tindang

[tindang]

Nico!

3/28/21- It's been a week out from my visit to the emergency department at MGH. Blisters have formed since then, flowering from the red/brown patch of skin on my left thigh, where I had spilled boiling water in a terrible accident. I was in a lot of pain yesterday, but I woke up today to shrunken blisters and pruritus in-and-around the area. I'm sad to miss Palm Sunday mass and to have spent the whole weekend room bound. I've been trying to find some positives, but life has not been too kind lately. I'm back in a state of rollercoaster emotions and I'm waiting to get off.

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4/5/21 - Deviating from the Ideal: U.S. Migration Policies in the Context of Rawlsian Principles of Justice

In "Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders", the philosopher Joseph Carens begins his argumentation with the following epigraph:

Many poor and oppressed people wish to leave their countries of origin in the third world to come to affluent Western societies...[and] there is little justification for keeping them out.

He goes on to examine three distinctive political theories--Nozickean, Rawlsian, and utilitarianism--and applies them to the issue of immigration. Though distinct, Carens finds that all three approaches evince the moral failures of militarizing borders and restricting the movement of peoples, suggesting that a world without borders is one that respects the idea of moral equality. 

I found Carens's Rawlsian argument most compelling, insofar as it goes furthest in laying the framework for thinking about this issue transnationally. He does this in two ways: first, by arguing that people in Rawls’s “original position”--a tabula rasa -esque scenario in which people first come together to decide how they wish to be governed--would consent to principles of equal liberty and social redistribution if cloaked under a “veil of ignorance” that erases distinctions like race, class, sex, and most pointedly, national origin; and second, by refuting objections to the application of the Rawlsian veil to global contexts (Rawls had only intended for the original position to apply to certain societies with a “particular understanding of moral personality”, not all). 

I posit that the analytical power of Rawl’s original position, as it is applied to transnational affairs, comes from the tensions inherent in upholding principles of equal liberty in real-world settings. Of course, Rawls had predicted such conflict, and sought to address it by drawing distinctions between ideal and non-ideal theory: in ideal theory one assumes that people will abide by the principles chosen in the original position, even after the “veil of ignorance” is lifted; in nonideal theory, one considers the historical and human behavioral challenges of staying true to original-position precepts, which is more reflective of everyday problems and situations. I believe that these tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory serve as useful tools for critiquing restrictive U.S. migration policies. By exploring the deviations from ideal theory--in the context of U.S/Mexico border policies--towards the practicalities of non-ideal praxis, I hope to reify my understanding of border issues and justify (to myself) Carens’s conclusion, that there is little justification for restricting immigration.  

It is no surprise that current U.S. immigration and border policies fall far from the ideals of liberty envisioned in the original position. The question has always been how did we get here? The answer most likely predates any explanation that the Enlightenment might afford us, lying deep in the consequences of American settler colonialism and chattel slavery. Though I acknowledge this history and its foundational impact on modern American society, let me first flesh out my understanding of the gradual legal push away from ideal theory--while remaining always fully aware that the law is but one avenue through which principles of white supremacy and racism are encoded. If we are to then start with the legal perspective for answering the question posed above, we might begin with the Supreme Court’s decision in the Chinese Exclusion Case (1889), which contains the nation’s very first declaration of national sovereignty over immigration and vested Congress with plenary power over such matters. Sarah Song, a law professor at UC Berkeley, traces the philosophical tradition undergirding this decision to ideas espoused by Swiss author Emer de Vattel, whose Les droit des gens (The Law of Nations, 1758) outlined the parameters of sovereignty in the case of international law. Vattel writes:

The sovereign may forbid the entrance of his territory either to foreigners in general, or in particular cases, or to certain persons, or for certain particular purposes, according as they may think it advantageous to the state. There is nothing in all this, that does not flow from the rights of domain and sovereignty.

In staking this claim, Vattel followed already established notions of the state as being like a “moral person,” first laid out by German jurist/philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf, and later further developed by German author Christian Wolff. This personification of the state sanctions it with “an understanding and a will of which it makes use for the conduct of its affairs”, namely, as Vattel reasoned, in the interest of its self-preservation and self-perfection. It’s worth noting that Vattel understood that this self-interest deviated from the ethos of being a “moral person”, which if taken to its logical conclusion with regards to the idea of “moral state(s)”, would result in a “universal republic” in which “a real friendship [would] be seen to reign among them” (II.12). Here, it is not lost on me that this utopian conclusion mirrors the conditions of Joseph Carens’s ideal theory--that is, a global community void of hierarchical distinctions. In this sense, Vattel’s swing towards non-ideal realism, defined by state self-interest, may be at the heart of today’s polemics over immigration.

Indeed, I believe this is so. Public anxiety re the economic burden of migrants on American social institutions and fair wage have led to communitarian objections to increased migration from both conservatives and social democrats--while attending a protest against the Trump administration in 2017, I fondly remember standing next to a supposed feminist who, while rallying against the now former president, also expressed a resolute “no” when the crowd began reciting “Immigrants are welcome here.” The fixation on self-preservation may explain far-right popularization of terms like “chain migration” in lieu of “family reunification,” and the 2019 revision of the public charge rule which would have expanded the definition of being a “public charge,” and would have thus restricted poorer immigrants from either being admitted into the U.S. or attaining Legal Permanent Resident status. And, not surprisingly, today’s fears were enshrined in law vis-à-vis other, past Court decisions that occurred soon after that seminal 1889 case: in Nishimura Ekiu v. United States (1892) and Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the Supreme Court again expanded the U.S. government’s power over immigration, citing further elaborations of Vattel’s theory of sovereignty (Song 2017); within the latter decision, these two passages from The Law of Nations are cited in their entirety:

Every nation has a right to refuse admitting a foreigner into her territory, when he cannot enter it without exposing the nation to evident danger, or doing her a manifest injury. What she owes to herself, the care of her own safety, gives her this right; and in virtue of her natural liberty, it belongs to the nation to judge, whether her circumstances will or will not justify the admission of that foreigner. (I.230)

Thus also it has a right to send [asylees] elsewhere, if it has just cause to fear that they will corrupt the manners of the citizens, that they will create religious disturbances, or occasion any other disorder, contrary to the public safety. In a word, it has a right, and is even obliged, to follow, in this respect, the suggestions of prudence. (I.231)

In other words, the state, by virtue of its personhood and the rights accorded to moral persons, has the right to exclude those it deems dangerous to its self-interest. As many scholars have pointed out, the right to exclude is essentially a property right; and the commensuration of individual property rights to collective, state territorial rights has been the source of much debate (See Carens’s Nozickean argument for open borders).

All this is to say that the principles of state sovereignty that underlie American immigration policy were founded under non-ideal theory conditions, which privilege human interest over ideal theory egalitarianism. The effect of this philosophical turn cannot be overstated; because while it is one thing to erect borders and deny access in the name of self-interest, it is another to punish those seeking opportunity and/or asylum for similar reasons. 

To explain today’s punitive approach to immigration, it is incumbent on me to outline another ideal to non-ideal theory transition: This time, I mark as my starting point the Bracero Accord, a U.S./Mexico bilateral program that, between 1942-1964, facilitated over 4.5 million temporary labor contracts to male Mexican workers in an effort to redress previous, depression-era deportations of Mexican-American citizens and to address labor shortages that appeared during and after World War II. Though imperfect (the program was ultimately deemed exploitive), this bracero initiative may have came closest in realizing the tenets of justice that ideal theory conceptualized, formalizing (now questionable) protocols for far pay and anti-discrimination; that is, in setting aside the dehumanizing experience that braceros encountered, we might think of the legal protections granted to these workers, and the imperative that the U.S. government showed in trying to repair its relationship with Mexico, as a promise towards an ideal--a quasi- “veil of ignorance” that ended up being unrealistic, ineffective, and violent. So, it might be here within the context of the hopes of the Bracero Accord and the porous border through which hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers made their way each year that we locate our ideal beginning.

From this point, the rapid progression towards non-ideal theory, which again takes into account the “historical obstacles and the unjust actions of others” that seek to undermine liberty and justice, paradoxically began during the civil rights era of the 1960s, when a) the termination of the Bracero Program and b) amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act effectively ended the legal and cyclical migration patterns of years past. Princeton sociologist Douglass Massey summarizes:

Whereas in the late 1950s, some 450,000 Mexicans had entered the United States each year as Braceros and 50,000 as permanent residents, by the late 1970s the Bracero Program was gone and legal visas were capped at 20,000 (Massey 2014)

A closed door, however, does not mean a locked one; notwithstanding new restrictions on migration, former braceros continued their northward journey through unauthorized channels, paving the way for what has become considered “illegal” migration. In his article, Massey provides this useful figure, which takes data from DHS to assess Mexican migration to the U.S. in the three categories shown below:

The noticeable inverse between trends in temporary labor migration and unauthorized migration (measured by the annual number of apprehensions divided by the number of Border Patrol officers, expressed per thousand) in 1964 reveals the unspeakable harms of supposedly benevolent updates to U.S. immigration policy. Despite the tapering of unauthorized migration since 1986, shown above, the wide-ranging consequences of the 1964 recategorizing of what were once “legal” guest workers to now “illegal” trespassers on the political, social, and individual levels of society deserves pause and reflection. 

