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Finding a Voice in Vietnam
by Michael McColly, photography
by Tuong Nguyen
Rice paddies, orderly and
green, stretched out on either side of us as we bounced along
a red clay road on the motorcycle belonging to the family
of my traveling companion, a former student named Tuong Nguyen.
Along the road, old women carried vegetables, children ran
to school, teenagers three to a bike laughed and called out
to us in fragments of English. All that morning, as we traversed
the Vietnamese countryside, stopping at temples to light incense
and at schoolyards to photograph crudely illustrated posters
of needles dripping blood, meant to warn youths against the
dangers of AIDS, I’d had a sense of déjà
vu. Later, as we sat under a thatch roof eating fish and vegetables
and drinking rice wine with the farmers my traveling companion
once had worked with, I realized that, after teaching writing
for 13 years to students for whom English was not their first
language, this was the first time I had actually entered into
one of their worlds.
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Students often casually invite
me to visit their countries, writing down names of siblings
and cities to see. But most of them come from places not exactly
on the tourist route—dusty, drought-ridden villages,
overcrowded barrios, working-class tenements, war-destroyed
neighborhoods. Nevertheless, they would describe such places
as if the world had begun there and make me appreciate just
how far and how much they and their families had sacrificed
to get to the U.S.
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Saigon, Vietnam 2001.
HIV positive woman attends an HIV/AIDS and drug use meeting
(she died about three months later).
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Often I would ask them to
read their essays out loud, preaching to them that it had
some educational purpose, but it was really to hear the passion
they infused into their memories of lands and languages that
their children will most likely never understand. There was
something in their voices, in their desperate immigrant’s
stammer, that made me listen as if I was being told something
for me alone to understand. I was obsessed with their bittersweet
tales of immigrant life. Perhaps I was selfish in the way
I pried out their stories, unmindful at times of just how
painful they were to set down in a second language. I was
so affected by their narratives that I took students to poetry
readings, bribing them with extra credit if they would stand
on stage and read their essays. I wanted to prove to them
that they had important stories to tell, that they had more
to offer than working in cardboard-box factories or daycare
centers. I even published a little book of their essays.
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Saigon, Vietnam 2003.
Young sex workers and 15-year-old male drug user share lunch.
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I read and listened to my
students’ stories of survival—depictions of floating
on the South China Sea or walking for weeks in the Sudanese
desert to flee Ethiopian soldiers—because I needed to
learn how to survive myself. Unbeknownst to my students and
colleagues, I was swallowing a fist full of pills each morning
and sitting in my car waiting for drug reactions to subside
before my first class. I was HIV positive.
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Yet, I shrank from telling
students this fact of my life, even though day after day they
revealed their personal lives to me, and even though my younger
students, vulnerable 18-year-olds who feigned nonchalance
while being bombarded by the sexual seductions of a merciless
media and material culture, might have benefited from knowing
my situation. But the time I came closest to telling them
was not out of concern for them but out of one student’s
concern for me.
Tuong Nguyen had been coming
by my office since I’d first had him in my class five
years before; in fact, I’d had him twice, because he
didn’t pass the first time around. Often he came to show
me his photographs. I admired him for daring to go into photography
at a university where most students choose practical fields,
particularly his fellow Asian classmates. One day he came
to invite me to lunch, to pay me back for help I’d given
him on a term paper for another class. I was annoyed, not
so much with him, but with having to spend time “on the
job” outside my duties as a teacher. I felt trapped and
terrified that I’d never find a position more in line
with my interests as a writer. But my health, or more truthfully
my health insurance, was making it nearly impossible to leave.
When Tuong came in, he looked at me and simply asked: “You
seem so sad, all the time. Are you all right?” I’d
had to pay a therapist to ask me questions like that. Stunned,
I reverted to my classic Midwestern stoicism. “Oh, I’m
just a little tired, that’s all.” It was two more
years before I told any students or colleagues.
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Saigon, Vietnam 2003. 17-year-old
young man, HIV positive from drug use, says he would never
give up life. Unlike many other young people with HIV, he
works hard toward living, and that makes him stronger and
healthier.
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What turned me around was
the AIDS conference I attended in South Africa in 2000, where
I was invited to give a yoga workshop for people living and
working with HIV. The compassion and fearlessness of the activists
I met at the conference transformed me: I began to see myself
as part of a global movement rather than a victim. Nine months
after returning from South Africa, I sold most of my things
and took a leave of absence (without pay, but, thankfully
with health coverage). My plan was to travel and meet as many
people as I could in a year, to learn how different cultures
(including those only blocks from where I lived in Chicago)
were responding to the AIDS epidemic.
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Tuong, with his facility with
computers and photography, helped me put together my presentations,
and while doing so I told him. He was quiet and respectful,
asking me nothing. But after that he came to my office weekly,
even called me at home sometimes, to make sure I was taking
care of myself properly. And when I mentioned that I wanted
to go Southeast Asia, he insisted that I come to Vietnam at
the same time he was planning to visit his brothers with several
other members of his family.
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Saigon, Vietnam 2001.
Man does shoe repair on the street.
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By the time I’d arrived
in Vietnam, I’d been in hospices in Northern Thailand
where Buddhist monks cared for those infected and instructed
them on how to die in peace; bars in Bangkok talking with
advocates for the rights of sex workers; and clinics in south
India where a doctor with HIV himself cared for terrified
villagers who’d traveled up to hundreds of miles to see
him.
