Peace in Vietnam

by Emma Oliver (Japan)

I didn't expect to find Vietnam

It rose, pastel and ornate, like so many buildings in Vietnam but more demurely majestic. Carved and vibrant wood flowers curved into balconies supported by dragon-guarded columns and strung with blue, pink, and yellow lanterns that hung like Easter Eggs in a celebration of world unity. I didn’t expect to find myself somewhere that could bring me back from the whirlpool. The riptide I’d spun into navigating the Vietnam War Remnants Museum in Saigon, as the locals still call it. I’d scanned black and white faces and captions for an hour. Lives lost, women raped, children dead. Breath by breath I could feel myself sinking, that feeling I now associate with watching, reading, treading the news. You’re inundated with it, this sense of helplessness, of drowning. I’d spent the afternoon that way, holding my breath as I relived years of hatred and cross-cultural misunderstanding through photographs and statistics. It’d affected me just as I’d expected it to, but I’d wanted – needed - to see it, to better understand the culture I’d immersed myself in all week: the small, open homes where families ran businesses; the food that, yet simple, packed so much passion and flavor; the markets teeming with fresh (read: alive) meats and seafoods. As I’ve traveled and lived in Asia, such a far cry from my American upbringing, I’ve learned that all the lives and customs seem so different until you learn the point at which they branched from the typical development cycle. Then you think, yeah, if the difference was a car or a roof, I’d chauffeur my family of four around on a Vespa, too. It’s been different from my travels elsewhere, this pattern of experience and learn. Witness and understand. It’s hard for this kind of learning not to leave a mark, an impact, a weight. I didn’t expect to find myself in a place that would ground me once more in the understanding that different is okay. Better even. And that I’m not alone in thinking this, no matter how alone I may feel standing before the smiling portrait of a small misshapen girl, forever changed by the aftermath of war. It was Ho Chi Minh City’s Cao Dai Temple, in all it’s color and symbolistic design, that let me catch my breath. That with it’s breathtaking palette and detail, meticulous hand carvings and murals, somehow halted my spiral. As the old woman at the entrance beckoned me past the “closed” sign, the very energy reminded me that acceptance, tolerance – however insufficient the word – is evident around the world. In my incredible tour guide who warned me that the museum only showed one side of the story. In the families that let me into their home to learn their craft. In temples that embraced travelers and religious practitioners no matter their creed, race, sex, or background. As the elderly woman led me up the steps, turning on lights as she went, ambassadorial figures from East and West communicated through brush strokes and woodwork that “Love is justice,” and that it’s possible to thrive in amity. That despite differences of values, beliefs, opinions, we can find ground common enough to stand on or even a raft in our global society’s sea to float in and roll with the waves that come. We progressed among the halls, each a different electric shade of lime, turquoise, magenta: two beings - different in age, culture, education and yet - under the same sky-painted ceiling, both as taken by the union of figures of faith from around the world on one altar. I was driven breathless by this rainbow monument to coexistence, where an American walked up to a closed door and an elderly woman turned on all the lights just to show a traveler this thing she was proud of. I didn’t expect to find myself somewhere that could bring me back from the whirlpool. But sometimes the thing you least expect is the thing you most need.