoyed this gallery of photographs from various parts of the country.  The photo above is not part of the gallery, where copyright presumably applies.  Instead it comes from Wikipedia.

Next week I’m going to Argentina, virtually!