[Fuck the Plane, Take the Train] Ukraine Trip 2008!

Dear members

2007-10-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

Hey kids, i don't know if any of us check this site regularly anymore, and i guess it is to be expected seeing as to how this whole bubble has popped on our sorry money-less souls. but it can be rectified, it can! i have the hope, and maybe that's not enough for some people, but at the very least, i think it can spur some of us on...i do want to go to europe. i really do. i want to visit china and I want to take a train with all of you. I want to see Mira, and i want to hug her hello. I want to swim in Asrul and Mira's parents' pools and i want to walk around unfamiliar cities and smile at passing strangers. I want to take lots and lots of pictures, because God knows i don't have enough pictures of you guys. I want to spread out big huge maps on the floors of one-room cheap hotels and i want to squabble over whether to go to the museum or the bar on the last night in the city. I want us all to hold hands so we don't get lost, and give each other knowing looks when strangers are talking to us about strange european things. And i want to have this memory, these colors and light and voices and sounds that I can hold on to and say, "That was mine, and no one can take it from me," because I want us to be happy for days on end, I want it to be a line that crosses over all of us, one we can share and say it was ours, all ours and no one else's. because i want it to be with you guys, because i gots no other guys, and even if i did, i wouldn't want them anyway.

let's throw what we can in this basket of ours

2007-08-28T00:09:00.000-07:00

okay, yeah

2007-08-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Who are the Vietnamese in 2005?

Sophie Quinn-Judge

Writers, poets, and scholars among the virtual, worldwide Vietnamese imagined community are reinventing the moral foundations of the Vietnamese nation for an age of globalisation, says Sophie Quinn-Judge.

(This article was first published on 29 April 2005)

24 - 08 - 2007

Vietnam today is balanced between the old collectivist traditions of east Asia and the borderless world of global culture and cyberspace. Vietnamese identity is perhaps more than ever linked to language and its poetry, as opposed to political affiliations. The thirtieth anniversary of the end of the “Republic of Vietnam” (the separate South Vietnamese state) sees diehard members of the pre-1975 Saigon military and civil service demonstrating in Washington DC, to commemorate what is for them a day of national sorrow.

But a younger generation of Vietnamese Americans – part of Vietnam’s new, global, virtual, imagined community – is increasingly returning to a country they barely remember, or never knew, to study the language and explore their roots.

At the same time, Vietnamese intellectuals within the country are looking for ways to transcend their arid cultural climate, which gives writers freedom to write about whatever they like – as long as it is not politics. Many Vietnamese abroad claim that the most popular Vietnamese journal of culture is a website based in Germany, with the mongrel title “Ta la was? ” – a mixture of Vietnamese and German meaning “What are we?”

Talawas is a forum for ideas and opinion for Vietnamese from all over the world, even though it is sometimes firewalled in Vietnam. It is run by a prize-winning writer, Pham Thi Hoai, who studied in the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s, when a brief period of intellectual openness in Vietnam (under the doi moi reforms) coincided with the Gorbachev reform period that presaged the end of communism in east-central Europe. She says that in the rural district of North Vietnam where she grew up, as of 2004 there was no longer a single shop selling books and newspapers, or a library where anything other than the works of former ideologues could be found. Official, subsidised culture had melted away, with little to take its place.

Cyberspace seems to be the one place where Vietnamese have successfully achieved reconciliation, thirty years after the collapse of South Vietnam – the provisional and (as it proved) temporary state created by the 1954 Geneva Conference, which split Vietnam at the 17th parallel following the collapse of French colonial rule and the desire of the west’s great powers to hold the line against communism.

Today, historical revisionists are taking a crack at refurbishing the image of this semi-colonial entity, mainly by pointing out that it offered a legitimate alternative to repressive, communist North Vietnam. But try as one might, it is extremely difficult to find real evidence that this creation could have survived, given the American insistence that it avoid reconciliation with the communists, including those living on its own territory. Other historians point out that the north was shaped by the policies of Chinese and Soviet advisers, after both France and the United States refused to recognise the state governed by Ho Chi Minh.

