Author Archives: JeanEB

New Year Good News

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Photo Carl De Souza

Early this morning on this first day of 2018, I fired up my news feeder and the very first article I saw was this, from National Geographic. China Shuts Down Its Legal Ivory Trade. I choose to see this as a favourable omen for the coming year – good news.

As of yesterday, December 31st, all legal, government-sanctioned ivory trade in China comes to an end and licensed ivory carving factories and retailers are closed.

Photo Tyrone Siu

Although there has been an international ban on ivory trading since 1990, China continued to allow it within its borders. Most of the legal ivory trade in China was from a bulk ivory purchase in 2008 from certain African countries but this enabled illegal trade in ivory to easily make its way into the system, thus hugely contributing to the continued poaching of elephants despite any bans. China is the largest consumer of ivory and its carvings are a long-sought after luxury item, playing a major role in the annual slaughter of some 30,000 African elephants.

The ban will be accompanied by a public awareness and education campaign to highlight the plight of elephants, and to reduce demand for the ivory products by encouraging people to respect the law and to “say ‘no’ to ivory” which I hope will have greater success than other “just say no” campaigns I can recall.

 

Cookie Monster

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Every year at this time, without fail, a strange urge comes upon me. Some things are hard-wired and this appears to be one of them. An overwhelming desire to bake Christmas cookies.

This primeval urge goes back generations. In my mother’s time, when we celebrated extended family Christmases, my mother used to be the one to bring the cookies and a fine thing that was. Half a dozen different kinds, dozens and dozens of them, some from recipes that had come down from her mother’s time. A thing of beauty.

When the boys were little and Christmas was a great big deal, I used to bake too. But not for years, now, decades in fact. For years any cookies in sight came straight from the tin. Still, for some reason, fuelled no doubt by ingrained nostalgia, the desire wells up.

On the very rare years I have succumbed, the Christmas cookie thing only lasted about one batch before I abandoned it and head for the store-bought. The reality is, I’m not actually that into it, at least not enough to devote all those hours to the kitchen. But every December, guaranteed, I think about baking once again.

This year, I decided not to push away the urge and to go with it. Embrace it. Full tilt boogie. Both Boys are here for the holidays for the second year in a row (be still my heart) and lots of people will be coming by for Solstice parties and other gatherings, so I had an audience of sorts.

So I pulled out the very old card file with its yellowed, cookie dough stained pages in the handwriting of an ancestor, with faded ballpoint ink notes in the margins, the old brown mixing bowl that is over 50 years old and used to belong to my mother, put the music on and went to town. I had a blast.

 

This Christmas morning where an unusual snowy winter wonderland greets us (did I mention there is no “usual” anymore on this coastal B.C. town) I’m not sure how things could get any better. We have a full house with Two Brothers, Rosie the Dog and Dennis the Cat. Presents under the tree await and feasts lie ahead. All is well.

Wishing all my friends and family much happiness on this day and good health to all in the coming year.

Ken Burns I Love/Hate You

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Well thank goodness that’s over. The assault on my senses has ended.

In September PBS screened the latest Ken Burns documentary – Vietnam. Eighteen hours of it, aired on consecutive nights. However it took me several weeks to get through the whole thing. Every episode was a nightmare – and gave me nightmares. I needed to recover from each before I could get up the nerve to keep watching. Between episodes I would rant and curse him – “Couldn’t you have told this story in less time?” “Did you have to put in every historical film clip you could find?”

“So why did you watch it?” Well you might ask. Even as I struggled through it, I still wanted everyone to see it. I have a library of southeast Asian history books including many on the Vietnam war but the visual experience of watching hour after hour of non-stop still and film images is quite another thing from reading about it.  I learned a lot that was new to me, and telling that story visually, to reach an audience more comfortable with film than books, was quite an accomplishment although I do have to wonder how many people made it through the whole thing.

It shows what happens when American politicians, informed by their American superiority complex, feel compelled to stay the course no matter how much they know that their cause is futile, lie continuously to the people who chose them as their leaders and in doing so, directly caused the deaths of thousands and thousands of their own young men (and some women), over 50,000 of them, as well as turning on their own young people at home who were protesting their actions, killing some of them as well.

Ken Burns at some point suggests the whole tragedy was a result of misunderstanding. I don’t read it that way at all. Entering the war in the first place was completely deliberate and escalating it over all those years was all about politicians intentionally trying to save face and refusing to relinquish a vision of themselves as invincible, the greatest country on the planet and the defender of the “free” world.

Despite the 18 endless hours, the documentary still was, intentionally so, focused on the American experience of that war. What is missing are the stories of the consequences of that war on the people of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia both during the hostilities and after the Americans finally left them to their fate. In addition to the American casualties, two million Vietnamese civilians died, over a million North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong fighters and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed. After the North Vietnamese takeover 200,000 people from the south fled their homes, many to became “boat people”, desperate to escape.