I spent the first week in
Vietnam with Tuong and his family in his brother’s house,
near the town of My Tho, in the Mekong Delta. After a decade
of separation, the family had come back together: his sister,
who did nails in downtown Chicago hotels; his brother-in-law,
who worked for Motorola in Atlanta; another brother who lived
50 yards down a dirt road from the brother they were all staying
with; and his parents, whose house was not many blocks from
my university. Two worlds merged: Children played Nintendo
on television; frog legs were frying in the kitchen; and men
drank rice wine mixed with snake blood while singing Beatles’
songs in Vietnamese. And there in the middle was the father,
a veteran of the South Vietnamese army, imprisoned after the
Vietnam War and tortured in a prison only a few miles away,
now looking as if he couldn’t quite believe that he and
his family had survived.
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Saigon, Vietnam 2003. Kids in a poor community
where over 80% of women are sex workers, and most men are
low-paid laborers, alcoholics or drug addicts.
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According to the United Nations
program on AIDS, the number of cases in Vietnam has risen
sharply since 1990, when the first case was reported, and
even though estimates are now at 150,000, (0.2 percent of
Vietnam’s adult population), the rise in drug use, sex
work, and urbanization reflects the same looming crisis that
exists in China and India.
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In Ho Chi Minh City, I asked
Tuong to accompany me into its burgeoning slums, a world he’d
never entered himself, where women prostitute themselves to
pay for rent and food, where young boys and girls work the
streets shining shoes or sifting through trash for scraps
of metal to exchange for coins. We followed a social worker
and a former sex worker into a slum along the Saigon River,
where Tuong took photographs and I listened to the social
worker, Pham Van, tell me how these women had come together
to share work and look out for their teenage daughters. Police
officers sometimes arrested the girls, blackmailing the parents
for money or pushing the girls into prostitution rings or
work camps.
On our last day, Mr. Van
took us across the city by motorbike to a meeting he had organized
for drug users with HIV. There, I sat in a circle with people
whose lives had shrunk, as had their bodies, through drug
addiction, lack of food, and HIV. Beside me sat a woman with
needle marks on her bone-thin arms, who struggled with every
inhalation. A man across the table looked almost invisible,
ashen in a cloud of his own cigarette smoke. Tuong whispered
their stories to me as they went around the table, describing
their past week. One man told us he was worried that he would
be jailed for not attending a required meeting for HIV carriers.
None of them had access to treatment, as we’d learned
the day before from a doctor who’d told us that, incredibly,
less than a hundred people in all of Vietnam had access to
antiretroviral drugs.
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Then it was my turn. I knew
Mr. Van wanted me to speak about how I’d learned to live
with HIV. But I felt that it was cruel for me to even be there,
exuding what these people couldn’t have—health and
hope. I tried. As Tuong walked around taking photos of the
group, he translated for me, describing what I was doing and
writing about. But that didn’t satisfy them—they
wanted the real story: how I’d contracted HIV, and how
I was facing the prospect of my own death.
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Saigon, Vietnam 2001.
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I grabbed hold of my chair
and stared at the floor, embarrassed and afraid of what I
had to tell them. Looking at their faces, dying people who
had become trapped in the cycle of poverty and addiction,
I knew that I had to tell them the truth.
But of course it wasn’t
me who told them. It was Tuong, a student who failed my class
and then gladly took it again. I watched as he expressed my
story, his lips quivering as he tried to explain in Vietnamese
the anger I felt when I first discovered I was HIV positive.
My words, now his, rose and fell in singsong diphthongal Vietnamese,
telling them about how I had my own problems with drugs, about
the despair that went with addiction.
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Most difficult of all for
me, and now for Tuong, too, I had to admit to them that I
had contracted the virus by having sex with another man. I
also spoke about how I used yoga and meditation to help me
feel more in charge of my health. That seemed to fascinate
them, and they began a debate about the nature of yoga. As
I listened to Tuong’s voice, I felt oddly liberated,
knowing that someone else could take the story of my own life
and tell it with perhaps more truthfulness than I could.
Last fall I returned to Chicago
and my former teaching position. And between my teaching duties,
I keep the memories of my travels fresh in my mind as I work
on a book chronicling the stories of those I met in Vietnam
and elsewhere in Asia and Africa. I struggle to keep their
faces from blurring. But Tuong continues to sharpen my gaze
with his photography and his compassion. Since his graduation
he returned to Vietnam to work with Mr. Van and photograph
the conditions of the urban poor in his country. And sadly,
while he was there, he discovered that his own nephew had
contracted HIV from drug use—a 16 year-old boy.
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Michael McColly teaches
Writing and English as a Second Language at Northeastern Illinois
University and is working on a memoir based on his travels
in countries affected by HIV/AIDS.
James Tuong Nguyen has
a degree in Fine Arts in photography and computer graphic
design from Northeastern Illinois University and is working
on a portfolio of a documentary photograph series that records
the social conditions of Vietnam’s poor. He had revisited
Vietnam and traveled to Cambodia and Korea to study Vietnamese
people working and living in those countries. He can be contacted
at tnguyen60640@yahoo.com.
Originally published in
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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