This was Vietnam about three years ago and we were sitting down in some roadside café trying to choke down one of those sickly Vietnamese coffees that are part-coffee, part-sweetened condensed milk.
Two dogs had become stuck after the act of coitus and twisted around so they were facing away from each other. We became aware of their presence because the male dog would begin a god awful caterwauling each time the bitch tried to extricate herself from his twisted bollocks.
And I was trying to explain to the two Australian bigots in my tour group why what we saw last night was not so unusual. We had been driving to Nha Trang for most of the afternoon. The previous night the coast had been hit by storms and there was some water damage.
Out of the window of the bus we saw two men cleaning up the muck, mud coated by a layer of natron-like white, with a shovel. One man would toss a shovelful of this mud off the road and the second man would help with the return sweep by way of a rope that was tied to the shovel where the head met the shaft.
Upon seeing this admittedly unusual work practice one of the bigots called everyone over so that they could laugh at these two Vietnamese blokes just getting on with the task of clearing up the road so that WE could pass through safely.
I studied exercise science, he said, and I can tell you right now that there is absolutely no benefit to working a shovel like that. And I did physics, too.Tired of his incessant comments on everything that wasn’t to his satisfaction and his po-faced demands to be taken to a whorehouse or an opium den, I decided to argue. It was a very simple strategy I would hit them with, a they wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t worth their while. That’s not how people are. That’s not how they do things.
Rubbish! he said, at my university we do lots of shit for no reason.Case in point, I argued... and in my own head I tried to unpack the levels of ignorance and racism that confronted me.Written on Tuesday, 15 January 2013