Welcome to The Manor

I remember there being a mother and her barely-walking toddler, a cute little girl with a red backpack and necklegth hair, still puffy from her earlier nap in the crib. The two were just going through a strolling the open air, on the wide streets of the amnor’s luxury blvds. The five of us would come to see the whole family as we completed our tour of the area. We later found the father at K-mart, the Manor’s local Korean goods market which doubled as a generic kwikie-mart, taking inventory and directing the delivery man where to drop the boxes of ramen and potato chips. We passed Louis Vuitton quick-stops and the orthodontist, the local Korean BBQ restaurant and the Manor’s own personal Big C, what we now call the mini Big C due to the fact that the big Big C is only two bus stops away. 

In general, the Manor was a luxurious housing complex that is nearly self-contained. No one must leave its perimeter to live a comfortable and rich existence. I would have been satisfied with just the local pool bar that also served pho, nearly everything I need for my existence. I would live at the Manor for this reason alone, but I couldn’t help shake the feeling that the Manor was in a state of decay. We arrived to find mountains of dirt, a hint of the further efforts for development in the area, but at the same time, I would look up at the sides of the apartments only to find leaky air-conditioners staining the concrete walls of each Manor apartment unit. Vietnam’s humidity is no timid creature, and it’s violent monsoons return every year to remind the people of The Manor that they too are subject to the whims of nature. The Manor is in open defiance of nature. It’s clearly unsustainable with its mass of air-conditioners and single bathrooms. These are reasons I wouldn’t live there. Besides that, it seems designed for isolation and privacy, not for community. This can’t be good for quality of life, and that’s ultimately why the Manor wouldn’t be my choice for a place to settle down.

A Vietnamese Village: Mapping Den Hai Ba Trung’s Community Scape in Hanoi

We got of the 33 bus and walked a short distance down a peaceful road circling a small lake—or a large pond. Trees surrounded the entire lake leaving a cool shade for an easy stroll or some chess on the stone benches. We began our tour of the area at the pagoda, where we saw 65 year olds playing badminton next to children peddling their tricycles. Men sat in cliques against plastered brick walls, waiting for their pho, and women sat outside their vending stands, gossiping and peeling fruit. None of the buildings in Hai Ba Trung are over two stories, which gave a chance for the sky to shed a nice diffuse light over the narrow streets and alleys. People were friendly and calm in the area, and there was a cheery feeling of general health in the daily life of the village district. Having no reason to leave a 4 block radius, the inhabitants seemed like a close-nit community, content and self-reliant with only the occasional need for outside help. I would be wonderful to grow up in this community, along with café and a wifi connection to say hi to the outside world once in a while.

Getting a Gig

I read about Tamara Jenkins, the director behind Beverly Hills Slums. The interview in the book seems to be well chosen. I’ve read many interviews involving first-time directors, and Tamara Jenkins seems to have hit all the right notes in her interview. She covered her personal story, her development, and then her claim to fame, dropping names like Coppola and Peter Bogdonovich along the way. She also made sure to add those tips that every budding filmmaker want to hear, as if she was secretly conducting some lecture at NYU.

When I took some film classes in San Francisco, the technical aspects were or course dry, but film was in general a rather dry subject. It’s essentially chemistry, which may be exciting when you’re looking at a finished product, like a picture of a sunset or that moment in time when a raindrop enters a puddle, but in general it’s all just numbers, curves, and conventions. The real beauty with filmmaking is in the finished product. Sometimes the beauty shines through in the script, but it’s the collaboration among all the moving parts of that machine that is Hollywood which may come across as something beautiful, perhaps elegant.

Tamara Jenkin’s story really exposes the pitfalls of collaboration, or rather, the awkward mixture of private funding and artistic endeavor. She described her first feature film experience as having “too many cooks in the kitchen.” To her, making the film was like making spaghetti with chocolate sauce—a novel idea that sours when you share it.

