two million dongs and a bottle of joy

this afternoon i packed my bags and peddled to the china-vietnam border. while exiting chinese customs, the kinked, narrow metal railings that keep people in line posed quite a problem for my bicycle. and on the vietnam side of things, at least 5 officers stopped me to look at my paperwork before they would let me pass through. no more than twenty minutes later, however, i made it. i observed no dramatic changes; everything looks and feels more or less the same. all i did was cross a river.

so i had to go to a bank and exchange my yuan for dong, but the teller told me they don't take that kind of money. wow, how silly for me to think that a bank would exchange money from a country just across the river.....

so i used the atm to get cash. and because the exchange rate from dollars to dong is about 1:15,000, i'm officially now a millionaire. with two million dongs in my back pocket, i set out for a way to spend my 140 or so yuan. so i went to the market where people gladly trade in dong or yuan (china *is* just a mile away) and bought a whole bunch of fruit that i couldn't recognize. tonight i'll have unidentified dessert. i also picked up some bottled water, which turned out to be made by the coca-cola company and labeled "joy". [suspending political commentary here]

the last couple days i spent a lot of time with chris, the canadian-chinese man i met at a restaurant my first day in dongxing. (i'm not using chris' real name). it turns out that chris is actually canadian-chinese-vietnamese and has quite a story to tell.

although his family is chinese, he and 3 previous generations of his family worked in vietnam as farmers. enter what we call the vietnam war--people here call it "the stupid war". chris was a teenager. and although he was technically chinese, he was forced into the vietnamese military because he had spent so much time in that country. his short height delayed his entry into the war until after the u.s. had "withdrawn".

but the war was not over. so he was sent to fight in cambodia where he narrowly escaped death twice until he decided to desert his post and hide in the bush for about a month. then he escaped to china. there people were so impoverished that he continued running. him--and many other vietnamese--attempted a very dangerous boating excursion to hong kong (then a colony of england). he told me that he thought "it's either i go--or--i die." he reflected that he was just a boy, young and stupid.

the chinese border patrol tried to stop their sail boat. but the people in the boat resisted the authority's attempts to overtake the vessel. finally one man in chris' party managed to kill the lone gunman with a paddle. they tied up the other authorities and set back out on their heading to hong kong. when the hong kong authorities stopped chris and the other twenty or so vietnamese boys, they were again told to turn around. after arguing for a while, one man in chris' boat sabotaged their own hull, sinking their ship. this left the hong kong border patrol with no choice but to pick them up and so they did. there were so many refugees from the war that hong kong requested international help from the united nations. and so chris ended up in canada.

in canada chris spent fifteen years of his life working seven days a week, 13, 14, 15 and sometimes 16 or 17 hours a day as a dishwasher. during the winter he also did the dangerous work of clearing snow off household roofs. he married and his wife had two kids. eventually he was able to buy his own, small restaurant. he was the only chinese person in his town, and he talked about how the police often harassed him at his business.

now chris is partially retired. having sold his restaurant and divorced from his marriage, he spends some time in china with his father and brother, some time in canada with his kids and working part time doing manual labor.

wow.

i've never learned much about the vietnam war/stupid war--my public education history classes always seemed to conveniently end just after the second world war--so it was good to hear about it from chris' perspective. it's sad to hear how the war displaced him from his family and community. and how he had to work long hours to make ends meet for years on end. it makes me think of how hardly the u.s. government continues to rock people in iraq and afghanistan. and it makes me think of how bad poor people are treated by most governments.

we'll see what stories my trip through vietnam offers. i'm sure we'll hear more of the stupid war.