The fact is that North and South Vietnam were each formed by the cold war. The competing ideologies that were once their raison d’etre are now both anachronisms, and it is likely that – eventually – the remaining supporters of both extremes will realise this. Class struggle, purification campaigns, communist elimination campaigns and the Phoenix Program are all now safely in the past – even if, like the Agent Orange victims and other legatees of the catastrophic violence of thirty years of war after 1945, the wounds are in many cases still raw and issues of justice and historical accounting unresolved.

What are we now?

Meanwhile, the diaspora created when the communists moved into Saigon on 30 April 1975 is now glittering with business and professional achievers, as well as increasing numbers of writers, filmmakers and other creative people. It is in this country of the arts that Vietnamese of all political and geographical backgrounds are meeting today as equals. These international Vietnamese may be far from the realities of the densely populated deltas and coastal plain of their homeland, but without question they will have a role in defining the Vietnamese identity of the future.

They are engaged in what might be considered a replay of the search for a “new culture”, which gripped east Asian elites in the late 19th century, and gathered force after their disappointment with the peace settlement that ended the great war of 1914-18. Those early modernisers, who included Ho Chi Minh, rejected Confucian patriarchy and stagnation at all levels of society. The freeing of women and the poor from superstition and rigid social hierarchies was a key element of their prescription for change. This search for cultural liberation, which strongly influenced the early communist movement, changed its focus in the 1930s to the struggle against imperialism and the evil influences of the west.

By the time that the Vietnamese had discarded their communist economic policies in the early 1990s, their culture was becoming a mix of communist Confucianism, requiring strict allegiance to the party, freewheeling capitalism, nationalism and reviving traditions of folk Buddhism, Taoism and ancestor-worship.

In 2005 a Vietnamese-American writer and poet, Linh Dinh, has said he wants to move beyond politics to look at fundamental problems of his society. One of these is the problem of domestic servants, which he has written a series of poems about. In a Vietnam where social inequality is growing, he believes that wealthier urban people are abusing the poor immigrants from the countryside who come to work for them.

Born in Saigon in 1963 and completely bilingual, Linh Dinh has translated into English one of the classic stories of post-war Vietnam: The General Retires , by Nguyen Huy Thiep. This story explores the conflicts in one northern family, caught in a status-conscious world where the amount of food served at a funeral absorbs more attention than human affection, for the dead or the living.

Another young Vietnamese-American artist is filmmaker Victor Vu. His film First Morning is a searing account of a refugee family’s tragedy, caused in part by their flight from communism, but also by the father’s infidelity to his wife and the parents’ inability to deal with their daughter’s psychological problems. It is a beautifully filmed dissection of social problems that goes beyond the political to their cultural roots. The best-selling memoir by Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala, is yet another example of this trend towards self-examination: the habitual violence practiced by the males in his family becomes the heart of his story, not the sense of a lost homeland.

Through the void

Vietnam itself is experiencing a void of belief, left by the long war and the fading away of communism, which these artists are investigating, even as they examine their own traumas. The government’s invitation to long-exiled monk, the Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, to return for three months in early 2005 to preach and lecture in all parts of Vietnam, is a recognition that the end of communist idealism has left a gap to be filled. His lectures on love, anger and mindfulness address issues left unexplained by nationalism and Confucianism, two of the traditional “isms” which on an official level can fill in for Marxist dialectical materialism.

Could this opening to modern Buddhism be a self-conscious echo of the 11th-century Ly dynasty, when Vietnam was consolidating its newly-won independence from Chinese rule? At that time Buddhist monks served the rulers as advisers and purveyors of culture from other parts of the world. Nowadays foreign culture is banging at the doors and Vietnam has its own diaspora and students all over the world, bringing back experiences and new ideas that are becoming part of the complex, febrile texture of Vietnamese national life.