At the broad level of the body politic, the rising number of annual border apprehensions in the mid-1960s effectuated closer federal scrutiny of the border. At the behest of political racketeers, members of the U.S. Border Patrol, and a changing landscape of public opinion surrounding undocumented migration, Congress enacted a litany of measures that further restricted entry: 1986′s Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), while granting amnesty and Legal Permanent Resident status to 2.7 million former undocumented migrants--subject to conditions of learning English and seeking citizenship--criminalized undocumented hiring and signed off the first of a series of significant increases in appropriations for the Border Patrol; 1994′s Operation Gatekeeper militarized the busiest border sector in San Diegos (See also ‘prevention through deterrence�� strategy); 2001′s PATRIOT Act made it easier for the government to employ immigration rules to detain or deport non-citizens without resort to the lengthy procedural regulations of the criminal justice system (Akram 2006). Juliet Stumpf and others have mapped these measures to a phenomenon they call “crimmigration,” which describes the American merger of criminal and immigration law that has happened since 1875 when the first federal statute was passed to restrict immigration of Chinese women. Since then, Stumpf writes, “the relationship between immigration and criminal law has evolved from merely excluding foreigners who had committed past crimes to the present when many immigration violations are themselves defined as criminal offenses and many crimes result in deportation” (Stumpf 2006). Indeed, today, immigration prosecutions outnumber all other types of federal criminal prosecutions, including prosecutions for drugs and public order violations (See “Prosecution/Courts”).

Interwoven into the political and structural realignments of U.S. migration policy during this time was the effect that legal/illegal discursive shifts had on White Americans. As politicians seized on the expediency of showing strength against the "Mexican Menace” and “alien invasion”, and as journalists found success in characterizing undocumented border crossers as “illegals” set out to “inundate” American society and “swamp” its culture (Chavez 2001), it becomes easy to imagine the kind of social re-engineering that must have taken place: As Mae Ngai reminds us in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Mexicans were once considered legally white and enjoyed migratory privileges not afforded to Asian migrants (Ngai, 38, 2004); but, as UMASS-Amherst professor Moon-Kie Jung might say, racial differentiation happens when people come to hold schemas for “separating human populations by some notion of stock or collective heredity of traits” (Jung, 64, 2006). Viewed in the light of American genocide, slavery, colonialism and imperialism, the racialization of Mexicans based on notions of in/exclusion was par for the course. We might find then, within the border debates of the mid to late twentieth century, the seed of today’s social animus towards Latinx migrants, which has encouraged bias in enforcement of immigration law and (most likely) inspired Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (Read more about state/federal collaboration and interdependency when it comes to developing and enforcing immigration law in Judith Resnick’s “Bordering by Law”).

The human impact of these policy adjustments should not be forgotten, nor go unnoticed. For it is at the individual--and for some of my friends with undocumented parents, personal--level that federal immigration policies harm. This case is explicitly made in Jason de León’s The Land of Open Graves, which lays the blame for migrant deaths along the border squarely in the hands of the U.S. government. It is described in this podcast during which a university student talks about her experience growing up living in fear that her parents could be deported at any moment; and again, in the harrowing stories that undocumented child migrants have told, as documented by Valeria Luiselli in Tell Me How It Ends; and perhaps, more recently, in the iconic image of Yanela, the 1-year-old Honduran girl, who was captured crying for her detained mother. Between these examples, one thing is clear: U.S. immigration policies violate, if not the ideals of moral equality that America was founded on, then international human rights.

De Leon writes: “The benefit of the chronological distance from the pain and suffering of past migrations is that many Americans today have no problem putting nationality before humanity” (Leon, 26, 2015). In this blog post/essay, I make the case that this antipathy for life, or explicitly for the life of Others, has as much to do with historical myopia as it underlines the principles of self-interest that lie behind our legal and social interpretations. When people hear that undocumented migrant children are being separated from their families yet still defend the action as just since “They came into our country illegally,” I see this perverse rationalization as but a product of self-preservation. Mae Ngai has spoken about the consequences of normalizing such principles of sovereignty in immigration affairs, suggesting that it “generates the view that immigration is a zero-sum game among competitive nation-states” (Ngai 2004). Not only does this view fuel anti-immigrant resentment, it discourages us from seeing the moral worth of our neighbors and prevents us from coming together to form humane and bilateral coalitions for tackling transnational problems. 

Against the backdrop of U.S. human rights violation, and the radical transition away from the conceptions of justice laid out in Rawls’s original position, I remain cautiously hopeful that there will come a day when justice will be served. It might not happen during my lifetime, but I’ll be on the vanguard of this fight. 

[tindang]

Nuestro coche, después de un accidente al Publix delante del lugar de trabajo de mamá (11/02/2021)

2 de marzo de 2021 - Una gramática diferente

Hola, ha sido mucho tiempo desde mi último apunte aquí. Pero, empezando a partir del principio de este año, he tenido la oportunidad para relajar y reflexionar sobre logros recientes - entregué todas de mis solicitudes a las escuelas médicas al fin del año pasado, aprendí que soy semifinalista de Fulbright hace cuatro semanas, y, durante estas semanas pasadas, hice buenas observaciones en mis juntas de trabajo. Desde luego, todo esto con ocho rechazos escolares en el fondo. Estoy preocupado sobre mi futuro, pero, como dice Marta, mi amiga colombiana del trabajo: más vives, más opciones vas a tener - o, algo similar. Entonces, en ese espíritu, intentaré dejar de preocuparme con mis fallas percibidas, zambullirme totalmente en mis logros presentes y pensar más sobre la constelación de opciones que sé que tengo.

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Respuesta a “Breaking the inverse care law”, publicado por El Lancet Global Health.

Otro día, recibí un correo electrónico con este editorial sobre la “ley de cuido inverso”, propugnada por Julian Tudor Hart, un médico inglés, en 1971. De acuerdo con sus autores, la ley, que dice que la disponibilidad de buen servicio médico varia inversamente con la necesidad de la población atendida, está vinculada con la riqueza; paradójicamente, los más ricos tienen la menor carga de enfermedad así como el mejor acceso a los servicios médicos. Los autores concluyen que esta ley “estaba hecha para ser rota.” Pero, en esta declaración, ellos emplean una tendencia normativa, común en el ámbito de medicina--la exclusión de la responsabilidad en la construcción de desigualdad: ¿quién crea esta ley “hecha”?, ¿quién se encarga de su efecto?, y ¿a quién experimenta sus consecuencias?

Esta exclusión se refleja en el tipo de gramática que rodea las ciencias. De la secundaria a la universidad, nos entrenamos usar la voz pasiva para explicar nuestra interacción con el mundo natural; en esto, se florecen opciones gramáticas como “la agua fue hervido” en vez de “herví la agua”--el protagonista, su mano, se desaparece. Por un lado, la gramática, aquí, sigue un parámetro del método científico: la abstracción de la figura principal para lo universal, quién podría obtener los mismos resultados siguiendo los mismos pasos; por otro lado, esconde la responsabilidad por la omisión de la figura responsable para la acción. Este convencionalismo no debería ser tomado levemente. Como dicen Lukin et al. en “Reporting war: Grammar as ‘covert operation’”, la gramática es “la herramienta principal por la que cubrimos las complejidades del pasado y el previsto futuro.” En la misma manera en que puede “construir nuestra experiencia de la realidad” de guerra, puede influir la realidad de salud y enfermedad. 

Entonces, cuando el editorial menciona que “los migrantes indocumentados y los refugiados están entre las personas con más riesgo de contraer SARS-CoV-2 debido a condiciones de viva y trabajo que hacen imposible evitar el virus”, pienso sobre cómo actúa la gramática en esta declaración para extirpar la posibilidad de que existan actores físicos que tengan culpa en la creación o reproducción de estas condiciones. Este uso de gramática me molesta mucho, porque lo veo como una manera por la que los catedráticos científicos han reforzado el dualismo cartesiano--la idea de que están separados el cuerpo y la mente. Es decir, tal como faltamos un vocabulario preciso para describir las interacciones entre la mente, el cuerpo y la sociedad (Scheper-Hughes, 1987), también animamos esta imprecisión a través de nuestras opciones gramáticas científicas. Creo que al cambiar los patrones en que pensamos, hablamos y escribimos sobre cuestiones de desigualdad en salud--las que pasan por varios niveles y ámbitos de sociedad colectiva--podamos asignar responsabilidad más efectivamente y desarrollar nuevos métodos para identificar las causas de los problemas de salud y formar soluciones contra ellas.

[tindang]

Snapchatting on my way to Boston Logan.

4/23/20 - Day Break

Last Saturday, from 2 to 5am, I drove from Clearwater to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport. Work wanted me back in Boston. They’re expecting everyone to be at their desks, sipping on coffee, making small talk, rubbing their aching backs within two weeks. I doubt it’ll happen, but I like having a job during this pandemic and want to keep it.

