photos

it's kind of weird to do two posts at a time but i gots to put up some pictures!!

This is my family!!!! This picture was taken at the Death Anniversary of my grandmother and grandfather. In VN, there's a big family gathering to honor the memory of people who've died on the date they passed away. We end up celebrating family and life, and eating lots of food. Many of the relatives I haven't met yet. The old woman is my grandmother's sister! That's crazy. My grandmother died when I was 6, so it was a trip to meet this woman who looked a lot like her. In the pictures are my aunt, uncles, assorted cousins and their partners. The guy in the yellow shirt with glasses is my Uncle Chieu, and he used to live in the States but now has a business here. The woman in blue next to me is named Phuong. She's my cousin Ky's wife. Their daughter is the little girl. She is too cute! She's really fun and likes to jump up and down all the time and laugh. She's always hanging off her mom, so you could tell that she loves her a lot. Phuong and Ky are wonderful, genuinely nice people, always offering to go shopping with me so I don't get ripped off and shit like that. Getting ripped off is a fact of life. Taxis when they see you're a foreigner, or if it seems like you've never been to the place before, will try to rip you off either by driving around and around making the meter go up, or just by having a busted meter that goes up super fast. Then you have to be all angry, tell the driver to stop, threaten to leave, argue argue argue in a language you barely even speak, and then get back into the car. So far, three out of the last five taxis I took tried to scammed me. It wasn't a big deal in the sense I got my money back but it was just tiring. Such is life. in the grand scheme of things it's a minor annoyance in an unfairly privileged existence.

This is me, my roomate Kyla, and Loc. Loc is a university student. He's also one of Professor Thai's research assistants. Loc is really sweet and kind of dork (in the cutest, endearing way possible). He likes soft rock music, basically the ballads that my parents made me listen to growing up. It's strange...all the cheesy stuff that embarrassed me about my parents, making me think that I had particularly tacky parents, is actually pervasively popular in VN. Carpenters are still hella big, even with young people! People tell you they love Lionel Richie without an ironic bat of an eye. There was one time where we asked Loc what American music he likes, and he started singing "Tonight I Celebrate My love" by Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson, and I was able to sing along, while Kyla just looked at us in disapproval. My parents may not have passed down the ability to speak Vietnamese, but they did endow me with a cultural knowledge of cheesy soft rock from the 70's, 80's and 90's. In the end, isn't that more useful than language fluency?

This picture is from a "ladyboy" fashion show. This takes place every week at the Con Dom Cafe. It's meant to be Condom, but according to my friend, the government is not cool with that. Con Dom is a name of an insect so they're able to get away with it. Con Dom cafe is the home base for this organization called the Blue Sky Club that does HIV prevention work and safe sex education. There are three floors to this building. The first is the Cafe, like any other coffee shop, you can just chill and order drinks. The second floor is a clinic and the third floor is like an activity space. There's some gym equipment, a small library, etc. Blue Sky Club has an education peers program, people who do outreach and trainings etc. My friend, Tony, who's been helping me out a lot with my project, is an education peer and teaches English to the other peers. I've been sitting in on some of the classes. Anyways....at the Cafe, they have fun social activities, like weekly karaoke or fashion shows where they integrate safe sex education. For this Fashion Show, the contestants strutted their stuff but then also had to answer questions about HIV and stuff like that. The place was pretty packed. At least 70 people, and the place was overflowing, people were peeping out from the windows. The ladies were fierce! There were also segments where people did lipsyncing...including a wannabe boyband.