Scenes

Yesterday my partner and I went to have Mi Quang, and just seeing the bowl on the table made me remember an incident in Vietnam many years ago.

My nephew in Vietnam LOVES Mi Quang, and is something of a connoisseur. He knew of a particular restaurant in the backstreets of Tan Binh that served the city’s best Mi Quang, but kept eccentric hours – as soon as everything was finished, they would close up for the day. And some days they decided to serve a totally new dish, and on the Buddhist sabbath they only served vegetarian noodles.

On this particular day we were in luck, as they were serving their famous chicken Mi Quang, and there was plenty left. The problem was that the restaurant was jammed packed with children, and we had to wait for a table. The children were of all ages and sexes, and they were all shoddily dressed. Outside the restaurant, sitting bolt upright on a plastic stool, sat a young Buddhist Nun. It turns out that they were all from a nearby orphanage, and the Nun had brought them all down here for a special meal. Naturally, here vows didn’t allow her to be in a restaurant that served meat, and so she sat outside, and when the orphans were finished the owner came out to settle the bill with the Sister.

It was such a beautiful scene, and one that has stuck with me as a perfect example of the pragmatism (and fundamental rationality) of Vietnamese Buddhism. The Nun had taken her vows, and she stood by them strictly. But she chose not to impose her ideas on the children, instead allowing them to enjoy a special treat.

This is the kind of occurrence that makes me love Vietnam.

Going as Far as I Can

I’ve been trying to read some travel books to give me some inspiration for my own writing, but it’s very difficult to fit them in with all the other reading I need to do at the moment for work & study. At the moment I am reading Over the Moat, a love story set in Hue which is actually quite good, though I find the author (or is it the character of the author?) insufferable. I think this is an unavoidable aspect of travel writing. The person doing the telling is doomed to offend, irritate and embarrass. Paul Theroux gets around this by making himself such a thoroughly unattractive character that you almost can’t help but like him, and perhaps this is an excellent ruse.

I’ve just finished another book in which the author attempted to do this, but with less success. Duncan Fallowell’s Going as Far as I Can is an account of a journey to New Zealand – something sufficiently rare in travel writing to be noteworthy in itself. Fallowell is a good writer, there is no doubt, but I found myself irritated by his obsession with architecture, and some of his observations were really quite banal. That said, I couldn’t put the book down, and finished it very quickly – wondering at the end, though, why on earth I’d bothered. This is a constant bother with authors who are actually quite talented but whose ability to plot is flawed – you keep flicking from page to page but are left deeply unsatisfied at the end. Crime novels are particularly noteworthy for this, which is why I gave up reading them some years ago.