The drive was mesmerizing. Cruising at 80mph, I passed by St. Petersburg, then Sarasota, Fort Myers, and North Naples, before jetting cross-state towards the Eastern seaboard. It was dark driving through inner Florida; the kind of darkness in which I couldn’t help but imagine running out of gas and being stranded in oblivion, lost to posterity, or swerving and somersaulting down a hill to avoid a peripheral deer. Both thoughts sent shivers. Does Florida even have deers?

I started reading Vietnamese with my mom again while I was home and have continued it thus far back in Boston. Yesterday, we read about Sunita Devi and her 4 children. Part of India’s working class, the family lived off of the $73/month Sunita made cleaning homes. One can imagine what has happened to the family in this era of Covid-19. I pray for them and hope that Modi steps up the government’s assistance programs so that India’s vulnerable may survive the coming weeks.

In the U.S., SARS-CoV-2 has invigorated racism against Asian Americans. David S. Jones, a professor at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, suggests that this violence is part and parcel to how societies make sense of epidemics. In the New England Journal of Medicine, Jones writes:

“One dramatic aspect of epidemic response is the desire to assign responsibility. From Jews in medieval Europe to meat mongers in Chinese markets, someone is always blamed.”

This remark gives bearing to the intractable nature of social division in times of crisis. It begs us to imagine a different history, one in which all countries, all peoples, can come together, hold hands, and sit down to tackle the problem as one. Is this history possible? I think that Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient offers a compelling response. The story highlights four lives--Hana, Caravaggio, Kip, and Almásy--housed under the same crumbling roof of the Villa San Girolamo. Each character is damaged in some way as a result of a war that had just ended--Hana, the loss of her father; Caravaggio, the loss of his thumbs; and Kip, the loss of Lord Suffolk. In a time of repatriation, negotiation, and reconstruction, their existence together represents not only an attempt at healing but also an experiment in reaching past race/nationality to create a new pluralistic identity. 

Such an identity would have the capacity to engineer a world free from racial violence. In the novel, this world is made possible through a kind of place-making that works to dissolve and precipitate constructs of identity. The Villa, for example, functions as a receptacle for “the remnants of war societies” (92). Pockmarked, soiled, emptied, and burnt to ruin, with “little demarcation between house and landscape”, the Villa is open, literally, to any one who wishes to store their fractured selves (43). It’s a privileged space made for innovation, for recreating oneself anew. In this way, the Villa acts as a simulacrum of the desert, which Ondaatje invokes to describe a place outside of nation where one can chart new paths of being. Indeed, for Almásy, the desert was where he not only “became nationless” (138) but where he could be “his own invention” (246).  

While place dictates the situational circumstance through which identity is reformed, it is the love, friendship, and community within the Villa that provides the energy for this process to occur. Manav Ratti notes in The Postsecular Imagination that Odaantje makes use of aesthetic tropes to frame such relations between his characters. Ratti states, “the aesthetic imagining of another world, rich in pleasant sights, smells, sounds--enables the affirmation of friendship and affect, especially between individuals with marked differences.” Aestheticization, which describes the attachment of value to the sensory experience of objects or events (Sharman 178), is thus a catalyst for tolerance and understanding between the Villa’s inhabitants who differ by race and nationality. Ratti points to one passage that instrumentalizes this use of aestheticization; Almásy states:

“It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s mortality. I think when I see him [Kip] at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David” (116)

Here--and I admit that I am paraphrasing Ratti’s line of thinking--Almásy calls forth the image of David with the Head of Goliath to establish some basis of commonality between Kip and himself. Hence, this passage serves to underscore a relationship between two characters who share few lines of common history. 

Though Ondaatje spends considerable time building up this utopia-on-a-hill, it comes quickly undone in the wake of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Upon learning of these incidents, Kip confronts Almásy and asks, “How did you fool us into this?” (283). In this encounter, Kip rejects the life he’s led for the last few years, and “[leaves] the three of them [Hana, Caravaggio, Almásy] to their world” (286). “Their” world is one without distinction, whereas “ours” consists of lines that separate Japan from America, India from England, of nation, citizenship, and the other. I’m not sure whether, with this ending, Ondaatje hints at the impossibility of different people coming together to radically effect change, but he certainly leaves us with a schema for imagining this alternate reality.

I want to stop writing because I have to study but it is interesting to see the parallels and dissimilarities between The English Patient and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. The latter tells of twins, Marion and Shiva, who grow up in post-World War II Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, born to an Indian nun who dies giving birth and an English doctor who abandons them at birth. Like the Villa San Girolamo, Missing Hospital, where much of the story takes place, is situated at the end of the same war and exists as a privileged space; descriptively, it sits upon a “verdant rise” and was built to resemble “Eden before the Fall”; functionally, it serves a plurality of local residents and caters to members of the Emperor’s family and other high-ranking government officials. However, unlike the Villa, Missing experiences bouts of violence that stem from political conflict. This is where Verghese’s narrative departs from that of Ondaatje’s. Cutting for Stone is as much about love, friendship, and community as it is about the real-life violence that holds sway over these relations; it is politics that poisons Marion’s love for Genet, and it is the political economy that harms the patients that Marion attends to during his time in America.

In short, this story too does not offer us much hope for a united front against Covid-19 or any future cataclysm. If anything it strays further from this prospect. Verghese relays this message early in the text; Marion, who writes this story as the omniscient narrator, claims:

“Born in Africa, living in exile in America, then returning at last to Africa, I am proof that geography is destiny. Destiny has brought me back to the precise coordinates of my birth, to the very same operating theater where I was born” (10)

Without 600-pages of context, we are left blind to the meaning behind these words. But, from the outset, we are introduced to the fatalism that underlies Marion’s recollection of history. This kind of fatalism that embeds itself within a geography considers global unity a childish ideal. From here I ask, what is the alternative? Perhaps Verghese addresses this in the text, somewhere, but for now I am tired and do not want to write anymore. 

[tindang]

Memo 2: Fluids

From The Lighthouse (2019).

4/06/20

Today, I learned about fluid dynamics. As with all motion, fluids move in response to a force. In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton inferred that ocean tides were a product of the gravitational attraction between Earth and Moon. This attraction generates a gravitational force that stirs the ocean surface. Where there is force and motion, there is energy (W=Fdcosθ). And where there is energy, there is conservation (W = ∆KE). For fluid dynamics, the classic total mechanical energy formula (KE + PE = KE + PE) is transformed into Bernoulli’s equation:

:::::::point a::::::: P + ½ ρv2 + ρgh = P + ½ ρv2 + ρgh :::::::point b:::::::

where at a given point, P is the pressure,  ½ ρ v2 represents the dynamic or kinetic pressure, and ρgh is the static or potential pressure. The equation applies only to ideal fluid flow--that is, fluids that are incompressible and exhibit laminar flow (low viscosity). These conditions are often met in pipe systems. 

Notice how ½ ρv2 is similar to the equation for kinetic energy and ρgh is like that for potential energy. This is a clue that the math works the same way as that for calculating total mechanical energy! So, if a fluid is moving through a perfectly horizontal pipe system (i.e. h = 0), there will be no change in potential energy (P + ½ ρv2 + ρgh = P + ½ ρv2 + ρgh); if a fluid is not moving at all (v = 0) in a horizontal pipe system, (P + ½ ρv2 + ρgh = P + ½ ρv2 + ρgh) --> P = P, and thus pressure/energy is conserved.

Bernoulli’s equation explains the Venturi effect, whereby fluids that flow into a narrow passage experience an increase in velocity that forces a drop in pressure around that tightened area. In a horizontal system, P + ½ ρv2 = P + ½ ρv2 , an increase in velocity will cause an inverse decrease in P in order to maintain conservation. According to The Princeton Review, this effect explains why extremely high winds that skirt along a rooftop, from a hurricane for example, can reduce the outside air pressure so much that the air pressure inside the house can be great enough to blow the roof off.

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On a less stressful note, this past weekend I finally saw The Lighthouse with Mom. I really liked the movie. Robert Eggers did a great job. Thomas’s curse upon Winslow--

“Hark, Triton, hark!  Below, bid our father the sea king, rise from the depths, full fowled in his fury.  Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime...A bulging blackguard no more, but a blasted bloody film, now a nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to pick, and claw, and feed upon, only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the dread emperor himself”

--and that final scene! 

I can’t wait to see his future work.

[tindang]

Sunset stroll through Tufts University.

3/25/20 - Social Environment, Fragmentation, and Illness

I’m home in Florida, quarantined. Pinellas County issued a 7-day stay-at-home order that will take effect tomorrow at noon. Covid-19 has slowed life down, and I’m grateful for it. While I empathize with the millions–billions–affected by the pandemic, I am happy for the change in pace. It’s given me time to breath, time to escape impending burnout, time to cook with my family. It’s helped some of my friends re-orient themselves after months of constant work.

