Southeast Asia has a certain unique atmosphere, a kind of timeless wise serenity that hangs in the air over everything. It’s a spirit that seems to pervade the landscape itself, or perhaps more accurately, originates from the landscape. The vegetation itself, everything speaks in this one language. The impressions of my trip to Vietnam and Cambodia swirl dizzyingly through my mind, far too many to list. Here’s a random selection. They all carried this unique character with them.
The ornate, spectacular Buddhist temples were spellbinding. The interiors were blindingly colorful, with bright splashes of color and images crowded together in every inch. In one of them, a Buddhist monk spoke to us, told us how he spends his days, how he orients himself toward the world. It was fascinating. So different, and yet, there’s always a common ground.
We experienced the ever-present Mekong River, the “mother of waters,” the third longest river in all of Asia, originating in Tibet and running through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
The Mekong flooded while we were there and kept us out of Angkor Wat, but we did see the Wat Preah Prom Rath in Siem Reap which is also spectacular. The fishing villages were serene. They presented a different way of living, so simple, so calm. The rice paddies and farmers with their conelike hats were sweetly picturesque.
The cities, Phnom Penh and Saigon, like other major international metropolises, incorporated bits of world culture and commerce from everywhere, including the U.S. But at a deeper historical level, the dominant foreign influence was French, based on the French colonial presence from the mid-19th century to 1954. It left its mark in the architecture of the big cities, but not much in the rural villages.
I woke up in Phnom Penh to the sound of movement on the apartment balconies, and the motorcycle traffic that was just heating up. There were multitudes of motorcycles and scooters for every car. They flooded the streets like giant herds. Some of the scooters were taxis with little wagons on the back.
In Saigon we loved the bánh mì, the sort of sandwiches made on crusty baguettes that you could get from numerous street vendors.
One of my favorite experiences was a temple of the Cao Đài religion. It was such a charge it made me feel like instantly converting. I had never heard of it, but I discovered that it was founded in 1926 and combines aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity and Islam. The interior of the temple was even more wildly colorful than the Buddhist temples, incorporating wild neon lettering. It seemed to be a collage of everything, a general positive affirmation of life and spirit. I felt an instant affinity with it.
I took many pictures in Cambodia and Vietnam that still amaze me. I gaze in wonder and ask myself, was I really there, in a place so enchanted as that? Could I have been? All of the scenes seem subtly mystical.
Being there was certainly a kind of enchantment. It’s such a different world. It’s like a dream, a very pleasant dream.
I am always struck by the common chords between all human beings, no matter how far apart their cultures and backgrounds are. One of the most comforting things I know is that you can connect on a personal level with people of vastly different cultural backgrounds.
Asia is vast and encompasses a wide range of worlds within itself. What unites India, Russia, China, Japan, Afghanistan, Turkey, etc. into a single category?
The cultures of Southeast Asia are thousands of years old. America is a kind of newly invented country. We have our individual cultures, from whatever nation our ancestors came from. But as a nation we are an upstart, an experiment and that only goes back 250 years.
I can’t begin to imagine how we must appear to these Asians. Our respective cultural envelopes shape the way we see things so fundamentally that it’s a challenge to try to really understand how a person from a different culture experiences the world. The range of difference between American and Southeast Asian cultures is broad. And because of that it has tremendous capacity to teach us something.
As a big fan of the great surges of innovation and creativity that are generated through cross-cultural meetings, I am thrilled to experience those kinds of cultural encounters.
The feeling of difference that you feel in Vietnam, however you characterize it, is pervasive, from great to small. It is a kind of strangeness, undeniably, but a pleasant strangeness. It’s exotic in the maximum sense of the word.
The Vietnamese culture is ancient and refined. There is a different sense of time there. It’s a longer view. I was more acutely aware of Vietnam than Cambodia because of my own history with it, the way my country was so deeply intertwined with Vietnam for more than two decades.
I heard someone recently refer to himself as being “in the Vietnam generation” and I knew what he meant. For people in my generation, it is impossible to think of Vietnam without thinking of the war that to a large degree defined my generation.
How little I know about Vietnam, even now, after visiting there. I got a glimpse of how much there is for an outsider to try to penetrate. How little was known in America about Vietnam in the 1960s, even by the highest-ranking people in our government.
I got a shattering sense of that when I saw the documentary film The Fog of War, a film memoir of Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense from 1961-68, under presidents Kennedy and Johnson through the height of the Vietnam War.
McNamara said in his memoir that his understanding of Vietnam had been so insufficient that in his later years he came to believe that, “We were wrong, terribly wrong.”
The dreadful realization came in 1995 on a journey of reconciliation to Vietnam as part of a delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations. In a conversation with the Vietnamese general who had been his counterpart on the Vietnam side, he explained the American rationale for the war, based on the belief that Vietnam was being directed by Russia and China.
The Vietnamese general said, “Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you’d know we weren’t pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. Don’t you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years?”
I think often of President Eisenhower these days and how he promoted travel by Americans to other countries because he believed it would help to promote peace. He believed that if people knew better the people of other countries, they would be less likely to go to war, even if their leaders were pushing them into it.
I really think the old general, the great war hero who had seen the worst of war, was right. And I think that insight is as important now as it was then.
McNamara’s memoir was a warning about how badly things can go over a failure of understanding. And to me it was an endorsement of how important world travel is.
Your humble reporter,
A. Colin Treadwell
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