At the end of August we received some unexpected and very very welcome guests from South Africa. They were attending a conference in Singapore and decided to hop over to Vietnam for a visit. Before I divulge the details of their visit, allow me to digress. Immigration is such a hot topic at the moment, and being a migrant myself, I often find myself wondering about my inherent need and desire to move from one place to another. One of the aspects of expat life which took me many years to come to terms with, is that visitors from back home are a seldom occurrence. We are lucky if we get to see our family once a year. It is, therefore, always such a wonderful event when friends and family go out of their way to visit us. Over the years I have come to relish the chance to show my family and friends the little corner of whichever strange land I call home at that moment. It allows me to see the country I am living in through fresh eyes, to fall in love again with the details, and to look upon the less wonderful and distressing parts of the culture with gentleness. It is easy at times, when your heart is in pain and yearning for somewhere else, to only see the terrible things of the foreign land in which you find yourself. The honeymoon phase can pass all too quickly, and then, as with any relationship worth having, you need to cultivate the ability to see the moments of beauty and collect them like a string of precious pearls, to be revisited when a tonic for homesickness is needed. These moments allow you to live alongside the more difficult aspects of the new culture and world you are trying to fold yourself into, without becoming bitter and turning "back home" into something it never really was.
Over the years I have often wondered whether my husband and I would have stayed and made a home in South Africa if things had been different. The list of ifs is long: What if teachers could earn a living wage back home?, What if artists could thrive without also having to work a full-time job?, What if basic living costs didn't exponentially increase each year (but salaries didn't)?, What if you didn't need a car (and all the costs that go with it)?, What if loadshedding was a fictitious concept and the state supplied an affordable, good and reliable healthcare system?, and so on and so on. Perhaps we would have stayed, comfort is after all a very beguiling and alluring mistress. But after much time and a fair amount of suffering, the dust has settled enough for me to understand the immeasurable value of the choices we have made. How small my thinking and my tolerance for discomfort would have been had I never left; how likely that a trove of inner knowledge might never have been discovered and a subsequent unburdening of the soul might never have happened had life stayed too comfortable and safe. These are the invaluable gifts that lie on the other side of doing what you know you have to do even though you are deathly afraid.
Living in a very foreign culture has a way of stretching your capacity for the uncontrollable nature of life. I came home to the realisation that there are very few things in life that are truly within my control and if I do not open my hand and let go, then I will be the one that breaks. When you live abroad life has a way of beating this realisation into you. Like the Fool we walked off the edge of a cliff, but instead of finding death in the valley below, we found a richness of life. Other than the obvious insanity and discomfort of such an endeavour, it also creates a large space for life to rush in, to pick you up by you feet and shake you until all of your bullshit falls out. It is incredibly hard to hide from yourself when you are almost alone in a very foreign country. This is gold.
After years of wishing that the situation had been different, and staying in South Africa could be an actaul option, I finally realised that even if it had been different we probably wouldn't have stayed anyway. Because the truth of the matter is that both my husband and I belong to a certain subset of the human population who find themselves unable to stay put in any one place for too long. Whether this is a curse or a blessing, or more probably a bit of both, still remains to be seen. The first few years you fantasise (and, oh, did I fantasise...) about going back home and how easy and wonderful everything would be. And then you go back home for a bit and all of sudden home is no longer quite as homelike as you remember it. Very few people care about the adventures you have had, being much more interested in whether and when you will have kids (and if not, then why not?), the food is good at first and then slowly becomes boring and unimaginative, and soon you find yourself once again dreaming about being that stranger in an even stranger land. Perhaps it's genetic; God knows that as South Africans we know a fair bit about migration. Perhaps it's simply the life paths we are on. And perhaps one day we will still return, aged and engraved by a life lived for this day and not some imaginary one day.
And now, allow me to return to our South African guests. Our friends arrived just in time to join us on a journey to the ancient town of Hội An in central Việt Nam. The last time my husband and I visited Hội An it was just as the country was beginning to emerge from the pandemic. Places which made most of their money from tourism suffered greatly and this was still very evident when we visited in December of 2022. Two years later and Hội An is once again vibrant, bustling and chock-a-block with tourists, shops and hawkers. And yes, the sheer quantity of tourists can get overwhelming, but as long as you rise early (along with the Vietnamese) you can spend a few glorious hours wandering the old, narrow lanes and hunting for details to photograph without too many people clogging your way. And of course, when the heat gets to be a bit too much, duck into one of the many rustic coffee shops and have an ice cold Coconut Coffee (which is to die for by the way), our guests definitely appreciated the cool-down pit-stop.
Visiting Hội An was my husband's birthday gift to me this year. The Vietnamese National Day coincides with my birthday, which means that schools are closed, and so we usually try to use the oppurtunity for a short getaway. I wanted to go to Hội An to photograph patterns to feed my ever growing obsession with Vietnamese tile & wrought iron designs. Which I did. And it was glorious. I still have a few illustrations left to complete for my book about Sam, and have no doubt that some of the visuals I encountered will find their way onto the page.
I'm going to feature a book or two that I am either busy reading, or have already read. Perhaps like me you enjoy an interesting recommendation every now then. In that vein I would like to invite you to please let me know of any interesting reads you had in the last while. Let's start a communal list.
May you all have a peaceful October ahead.
I am currently reading...
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe.
This is a great, non-fiction recounting of a decades long saga that details the smuggling of Chinese, specifically Fujianese, into America during the 80s and 90s. It closely follows the story of Cheng Chui Ping, aka Sister Ping, a middle-aged grandmother who ran one of the most prolific smuggling operations at the time. Patrick Radden Keefe delivers the facts like a novelist, making for an informing and entertaining read.
Let me know which book has got you in it's grip!
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