I wanted to use this free time to condense my thoughts around some readings before I take a long break from writing to prepare for my MCAT exam. A few weeks ago, I finished a slew of articles that looked at whether neighborhood characteristics could predict health outcomes. Though the literature remains inconclusive, some studies have provided at least provisional hypotheses for how this might occur. Ingrid Ellen, an urban policy and planning professor at NYU, ran a meta-analysis that suggests neighborhoods may influence health in two ways: first, through short-term influences on behaviors, attitudes, and health-care utilization, which would then affect responses to certain health conditions; and second, through a longer-term process of “weathering”, by which accumulated stress, economic deprivation, and low environmental quality, over time, erodes the health of residents. 

Both short-term and long-term influences are recorded in various multi-level analyses that filter out individual-level effects (i.e. are health outcomes related to neighborhood or the kinds of people living in these neighborhoods) from those at the neighborhood level. One study in England found that people living in electoral wards with higher economic deprivation were more likely to smoke than those living in less deprived areas, after controlling for individual-level socioeconomic status. Another looked at data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program in Boston and found that families–parents and children–who received assistance in relocating from a high to low-poverty neighborhood experienced psychological benefits from the move. Such cognitive benefits might then be a modifier for the program’s downstream economic benefits that Raj Chetty and others at Harvard identified. In his seminal paper, Chetty emphasizes how children newly exposed to low-poverty neighborhoods through the MTO program had better college attendance and earnings later in life; and how these benefits decrease proportionately to the age of the child at the time she moved, suggesting an exposure effect. Chetty’s findings adumbrate a kind of “anti-weathering” process that counters neighborhood “weathering”; a process by which accumulated social, economic, and environmental capital, over time, produces tangible benefits that might then promote better health behaviors and attitudes.

Healthy neighborhoods are defined by a variety of statistics–on morbidity and mortality, greenness, income, etc. Much less attention is paid to the degree of community within a neighborhood and its influence on health. To what extent do intra-community bonds affect health? In Evicted, Matthew Desmond narrates stories of eviction in Milwaukee, WI and evokes Jane Jacobs in answering: 

“A single eviction could destabilize multiple city blocks, not only the block from which a family was evicted but also the block to which it begrudgingly relocated. In this way, displacement contributed directly to what Jacobs called ‘perpetual slums,’ churning environments with high rates of turnover and even higher rates of resentment and disinvestment.” (70)

Evictions result in neighborhood decay, via the corrosion of the bonds that tie neighbors to one another. Desmond exemplifies this reality through Doreen, a mother of four and grandmother of three, who found herself evicted after a shooting tore through her home. With Doreen’s eviction, Desmond writes, 32nd St. lost someone who “loved and invested in the neighborhood, who contributed to making the block safer” (70). 

From Desmond’s ethnography, we might then say that the dissolution of intra-community bonds has an effect on health consequences at the individual level, at least in terms of safety and violence. And indeed, Desmond makes a point of this in citing the higher crime rates in neighborhoods with higher eviction rates (298). But the breakdown of community may also affect one’s mental health. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson ensnares the reader into a riveting detective story aimed at uncovering the identity of the detestable Mr. Hyde. In telling, Stevenson takes us through London in the eyes of Mr. Utterson, a lawyer assigned to executing the will and testament of Dr. Jekyll; through “Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine”, the streets of Soho, and the “labyrinths of [the] lamplighted city.” In The Strange Case, the city bears witness to major events in the story; its streets act as theater to instances of violence: first, a young girl is trampled on a street, “lighted up as if for a procession and empty as a church”; then Sir Danvers Crew, clubbed to death along a lane “brilliantly lit by the full moon”. In staging violence, London precludes bystander interference. Like the maid watching the Crew murder as it happens from her window, we in the audience are powerless to act. 

The urban environment in The Strange Case does more than just adjudicate violence, it actively encourages illness. Characters are secluded from one another through a nest egg of rooms, doors, corners, windows, letters, and masks. In this environment, characters go about their tasks independently. Utterson retreats to his room to think; Poole, an elderly servant to Dr. Jekyll, waits a week before reporting “foul play” that has taken place at the Jekyll residence; Dr. Jekyll runs his experiments of transfiguration on his own. These secluded actions point to a fragmented community, one detached from the kind of conviviality that fosters social cohesion. In portraying the sudden death of Dr. Lanyon, ravaged by the burden of holding Jekyll’s secret, and that of Jekyll, victim to his addiction, Stevenson leads us to conclude that lack of social interconnectivity affects individual health.

The current pandemic, which has led to calls for social distancing and quarantine, reminds me that humans are, by nature, social animals. I pray that this situation will resolve itself soon lest we delve further into madness.

[tindang]

Habits

Harvard campus, in warmer weather.

02.04.20

It’s been consistently cold these past couple of days. My room has been freezing. It’s a corner one, perched above the intersection of Lowell and Kimball St., which probably explains why it gets so drafty. Though frigid, it makes for good sleep. In these temperatures, I have made it a ritual to burrito-wrap myself in two layers of blankets, spend half an hour reading, then, donning a face mask, fall into peaceful slumber.

I say ritual as if I’ve been able to follow it. My goal has been to get up at 5am every day and get to work by 6:30. I’ve been waking up around 6. My morning routine is typically shower, pack breakfast and lunch, walk, metro, then walk again to work. 

I normally listen to Hoy por hoy during the commute. It’s a Spanish radio program I started listening to in college, to help me improve hearing Spanish. Before studying abroad in Barcelona, I could never make sense of its fast-pace Spanish. Now that I am more comfortable with the language, I use it to actually catch up with the news. The hour segments I listen to typically begin with an overview of breaking news, of which high unemployment, politics, and gender violence are common themes, before turning to its host, Àngels Barceló, and her posse of guest speakers. During this latter part of the segment, Àngels either speaks further on the issues of the day or discusses other matters of interest. Since I began listening to the radio podcast attentively, I’ve found Àngels’s conversations to be absolutely fascinating. She speaks authoritatively on a wide range of issues and her guests bring great expertise on whatever subject matter is at hand. Today, for example, she discussed how cancer patients lose the sensation of taste after receiving chemo- or radiotherapy--presumably, as their taste buds wither away. For these patients, their favorite food items either become flavorless or take on metallic flavors, which might disrupt not only their appetite but also their mental well-being. In response to this damage, there is currently a study at MD Anderson Cancer Center Madrid called El sabor perdido that is looking at ways to alleviate this downstream effect of cancer treatment. The issue is so obvious, but I would have never even known about it unless I had heard it mentioned on Hoy por hoy.

So I listen to this radio program, get to work, and clock in to begin my 8.5 hour workday (a big, sarcastic, thank you to the recent change in Mass General policy and the Federal Labor Standards Act for making me non-exempt now). Work has been going these past weeks. It’s been busy. I’m in charge of running two provider surveys--one this month on the follow-up of abnormal cancer screening results, the other in April on provider knowledge, beliefs, and practices pertaining to cervical cancer screening. Part of this task has been to learn REDCap, a software used to capture survey data. I’ve been really getting into it. I’m always excited to learn new computer skills and this falls in line with my interests. I just hope everything will turn out okay next week when we launch the first survey--fingers crossed.

And then I clock out. It’s ~4:30pm, and I listen to either Pod Save America or InvestTalk on the metro ride to either Harvard, where I’ve been slowly going through MCAT material, again, or to Porter, where I catch the 83 or the 87 bus that runs over to the local Market Basket to buy groceries. I study, or I cook, for the next few hours, and then return to my room at 10pm. From 10-10:30, I either catch up with emails, read a Vietnamese article with Mom via FaceTime, or do some kind of extraneous reading, and then from 10:30-11, I read whatever book I’m currently working through. Right now, it’s a collection of essays called Men In Dark Times by the German-American philosopher, Hannah Arendt. I hope to write about some interesting tidbits from it in the coming weeks. 

Then I put on that face mask, and that’s my day! I really wanted to get this down. I’m sure I will enjoy reading through this in the near future.

[tindang]

Colorful houses near my new home in Boston.

06/01/20 - East, West, Migration

I moved to Boston in September, a few weeks before my 23rd birthday. it’s been a stressful few months--moving, budgeting, starting my first real job. It's been hectic, but not without reward. In these past months, I've honed my skills as an amateur chef, led a team to win top prizes at a local Hackathon, impressed my supervisors with quality work, and made up with my sister.

I've also been reading extensively. This post marks the beginning of what I hope will be a more successful attempt at journaling my thoughts.

I've been fascinated with the concept of migration for some time now. As I've written before, I am invested in addressing health disparities in immigrant communities. Lately, the question of how has been the source of much stress. It’s led to a lot of reflection, and the more I think about it, the more uncertain I am about my career. Though I am sure I want to be a physician, I feel called to do something else that could put me on the frontlines of systemic inequity. The most obvious answer is public health, but the research bores me. I’m still figuring it out, but the work I see myself doing in 20 years is related to collecting patient narratives and transforming these stories into something concrete. For now, I am focused on learning more about how stories make a place, and how place manifests health.