Clearly the government in Hanoi fears uncontrolled change, and needs some credible moral force to mediate it. Vietnam has a tradition of absorbing new influences and making them its own – from Confucianism to French bread, from military technology to soccer. So one can imagine a time when the fertile and dynamic intellectual exchange of the virtual Vietnamese community is embraced in Hanoi. When it is, a new phase in the Vietnamese people’s 2,000-year history will begin, and the legacy of 30 April 1975 will have finally been overcome.

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by bye

2007-08-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

oh i'll be checking in again in two months.
be. very. wary.

allooo

2007-08-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

apologies for being so random macam sial. but i'm saving rm200 a month. how serious is that?

uhh not to burst anyone's bubble.

2007-08-13T22:47:00.000-07:00

Russian Train Derails After Explosion

ooh. oops. i misread. i thought it derailed THEN exploded. cuz that would just mean shoddy worksmanship, if you know what i mean. terrorism is fine i guess. i mean, at least we know the trains are okay. just try not to get one that has a bomb on it.

Look who we may find in Ukraine!

2007-08-08T20:30:00.001-07:00

Leonid Stadnik, 36, believed to be the world's tallest man at 2.57 meters tall (8-foot-5.5) during their meeting at a hospital where Stadnik is undergoing medical tests in Ukraine's capital Kiev.

so how boojies?

2007-08-06T22:23:00.000-07:00

Alright just what we need! More conundrums! (Is that right? What's the plural for conundrum? It is a noun right?) Come on kiddies, let's start doing the math:

How do we get from KL to Hanoi in the least amount of time?

Also Asrul, we cannot take 20 days to get to Kiev, and 20 days back. If so, I will personally be setting the train on fire, thereby fucking this precious train of ours and taking the bloody plane...to Japan. So how, So how??

eureka!

2007-08-02T19:41:00.000-07:00

i've figured out to money bit. if everyone saves a ringgit a day for a year, we can raise rm40 grand, i.e. USD 12 grand in EIGHTEEN YEARS! woohoo! come you guys! a ringgit a day and we can ride the train when we're all a bunch of 40 year olds!

oh yeah

2007-08-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

i'm in!

2007-08-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

hey they give money for organs now you know... oh and just to scare us all, i heard that foreign looking people are often the target of pesky bribe-hungry coppers. especially on trains. that's what my friends who used to ride trains in russia said. so we should definitely arm ourselves.

oh. it just occurred to me. they might just think we're a terrorist group. mehehehe. MEHEHEHE.

we're on our way!

2007-07-31T18:49:00.000-07:00

YAY! we've got our first donation from the most kind hearted soul that is Fuzzy's brother.. whoot!

plea from cuba:

2007-07-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

Come on, look how close bosnia is to kiev! who's willing to be jacked to sarajevo??

tren haram

2007-07-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

Is this the train we've all been talking about but not sure if it even exists and that it costs $500USD? :P

Map happy:

2007-07-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.seat61.com/Trans-Siberian.htm#Route%20map

Les visas des China's:

2007-07-29T21:27:00.000-07:00

Woot! A double transit visa through China is RM50 only.

Suzi's Corner - 28.7.07 - 7-ish in the PM:

2007-07-29T00:49:00.000-07:00

In between German maps and roti's, assignments were handed out to the members present at the time; each were given a single country to research. So while we eagerly await LILI's memo on the details of all this (we wrote it in her lil LILI diary), I give you what I can for now.

Thailand - Asrul

Cambodia - Amri

Vietnam - Lili

China - Fuzzy

Russia - Zetty

Ukraine - Asrul

We juggled ideas on raising money. We considered sponsorship. We arranged post-trip buffer zones. Buddy System's were in there. No eating. Taking 1st Class. Skinhead neo-nazi's. Lili wearing a wig. Bleeding girls.

We are, as far as I can say, well on our fucking way.

Day 1:

2007-07-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

it only took us about 23 minutes before we figured out we have no cash.. and I fell asleep..

so please donate.. :)