“It might be a crazy idea. To put chocolate in pasta sauce. And you know, it might be like the most amazing pasta sauce or it might suck. But at least you tried this wild thing. Like it was your obsession.”

“But then people are like, ‘Well, you know what, how about just a little chocolate? We don’t want to make it too crazy.’ And you’re like, “No, no, I’m telling you, we need two pounds of chocolate!” So they’re like, “How about a quarter pound of chocolate?’ Da, da, da.”

“So that little chipping away of how much chocolate you’re supposed to put in dilute the original intention of having this crazy chocolate pasta sauce.”

Tamara’s chocolate-spaghetti metaphor is apt for the idea of collaboration. It was the same idea that made me weary of film business. In film theory, there’s an idea of the auteur. An auteur is like the captain of a ship, only for a film. Film directors have the hardest job in filmmaking, and it’s why they garner all the respect. They’re the CEOs, the people who have to deal with the responsibility of getting a movie done. A finished feature is their vision, but unlike Jenkins, it isn’t always their idea. It’s their ability to collaborate that really sets them apart, and what makes Jenkins worthy of King Coppola to invite her to court.

Enter Vietnam

Here I am in the capital city of Vietnam, visiting Uncle Ho resting in his Mausoleum in Hanoi, not in Ho Chi Minh City as one would expect. Either way, I came here to learn the language, my mother tongue. It was my first language, but I quickly left it behind for English, or you might say, Ebonics. Vietnamese had no place at my preschool. It was a nice place with murals celebrating the ethnic leaders, with an upper terrace for a schoolyard. Its amenities included stainless steel tricycles and a fully operational jungle gym. My best friend and I would spend our recesses playing kick-ball if we weren’t whispering about those mysterious beings on the other side of the playground—girls. There was one other Vietnamese girl in my class, although I think her parents were Chinese, if that makes any sense. She seemed confused whenever I spoke to her, so I tried English, which didn’t seem to help much, but at least it got a flinch of recognition before she ran to the tire-swing with the other girls. It was then I decided to concentrate on the class’ lingua franca, English.

It took a while before I became interested again in the language my mother spoke to me as an infant. The few summers of Sunday Vietnamese school traumatized me thoroughly enough to make me wish the language would just die and go to heaven, like every good language should. By the time I could read the vowels in Vietnamese, I was ready to completely leave it behind. By the third weekend of reciting vowels, I cried out of frustration. What could be worth the torture of waking up 7am in the morning to be deserted by mother, placed in cold plastic chair and a cold particleboard desk? I missed the point, but these summers reminded me of the words commonly attributed to Mark Twain: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

It was only until high school when I started valuing my mixed-race heritage, and the fact that I was born speaking two languages. Unfortunately, they didn’t offer Vietnamese at my high school, so it was then I decided I would find an exchange program that would allow me to learn Vietnamese in its natural setting. Besides, I’ve always believed that languages could only be learned through immersion, and so I wasn’t two concerned with wasting my time drudging through practice drills in the school’s language lab in Spanish or French. I wanted to do something a little less common, and so I ended up taking Japanese in high school. I ended up going to Japan through an exchange program because Vietnam wasn’t on the list.

Finally, in my last year of college, I’ve been able to make it here to Vietnam’s capital city, Hanoi, on a study abroad program through UC Berkeley. It’s a very well structured program with trips all over the country, from Ha Long Bay to Saigon, and a program director who is very knowledgeable about the countries history, economics, and politics. While I’m here, I’ll be learning Vietnamese, taking classes on Globalization and International Business, and of course, on Vietnamese culture and society.

In this last class, we’ll each have to interview people of various professions and livelihoods, in Vietnamese and English, and publish it in an anthology I’ll be editing with ten other students. When I’m not doing this, I’ll be backpacking through the Vietnamese countryside and exploring South East Asia on the weekends. I look forward to the rest of the semester.