Mariana Arcaya, a professor of urban planning and public health at MIT, distinguishes between place and space in determining geographic health disparities. Space deals with an individual’s precise location while place refers to membership in a political or administrative unit, such as a school, a district, a city, or a state. It is the complex interplay between these two concepts that gives rise to the unequal, spatial distribution of resources. In this framework of geographic inequality, two neighbors who occupy the same space might exhibit different health outcomes due to their place, by occupation for example; the reverse might also ring true. 

Though epidemiologists have shown that both have a hand in determining health status, it is place that is more difficult to measure. Place, as defined above, is an inherently fluid concept. The question of whether a person belongs to a certain unit is preceded by questions of degree: To what degree does this person associate with the unit? To what degree does the unit accept the person? I believe that these two questions should form the basis for any analysis that seeks to link place and health.

As Lara et al. points out in “Acculturation and Latino Health in the United States,” questions of degree were once overlooked. Referencing Milton Gordon’s testimony of the experience of European immigrant ethnic groups in America during the late 19th century, the authors note that the idea of assimilation and acculturation began as unidimensional constructs. Acculturation, Gordon thought, was an inevitable consequence of migration, naturally ending in assimilation, at which time the immigrant would have expunged the “memories, sentiments and attitudes” from her past life and adopted those of the receiving group. In other words, a person’s place was fatalistic.

This unidimensional view of acculturation did not hold water in the wake of the mass migrations that followed after passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which repealed the racist immigration quotas that existed prior. The entry of new bodies of color onto American soil brought with it new stories and new trajectories--the unilinear model split in two. 

Though the resultant bidimensional model of acculturation, which proposes that acquiring a new dominant culture is independent of maintaining the original culture, reigns in the modern public health literature, I disagree with its premise. Acculturation is a matter of mixing and blending, a matter of degrees. It is, to some extent, dependent on existing connections with one’s native culture. It occurs at the nexus of a host of factors, which includes not only language preference, generational status, space, and place, but also degrees of code-switching, familial roots to the homeland, belonging, and acceptance--not to mention, a person’s cultural understanding of what it means to belong somewhere, and to be accepted someplace. 

Postcolonial theory supports the spider-web model of acculturation (I made this up but I will coin it here). In “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” John Smail writes that despite Dutch domination of Indonesia for 350 years, its social structure “remained coherent while going through a certain amount of change.” This line of thinking is a counterpoint to the idea that foreign control leads to the total submission of colonial centers. In building his argument, Smail calls us to see that “disruption” and  “development” belong to the same natural process of cultural growth (i.e. development would occur regardless of Dutch presence). In this framework, cultural change in late colonial Indonesia should be viewed as “creative adaptation,” which allows us to replace the idea of submission with “a picture of a society strong and vital enough to adopt new cultural elements that appear useful to it, to grow with the times, in short to stay alive.” Acculturation was then (and now) a dynamic process that involved an array of transactions in the struggle for power and legitimacy.

Smail briefly alludes to the possibility of “weak” societies that failed to acculturate by pointing to revitalization movements. These groups were presumably lost to history. I bring this up because the specter of failing to “make it” in America casts wide shadows over the lives of many, especially immigrants. Those who manage to acclimate propel their families to opportunity, but what about those stuck in the outer rings of the spider-web?

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth offers a few perspectives on this through the character development of the novel’s first-generation-English characters, who each grapple with multiple dimensions of place. I found Millat Igbal’s development to be particularly memorable because of the trauma that young Millat experienced at the hands of his (well-intentioned) parents. I have no doubt that this trauma resulted in Millat’s embrace of fundamentalism and ethnic essentialism--“He knew that he, Millat, was a Paki no matter where he came from”--which, in turn, led him to reject acculturation as a vehicle for place-making. In White Teeth, the lack of place beckons violence, both physical and emotional (re: Irie). At the crosshairs of this violence are those marginalized by society, the colored bodies of immigrants.

White Teeth’s negative take stands in contrast to evidence that suggests that those least acculturated to American life exhibit better health behaviors, at least for Latinos living in the U.S. Returning to Lara et al’s study, we see that more acculturated Latinos are more likely to engage in substance abuse and undesirable dietary behaviors, as well as experience worse birth outcomes compared with the less acculturated. These findings are paradoxical, given the positive associations other studies have found between acculturation and health care access; that is, if more acculturated individuals are receiving health care, why are they presenting worse health outcomes? To answer this question would require us to move beyond the simple models of acculturation used by public health researchers today. Though practical, they reduce the true impact that culture has in drawing the parameters that define our place, and therefore our health.

[tindang]

17/1/19 - !!

I recently finished this response for a summer program application at Columbia University asking about an issue of inequality I care about. I wanted to share because I’m so proud of it. Since college, I’ve felt pressure to write personal statements to read in a way that someone else reading it would want to read. I was never happy with them.

This piece reflects who I am, who I want to be, and an issue that I truly want to change. And I couldn’t have done it without 1) taking the time off from school to think about myself and my career goals, 2) Dean Bhattacharyya, who, during my time at Brown, constantly reminded me to live and write in a way that is true to myself, and 3) my friends, who are always quick to send me feedback despite their busy lives. I feel continually indebted to the Brown community for their love and support. 

“Asking for help is difficult for me; self-sufficiency, my guiding principle. I grew up honing this trait in an immigrant and single-parent household. My mother’s work schedule and limited English meant that at an early age I often had to take charge of matters large and small--planning summer trips, setting educational goals, interpreting health care instructions. Problem-solving was a task done in solitude.

It was not until I entered Brown University, as a first-generation college student, that I realized the shortcomings of relying on myself. For the many obstacles to come--from the chronic back pain to the inability to work out my college meal plan--I had to learn to put faith in others, to ask for help.

At a lecture I attended at the annual 1vyG conference last year, Annette Lareau, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, laid out how class and racial differences contribute to differences in class-based social skills, which includes students’ ability to seek help in and out of the classroom. I believe that such interpersonal skills show up less among immigrants, who may face not only language barriers but also bootstrap narratives that stress individual responsibility for success. I believe this because I have lived it. Whether it was at the doctor’s exam room interpreting for my mother or at university, where my do-it-yourself mentality inclined me to personally deal with my problems rather than reach out for help, I have often questioned and grappled with the barriers that immigrants might encounter when seeking assistance.

I offer my background as a point of comparison, an acknowledgement of my privileges. Though my education granted me the vocabulary and confidence to traverse the hurdles toward finding help, I think about the many immigrants living in America who continue to lack access to critical resources like housing, food, and healthcare due to largely uncontrollable social, cultural, and economic forces. This worry, coupled with my own experience navigating for assistance, compels me to support those who come from similarly disadvantageous backgrounds. My three-year commitment planning and hosting events with the Sidney Frank Scholars Association--a student-led group at Brown devoted to building community for fellow low-income Scholars--was one product of this desire. Another, my interest in learning the languages and histories of minority groups who call the U.S. their home, particularly those of Spanish-speaking peoples and my native Vietnamese. Rooted in my belief that understanding the humanities is crucial for bridging the everyday needs of immigrant communities with the goals of social institutions, this interest has propelled me to do extensive coursework in Brown’s Hispanic Studies department and accept my current year-long job at a publishing company in Vietnam.

Public health data has long concluded that immigrants in the U.S. use less health services than non-immigrants. A single PubMed search could provide a litany of reasons, but I now add one more--fear; the fear of asking for help, worsened ever more so today by political anti-immigrant rhetoric. I stand resolved to address this disparity as a future health professional.”

[tindang]

A note written by my sister.

31/12/18 - Purpose

My mom sent me this note just before 12AM my time and it was so nice I wanted to memorialize it here. I’m not entirely sure why my mom decided to send me this on the cusp of the new year, but I’ll just imagine that it has something to do with helping me align my goals for 2019.

My resolution this year will be to be kinder to my family, starting with my sister who’s had to endure for most of her life my atrocious behavior. I wish I had the courage right now to call her and say sorry for all the times I’ve put her down and ignored her over the years. To my sister, I hope to make up for all those years of pain and be a much more supportive figure in your life. To Mom, who’s given up anything and everything for the happiness of her children, I promise to help you more around the house and bring you all the joy I can find in the world. To Dad, I’ll make sure to continue doing well in school and keep up with my prayers.

Lastly, to God, thank you for all your blessings throughout this year. Thank you for blessing me with food every single day, for the roof over my head, for keeping my family and friends healthy, for looking after me during my darkest periods, and for all the joys and challenges that have come my way. I hope to find the strength to keep the promises I’ve made to you and to those I love heading into this new year. 

I wish everyone infinite health, happiness, and success in 2019. Happy New Year!

[tindang]

The wat at Angkor Ban, Cambodia. 

28/12/12 - Impasse 

I’m sorry for the lack of update for the last two months. I fell into a kind of rut, and the thought of keeping this blog up-to-date during that time was daunting.

Undoubtedly, a lot has happened since my last entry (and a little before then). I went to Cambodia on a working trip, attended a cousin’s wedding, visited my maternal family in Da Lat over a weekend, got sick for a week, lost my passport and visa, injured my back again, ran into a few weeks of depression, and delved into MCAT studying. Each of these items deserves their own post but, as of right now, I feel like the only way I can start writing weekly again is by not stressing out too much about what’s passed and move forward. 