It got me thinking and remembering my own brief glimpses of the aftermath of that war that were still evident on my travels decades after the fighting ended.

VIET NAM

“I hate the Americans…but I love their money”

On my first visit to Hanoi I was wandering around the city by myself getting the lay of the land, when I ended up in a park on the edge of a lake. It wasn’t the slightest surprise to me when I was accosted by a personable young entrepreneur who did his very best to sell me a guidebook I had zero need of. I told him he was wasting his time and should move on to someone he could make some money from but he didn’t. So we had a chat. He told me about the education system in Viet Nam (he was a student) and towards the end of our conversation he dropped the facade a bit. We talked about tourism in Hanoi. He knew I was Canadian and said that he actually hated the Americans, this from a young man born well after the war ended. But he said he liked their money.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that was how I was being viewed because after all, short of sewing a Canadian flag on my sleeve, how would anyone know what North American country I came from and would that even matter. I found an edge to the Vietnamese I met during my travels that I didn’t see in neighbouring Laos or Cambodia.

It is possible in Hanoi to do the “American War” circuit. You can visit dedicated war museums and see the wreckage of shot down U.S. fighter planes. Elsewhere in the country you can climb into underground Viet Cong tunnels, find a guide to traipse around old battlegrounds with and visit memorials to the fallen. I did none of that. Other than stopping in front of what remains of the “Hanoi Hilton”, the POW prison that McCain and others were held in, just down the road from the hotel, I didn’t spend my time doing that circuit but where I did find the war was from hanging out at the National Art Gallery on several occasions. It was from the artists where I began to glimpse the lives of the Vietnamese and understand the impact that so many decades of continuous war, first with the French and then with the Americans and South Vietnamese army, had had on the Vietnamese people. Artists painting their lives showed the continuous thread of war and soldiers and I spent hours peering at those images. Look closely at a forest landscape and you’ll find a hidden army field hospital in the bush, or soldiers walking single file through a jungle pathway. Images of village life show a visiting soldier, on leave with his family or about to head out.

 

Nguyen Trung – Portrait of a Soldier – Oil Painting

 

Thai Ha – In the Mangrove Swamp – Lacquer Etching

 

Dang Thi Khue – Capture of American Pilot – Oil Painting

Nguyen Phu Cuong – Memorial – Bronze

The art museum is in an old French colonial building, with large open windows and a sleepy atmosphere. Most of the time I had the place to myself. Posted signs said photography was forbidden and closed circuit video cameras were in place. I looked around. The guard was sitting at an old steel desk just outside the gallery room, knitting, and I found it very hard to believe that someone was actually watching me through some kind of CCTV set up I could see no evidence of. I pulled out my camera and went for it. I did not get arrested.

LAOS – THE SECRET WAR

Ken Burns doesn’t explore this at all, other than a few brief mentions, but during the Vietnam War the Americans engaged in a “secret” war in neighbouring Laos (and Cambodia) in part to try to get at the supply roads and trails, but also to directly support one side of the Lao civil war going on at the time. The term “secret” is an interesting one. It meant that the U.S. President was lying to the American people, trying to keep from them the fact that the military had crossed the borders and expanded the war. It was certainly no secret from the Lao people as they were definitely aware that they were being bombed every single day for years. Two million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos during all this “secrecy”, 30% of which did not immediately explode, leaving the area with an estimated 78 million pieces of unexploded ordinance – bombs just waiting to detonate, which has seriously impacted the Lao people all these many decades later.

On one of my trips to Laos, Kelly and I flew up to the north to visit the Plain of Jars, a place of ancient huge carved stone jars that no one knows who made them or for what purpose. This area was ground zero during this ‘secret’ war.  Looking out the window of the plane as we approached the Xieng Zhuang airport, still visible are a great many large circular depressions in the earth below. Forty years later, the land still bears the scars. Swimming pools, joked our young guide.

Remnants of that war are everywhere. Scrap metal bombs were piled in town yards, are used as building materials to prop up houses, and even herb gardens can be seen planted in bomb casings. All these years later dozens of people, many of them children, are still injured and killed every year. Clearing the land of the unexploded ordinance is ongoing and we saw the UXO clearing vehicles parked along the road, working in fields just meters from the road. At the Jars sites, we were warned to stay on the marked paths and not to wander.

The bombing of Xieng Khuong province wiped out just about every town and village in the area, leaving many of the people to seek refuge in caves where some lived for years. We visited a site called Tham Piu where a memorial has been erected to honor the 400 people who were wiped out one day by a single rocket fired directly into the mouth of the cave by a U.S. fighter plane.

Our guide paying respects at a shrine at the mouth of the bombed cave

 

Winston Churchill (quoting George Santayana) said “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. There’s very little evidence that we ever learn from history. Just look around at what’s going on now.

The Face of War – Salvador Dali