I spent the afternoon with friends at Hanoi’s Museum of Ethnology.
More specifically we enjoyed a pinic in the grounds. Eventually however the echo laden sound system kicked in and the nearby water puppets show started.
I left before it ended and, walking away, this tickled me – the water puppets lined up “back stage” ready for their big entrance.
More pics of my afternoon here.
It’s early days for the revisited version of this blog.
But already there’s a pattern that I can quite easily fall into.
First off there’s the “I love Hanoi” stuff. I used to think a real blogging “no no” was whinging – however I am increasingly aware that the overly happy stuff can grate too.
Secondly, on the flip side, I can become a bit of an attack dog when it comes to those that abuse this city. I am sure that it’s probably not an entirely pleasant trait.
However…
On the week that the Huff Post named Hanoi in its top ten winter destinations saying it’s “warm and dry” (it’s actually pretty cold and quite often damp) – it follows it up with this bollocks by twenty-two year old Julia Plevin
On her Twitter bio Julia compares herself to Carrie Bradshaw. The whole thing certainly reads like a Sarah Jessica Parker Sex and the City monologue
I am absolutely sure that 16 years ago, when I was 22, I wrote equally inane crap. I am sure, at times, I still do.
But why is the Huff Post printing it?
I’ll post only this snippet and let you dissect the rest yourself.
Recently I had a Vietnamese kitsch themed birthday party where everyone had to dress in kitsch.
***
…I tried to explain the kitsch theme to my Vietnamese friend. Even though this friend is as stylish as can be and does not dress like other women in Hanoi, she has always lived in Vietnam so it is hard to understand a party theme that is actually cultural commentary. To make this already complicated concept more confusing she is not perfectly fluent in English.
It’s tempting to take those snippets apart but you really don’t need me to do that. There’s a whole lot more besides.
The piece is actually an edited version of a post on Julia’s blog. At the end she writes:
Thanks for the birthday wishes from all my fans and loyal readers!
There are no comments.
Update:
After pressing publish it occured to me that I surely couldn’t be the only person to be squirming at Ms Plevin’s Hanoi huffing.
It turns out I am not (this refers to an earlier JP HP piece) :
In the Huffington Post, Julia Plevin ‘09 pens an almost stunningly naive piece about how giddy she is to be experiencing everyday life in Vietnam. With the simultaneously uninformed and slightly condescending tone of a Dartmouth freshman writing about their first foray into a fraternity basement, the wide-eyed Plevin remarks on how cheap, quaint, and no-longer-war-torn Vietnam is.
Her special-interest piece is without any argument and would be better suited for the depths of the Dartmouth Mirror than the HuffPo. Even her opener about her inability to find a conventional internship falls flat and petty outside of a Dartmouth readership. College students have a bad enough reputation for being annoyingly ignorant about the world as it is. We don’t need any help.
(She writes:) “It is apparent that Vietnamese people are tough and resourceful. When an American friend mentioned that he lost in tennis to his Vietnamese opponent even though the American had all the right gear and the big forehand, I joked casually that that was just like the war, when the Americans, for all their learned skills and equipment, could not overcome the Vietnamese.
“While I was able to casually joke, I know there are some people for whom the war here is still so real. I respect both Americans and Vietnamese who had hard war experiences and I am grateful that I can be part of this new generation that has lost sight of the war and wants to form friendships and alliances.”
Ugh.