At four months of living in Saigon, I can say definitively that I hate it. I hate the overflowing traffic; I hate the lack of functional sidewalks, the lack of a recycling culture, the lack of a healthy food culture, the lack of affordable international food options; I hate the unreliability of paid services; I hate feeling helpless witnessing the poverty that surrounds me every day; I hate how speech that might call attention to this poverty is aggressively censored; I hate breathing in the around-the-clock air pollution—and the smell of it when mixed with the recent December humidity; I hate my inability to adapt to the tropical climate. For four months, I don’t think I have gone on a single trip outside my apartment without monologuing about some problem in this dysfunctional city. 

Work itself has been bothering me, mostly because of my employer’s capitalistic tendencies. I understand that Vietcetera is young, still growing, but to maintain relationships with certain clients and businesses that sideline—are even harmful to—Vietnamese interests and labor for the sake of revenue seems unethical. I also have a suspicion that native English-speaking employees are paid more than their Vietnamese counterparts for similarly important work. And even if this suspicion rings hollow, it is undeniable to anyone working there that publishing English content almost always takes precedence over publishing original Vietnamese content—because that’s where the money lies. 

In terms of the work environment, I think it has been occasionally toxic and demanding, with miscommunication being a big issue; I still remember an instance where I was reprimanded for not doing something that I didn’t know I could do—late on a Friday night for that matter! And I often feel like my suggestions are not welcome. I sometimes wonder if working here was a mistake. There are some positives however. In late October, I took on a part-time role in the company in order to fully focus on studying for my MCAT (long story but I’ve had to push the exam date back multiple times since then). Though my official title is still ‘Project Manager,’ and I still help maintain and develop Vietcetera’s social media strategy while supporting various projects, I’ve recently taken on some editing responsibilities that I’m quite happy to do. I’m no English major, but I’ve grown to love writing and welcome any chance to improve it. 

Living and working and studying. And worrying, that too—about my back, my future, and, when I found the time, the pharaoh ant colonies that mushroomed throughout my apartment for weeks until one day, they disappeared, without a trace. Poof. I had been living in this cycle, depressed and unmotivated, for the last month when suddenly I woke up. I’m not sure what led up to it, but I believe Ellen DeGeneres played a part. Her Netflix special, “Relatable,” reminded me that I had special people in my life, and I quickly reached out to them. I started with a coworker, then my mom, whom I had been ignoring since the passport fiasco, and branched out to Jesus, and to friends. I felt a lot better. 

For some time now, moving forward has been difficult; in fact, it’s the very reason why I’m writing this blog (read my first post!). But I’m starting to realize that healing for me will always begin with voicing my thoughts and worries.

[tindang]

22/10/18 - A Matter of Representation, And Where It Goes Wrong

Three weeks ago Catherine Karnow arrived at the American Center in Ho Chi Minh City to give a presentation promoting her book, Vietnam: 25 Years Documenting A Changing Country. Daughter of Stanley Karnow—a Pulitzer Prize winning author whom I cited in an earlier post—and acclaimed photographer for National Geographic, Karnow has followed in the footsteps of both her parents in building a career around her work in Vietnam. The Facebook event description for the presentation looked promising and I attended it expecting a lecture on Vietnam’s transformation from 1990 to the present day, given from the unique perspective of a photojournalist who had witnessed first-hand the country’s tentative embrace of a regulated market economy in the mid-nineties. I was to be sorely disappointed.

Maybe it was my high expectations, or my unfamiliarity with these kinds of talks, but the event left a sour taste in my mouth. On a sixty-page Word document I use to record notes from interesting lectures and readings that have come my way in the last four years I typed “self-pleasure” on its own line somewhere under the event entry; the word sums up my feelings of Karnow’s lecture. In the hour she had to present, Karnow concentrated more on telling stories of self-discovery and personal aggrandizement through her photography in Vietnam rather than providing contextual information. The story behind a picture of an anguished family waving goodbye to relatives they might never see again was overshadowed by an account of how a son reached out to Karnow many years later to identify his mother in that very picture; the meaning underneath the forlorn expressions of a row of elderly women holding printouts of Võ Nguyên Giáp—a Vietnamese general celebrated for his preeminent role in the First Indochina War and the subsequent American War—at his funeral were run over by Karnow’s self-obsessed narrative of feeling joy photographing the group of women who were oblivious of Karnow’s part in producing the portrait they were holding. Karnow littered her presentation with such stories of serendipitous encounters and her voice in them was deafening. What I thought was an objective photographic account of a changing Vietnam turned out to be a subjective study with a narrow, self-realized hypothesis.

In “Relativity and the Anthropologist’s Gaze,” Paul Stoller argues that the givens of our dual socialization as citizens of the western world and citizens of science prevent us from describing the true social reality of the Other, imposing on us a sort of gaze that is always at a distance to truth and objectivity. I think having this awareness is important for anyone wishing to be a decent human being, especially when it comes to interacting with those unlike ourselves. It forces us to look at life as a web of infinite possibilities and guides us away from the danger of a single story. It makes us question our assertions about people and compels us to dig deeper to better understand our earthly neighbors.

Whether Karnow had this awareness, I was never certain. Her intermittent reminders about her sense of belonging to Vietnam—tied so precariously to her parents’ careers—certainly did not help her case. To me, they sounded like cheap excuses for appropriating a country’s history without consequence. Because that’s what she was doing—portraying a personal story of Vietnam under the veneer of a supposed reality. She belonged to Vietnam, her father wrote its history, so how could she get it wrong? But therein lies the problem: Karnow got it wrong. She got it wrong because she seemed to believe that her inheritance of passion for Vietnam inoculated her from the anthropologist’s gaze, that her sense of belonging allowed her to speak for those people shown in her photographs. Without ever acknowledging in her hour-long performance the power and privilege she had as an Ivy League-educated, white American, Karnow in this way equated her feelings towards a changing Vietnam to those of her Vietnamese photo subjects. The harm of this single story, told by a single author, cannot be overstated. And if you think I’m being too egregious in making this assertion, I quote from an article published five days after the event in which Karnow compares her sense of loss having to leave her Asian homeland to move to the U.S. with the loss of four million Vietnamese lives during the Vietnam War: “The Vietnamese have lived with loss for a length of history and it is that sense of loss that Vietnam and I have in common.”

Karnow’s representation of Vietnam is also a political tool. Satish Sharma, an independent photographer, writer and cultural critic, reminds us that, in the era of unchecked Western imperialism, colonial centers used photography as a means of consolidating control. He tells us that the power of photographs to create, establish, and reinforce an image incentivizes politicians to harvest this power for their gain. And how photojournalists, who have access to politicians, become willing accomplices in the making and marketing of a political image. These observations seem tailored for analyzing Karnow’s role in promoting a state-sponsored version of Vietnamese history. Like the timeframe encompassed by Karnow’s photo book, this role has evolved over a period of twenty-five years. It began with Karnow’s exclusive access to interview and photograph General Giáp—a gift from her father’s intimate relationship with the general—before his death in 2013, which propelled Karnow’s career as a photographer in the ‘90s. And it continues in the present-day with her book and photo exhibitions that tell the much-told story of hope and success and promise and happiness in the age of đổi mới.

Looking through Karnow’s body of work, it is hard to find a picture that might distinguish the photographer from any other mouthpiece of the Vietnamese government. Harder still without the voices of the many characters that filled Karnow’s presentation. When I raised enough courage to publicly ask her how often she found herself sifting between the bad and the good in photographing Vietnam, she made a point about her passion for recording the plight of the juvenile victims of Agent Orange and the children of the dust—the Amerasians—who were left behind in a hostile Vietnam by their American fathers in an effort to defend herself as a neutral observer. But I still felt that her answer toed in line with the state-sanctioned embrace of American culpability for the many social problems that exist in the country. That is not to say that I don’t admire her efforts in raising awareness and money for such issues; in fact, deep down, I do praise the Karnow family for their tenacity in showing Vietnam in a different light. But I believe that such endeavors are not successful without proper representation of all peoples, and that means including the voices and stories of ethnic minorities, the disabled, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, those still hopeful of the changing Vietnam and those who have become disenchanted with its rosy forecast.

Lastly, if I could speak to Karnow again, I would first show her how to pronounce phở bò correctly, tell her to come up with an adjective other than “quirky” to describe my hometown of Da Lat, remind her of what she owed to Vietnam, and then ask to sit down with her, to find out about the real Vietnam; you know, the one that surrounded her for the last twenty-five years, the one unfixed by her camera lens, the one of infinite possibilities.

[tindang]

10/10/18 - Memo 1

I wanted to record here that, as of this past Monday, I’m in the process of establishing a routine workout schedule at Tiger Gym Vietnam. Located right in the middle of my commute, exercising at Tiger Gym breaks up the long thirty minutes it takes me to walk from work to get back home. At approximately $20/month, the gym’s rate is actually pretty good when compared to others with similar services. It’s kind of small, but it serves a small clientele--most likely due to its price, which for Vietnam is admittedly on the high end. There are no paper towels/soap to clean out your station so I had to buy a couple of towels of varying sizes over the weekend. There are however a generous selection of machines and weights, a decent-sized locker room, accommodating gym managers, and, most importantly, free filtered water. 

This gif is so cool!

Thus far, I’ve noted that 5:30PM and 8:00PM are good times to go. And both work well for my schedule: if I’m still full from lunch, I can choose to go immediately after work or, if I’m on an empty stomach, go after digesting an early dinner at some random cafe. In either scenario, I walk home from the gym feeling great, and on the way like to purchase 1 or 2 bánh mì thịt from a particular chain store to feed my post-workout hunger.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone about this but ever since I saw pictures of myself from middle school-early high school, I’ve been terrified of appearing--or really feeling--skinny, weak, or small. This anxiety over my body-image manifests in many ways, the most deleterious of which is a general depression that seems to follow its own schedule. Needless to say, I’m really excited to be back on a workout regimen after a month long hiatus adjusting to Vietnam. Since my back injury during college it has been a goal of mine to get back to the point where I can consistently run 5Ks. In the last three years, the closest I’ve come is 2.2 miles. I’m hoping to make mincemeat of that last mile in the coming months.

[tindang]

A burst of color on my morning commute.

05/10/18 - Hope

Sometime during my last days in Florida this summer, I voted for the first time. I remember carefully filling in the bubble next to Andrew Gillum’s name on my primary ballot, fearing that any mistake, any deviation from that stretched out oval, would cost the gubernatorial candidate my vote. At the time, I had no faith that Mayor Gillum would win; he had been trailing in a distant third or fourth place in all the latest polls, and had so little money to campaign on as compared to his multimillionaire competitors. Perhaps it was this latter point that flared my support. You see, in his David-versus-Goliath battle for the Democratic nomination, I found a small piece of myself; in Gillum’s underdog quality, I saw my own struggle growing up having to navigate the many class divisions of society and education.

But as much as this sentiment came to me in the articles I skimmed through in making my decision, it also arose through the pictures that I saw. Andrew Gillum simply looked different from his competitors. On Wikipedia, on his campaign page, on every news platform I used to formulate my opinion, from his smile to his posture, from the light furrow on his forehead to way he gestured to his audiences, Gillum seemed to radiate a kind of genuinity that stood out in the no man’s land of Florida politics. And as much as I hate the immobile constrictions of identity politics, I could not help but see in those pictures a black man trying to subvert Florida’s almost two hundred year long endorsement of whiteness.

So it was with the conviction that Gillum would be a true voice for the voiceless, the underdogs of Florida, that I gave him my vote on a humid evening in late August. One could only imagine the shock and happiness I felt, waking up on the month’s final morning, by then in Vietnam, to find out that Gillum had won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in “the upset of a lifetime.”

During his acceptance speech, Gillum asserted the following: “As the fifth of seven kids, and the first of my siblings to graduate from high school, and the first to graduate college, you can’t tell anybody in our family we don’t know what it means to see intergenerational poverty interrupted at the hands of a good public education.” Indeed, poverty cowers before a quality education–multiple longitudinal studies have proven as much. But when was the last time I heard a politician speaking these kinds of words, himself acting as a standing example of what happens when low-income students are given what they need to succeed in life? In truth, I’m way too young to remember another instance, if it ever existed. But for now, what I am certain of is that Andrew Gillum is a rarity not only in Florida political history, but in that of this entire country. And it was with this conviction that I carefully marked the oval next to ‘Gillum’ on my absentee ballot for the November general election this past Tuesday and turned it in at the American Center in Saigon, hopeful that positive change lies just over that beautiful, sea-lined horizon.

[tindang]

Hải sản with my cousin Trí on Vĩnh Khánh street, located in District 4 of Saigon.

27/09/18 - 22, First Month Updates

Today marks my 29th day in Vietnam, and my 22nd birthday. In celebration of my first month living in this country, I want to make a hodgepodge post recording impressions and important moments I’ve had in the last four weeks.

On a bus ride home after my first or second day at work, I called my mom to tell her about my day. Thinking back on it now, my conversation, which revolved around corruption in government, Ho Chi Minh, and how uncomfortable I was to be standing on a crowded bus, was intolerable and I deserved the tirade of the woman sitting near me. I’m not sure what was wrong with me to have been so oblivious to the quiet sanctity of Vietnam’s public buses and to have brought up such controversial topics in a public space. My excuse at the time was, I didn’t know. I was used to having deep conversations with my mom while waiting out commutes, in a language that many do not speak, and mistakenly assumed that the near-constant noise of the city’s rush hour would drown out my voice. But that doesn’t excuse my behavior. Truthfully, I knew that people might be listening and could understood, but I kept speaking because I wanted anyone with a lingering ear to know what was happening in their country as if those living here were clueless to their plight. I was a pig, a bully, and an elitist ass. I told the woman I was sorry, and was saved by my approaching stop.

Everything seems smaller in Vietnam (or at least in Saigon): Streets, sidewalks, homes, people, electrical appliances, kitchens, chairs, mattresses, public buses, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been disappointed by the food portion served to me at restaurants. Yet I’ve come to see these compact structures and objects as existing in a backdrop of the grandiose. For example, from the fifth-floor balcony of my apartment in Bình Thạnh, you get a jaw-dropping view of Landmark 81, a recently constructed, Burj Khalifa look-alike that, as of today, holds the title for tallest completed building in Southeast Asia and the fourteenth tallest building in the world. Moreover, if you were to move out onto the street and follow the steps I take in the morning to catch the 19 bus to work, you would face an onslaught of motorbikes at the intersection of Phan Văn Hân and đường Thị Nghè; looking past the absolute chaos, you might see the bottlenecked river of raging traffic as man’s greatest attempt at capturing the Sublime in an urban form–no doubt a major accomplishment for Vietnam. These immense structural feats undergird a rapidly growing economy that I’m sure will lead to even bigger developments in the country’s future.

Last week, I finished reading Stanley Karnow’s, Vietnam: A History. It was a lot, but I’ll save you the details and summarize some of its key claims off the top of my head. First, Vietnam’s history is complex, and it was with this complexity that drove the Vietnam-American War in the latter half of the twentieth century. Second, there was an abundance of lost opportunities during the twenty years of war that might have led to a more peaceful settlement between the Vietnamese Communists and the Southern regimes. Third, the war in Vietnam paralleled an ideological war in the States as Americans grappled with the reality that their liberal order of democracy failed in Southeast Asia.

After work last Friday, a few coworkers invited me out to dinner near Khu Phố Đi Bộ, a popular plaza in Saigon. I feasted on a four-course dinner that night: French baguette with Vietnamese curry, Hong Kong curry fish balls, duck ramen, and fruit bingsu–totaling 200,000 VND or roughly $10. Since it was still “too early,” according to one coworker, to head back to our respective homes, I thought it would be fun to buy a bottle of wine and split it between the four of us on the banks of the nearby Saigon River. For convenience’s sake, I chose a bottle of [yellow tail] Cabernet Sauvignon (400,000 VND) at a Circle K, and we made our way over to the river, a short walk and a dangerous hop across lines of motorbikes away. We sat down on a dock with pleasant views of Saigon’s display of evening lights, and a river silence converged upon us and muffled the noise of the adjacent street. Shadowed by the faint yellow light of a lone light pole, we spent the next hour chatting away.

I got sick two weeks ago, and remember bowing my head in the shower after a long day at work, wishing desperately that I was home in the comfort of my bed with all the luxuries of convenience at my disposal. It was around this time that I experienced multiple bad run-ins using the public buses getting to and from work. After the incident with the woman, I refrained from speaking on the bus except when calling out my stop; because unlike those in America, a majority of Saigon’s buses aren’t equipped with the buttons or cords that alert the driver to stop, putting the responsibility of doing so on your voice. This single aspect to riding buses in Saigon is the source of much anxiety for me as I’m still figuring out how to say some of the Vietnamese words I’ve known my whole life properly, accent and all. As a Vietnamese American trying to fit in, to say a Vietnamese word incorrectly in front of a group of locals means eliciting dozens of raised eyebrows–not to mention the angry facial features of the bus conductor who helps notify the driver of impending stops. So with these worries, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on the buses muttering the stop names in practice, praying that someone headed in the same direction would come to my rescue. My “gross” Vietnamese, as one of my coworkers jokingly calls it, has been the cause of constant miscommunication that has had me jumping off moving buses–at the direction of furious conductors–and getting off at further-down stops. It was two weeks ago that a bus conductor, who I believe completely understood my initial stop request, asked me to repeat what I said in order to publicly ridicule the way I said it. Though I turned up the volume of the music on the one earplug I had on, it wasn’t enough to save me from the embarrassment of having a stranger berate me for my “Americanized” Vietnamese.

It’s 12:05 AM so I just missed my deadline for posting this (oops). It’s getting late so I’ll just summarize this concluding paragraph. I wanted to write that second-to-last paragraph in order to contrast it to how I’m feeling today, living in Vietnam for a month now. I’m excited to say that I’m content! For whatever reason, maybe having to do with me substituting the bus with Grab (aka the Uber of Vietnam) as my primary mode of transportation, this week has been more blissful than any other; and as of right now, I feel fully adjusted to living here. Also, I really enjoyed my low-key birthday (yesterday). No one from work knew about it, and at 5 PM, I left the office and met up with my cousin to relish in the seafood paradise of Vĩnh Khánh street. Afterwards, we stopped to get ice cream; the servings were small, but I tried lychee, jackfruit, and green tea.

[tindang]

From my first few days in Vietnam. A view from the third-floor balcony of Chú Út’s home in Saigon.

19/09/18 - Night

Last Friday, I finished my second week at work. It was a somber day. Stepping out of the office at 4:50 PM, I hastily paced over to the Circle K down the block to purchase a rain poncho. I was to meet my employer for dinner at Pizza 4P’s near Chợ Bến Thành in half an hour. Normally, a fifteen minute walk in light drizzle would not warrant any protection on my part, but two weeks dealing with Vietnam’s rainy season taught me better–some extra precaution never hurt. Surprised to find that the store sold umbrellas, I grabbed the first one I saw, glad to have avoided buying rain gear that I already owned (I tend to forget my North Face windbreaker at home and the umbrella I could always keep in my backpack’s shoulder pocket to solve that exact problem).

Dinner was pleasant. The “Burrata with Parma Ham & Mixed Tropical Fruits” salad cleared any doubts I had to a merger of buttery cheese and fresh dragon fruit and watermelon, and though I’ll admit to hating pizza, 4P’s flatbread was exceptional, and a break in the monotonous consumption of Asian food was much needed. Conversation revolved around my transition to Vietnam, my goals moving forward, and my employer’s path to building his breakthrough company.

I learned about Vietcetera at a Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) event in October of my senior year in college. Dedicated to revealing the new Vietnam, one detached from the memories of war, the company focuses on telling the stories of innovators and entrepreneurs, rising musicians and photographers, trailblazers in fashion, architecture, business, and the food industry, who’ve made their home in the country. As stated on its website, the company caters to a “globally-minded audience of readers” and aims to create a “brand ecosystem” that showcases what modern-day Vietnam had to offer. When my employer first pitched the concept to me and a group of students on a crisp, autumnal evening in the Underground, I felt conflicted about it. Though I was interested in expanding my knowledge about development in Vietnam, my past chided me toward indifference. How could the Vietnam I know, the Vietnam I came to know viscerally at the tender age of seven–the one trenched in death, disease and mundaneness–be anything more than a hospital room for the poor, the sick, and the dying? I remember leaving the event feeling upset, not necessarily at my future employer or Vietcetera per se, but at the “new” Vietnam with its emerging economy and its happy prognosis that seemed to invalidate not only my painful memories but also those of a war-torn generation.

I was last to finish dinner, no surprise there. Much to my dismay, I got into a habit of chewing slower during a blissful semester in Spain. In between bites of parma ham and salmon sashimi-topped flatbread, I reasserted to my employer my purpose for spending the year in Vietnam: to improve my Vietnamese and to learn more about the people living here in order to better serve them in the future. In relation to this mission, my work at Vietcetera might be considered tangential–and it certainly is–but it is important work nonetheless. Because as much as I felt unsettled leaving that VSA meeting almost a year ago, I believed at the time, as I do now, that working with the new Vietnam would allow me to think more holistically about the country’s grief-ridden past; that is, how might I think about the voices that have become disenfranchised as wealth is redistributed in the new Vietnam; haven’t these voices always been disenfranchised through state-sanctioned violence and censorship, I wonder; to what extent have novel outlets of expression in music, photography, fashion and design captured the spirit of a country moving away from the vestiges of war. These questions are just a few that have crossed my conscience in the last two weeks. Perhaps, in answering them, I might come to some positive conclusion about the new Vietnam that can help me move on from the past.

Leaving the restaurant a little before 7:00 PM, my employer and I walked to the end of the block and crossed a puddle-stained street to a corner set of buildings. We bought some bottles of water and Coke at a ground-floor convenient store and sidestepped over to an adjacent building, climbing its harrowing flight of stairs to reach a rooftop bar that my employer rented out regularly. I had offered him my help bartending an event scheduled for that night. The work–pouring a selection of craft beer and some wines at the request of twenty to thirty people–ended up being pretty easy, and entertaining; I definitely got the networking bug out of my system in the two-and-a-half hours I stayed to help. At one point during that time, in between conversations I held with people who seemed all too familiar, I remember standing behind the counter contemplating dinner and my employer’s show of readiness to help me pursue my goals after I had explained to him my purpose for coming back to Vietnam. In that moment, I remember feeling as if some burden had been lifted, right then and there, incised out of some dark recess within my chest. I thought, “Woah! I’m standing so close to a guy who gets me and fully supports what I’m doing; both of us, here, standing on top of the world.”

[tindang]

A visit to Angel Island State Park. Taken by my friend Sophia.

06/09/18 - Summer

I wanted to make a long post about my summer, but lost track of time. The last few days have been stressful, in part, because of my big move to Vietnam. Although I no longer have immediate memories to draw upon to make a more meaningful post covering the months leading up to my departure, I still want to dedicate this first blog post to the importance of this summer in my journey towards self-fulfillment.

Tuesday morning, I got out of bed, quickly brushed my teeth, and dressed for my first day at work. Walking the short distance out to Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh, a street named after a group of Vietnamese peasants that defied French colonial rule in the 1930s, I caught the 19 bus, getting off at Nhà Hát Thành Phố twelve minutes later. On my walk to 6 Thi Sách, where I would be working for the next nine months, I crossed paths with a hen and her chicks. The unfamiliar sight of free-roaming chickens pecking away at the dregs of the inner city paused me, and I quickly pulled out my phone to capture the spectacle.

I adopted the habit of cataloging anything of interest in my day-to-day during the summer after my sophomore year. This collection process often involved photography, but sometimes meant picking up free pamphlets, postcards and stickers, or, when traveling, purchasing magnets and other memorabilia. I had developed the habit out of necessity. At the time, I was suffering from a chronic back injury that caused pain to erratically radiate down my left leg; to collect any treasurable memory of my day meant finding happiness despite the circumstance, a reminder that among the vicissitudes of life, there was something beautiful to be found in the photo taken at the golden hour, in the seashell gathered along the shore, or the feather siphoned off the brush. At the time, I felt compelled to gather these items to mend a broken self. 

But today, I collect in order to deal with a more pressing problem. Months after the incident that caused my back issue, I noticed the same thought assaulting my consciousness at every waking hour, seeping into my sleep and disturbing what little precious hours of rest I had as a student: “ I don’t have enough time”, “I don’t have enough time”, “I don’t have enough time.” It was as if my injury had knocked me off the rhythmic passage of time, and my mind was slapping me silly with that single alert to get back on–“I don’t have enough time.” “Don’t have enough time to do what?,” I kept asking; but I had already known the answer. For many months to come I would repeat that same question, seeking an alternative conclusion, because I was scared to admit the truth: Brown University–the “most liberal place on Earth,” according to my friend’s father–had inculcated in me the idea that grades don’t define your life, that the future is what you make it out to be, but it disregarded the many insecurities I had entering Brown as a first-generation college student. For me, grades mattered, because society trained me to believe that they were the only sure way to get into medical school and escape poverty. So I worked feverishly to make up for the time I had lost dealing with my back problems by taking on more difficult course loads and ignoring irregular work habits that left me feeling more and more paralyzed as time went on. Like the trapped souls portrayed in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End or those in the Sunken Place, I became a passenger stuck in time, forced to eternally drift until I can reconcile my past failures with the present. 

17 June 2018: My sister and some friends help me repaint my room in Sherwin-Williams Watermarked–(Clearwater, FL)

17 July 2018: Sitting on one of the top floors of Bobst Library and catching the evening glow of the Empire State Building, I finish writing my last undergraduate assignment–(New York, NY)

20 July 2018: I enjoy breakfast with a good friend and her dog, and later that night, persuade another good friend to try a tamale for the first time at Casa Romero–(Boston, MA)

4 August 2018: I wake up to the light of quickly drawn curtains, which spread out to reveal quite possibly the most beautiful display of nature I will have witnessed in my lifetime–(Lombardy, Italy)

24 August 2018: I explore Angel Island State Park with a lifelong friend, and try to revive a beached jellyfish–(Tiburon, CA)

These dates hold some of my most cherished memories from this summer, and they have done a lot to help me feel whole once again. To those friends who I was fortunate enough to see this summer, a simple thank you just doesn’t seem to cut it; so here’s the hug I want to give to each and every one of you:

And to everyone reading: sorry for the depressing intro! I can’t promise that the content will be any happier from here on out, but know that with each passing day I move closer to aligning my past and present selves. With this hope in mind, I want to formally introduce my blog page, titled “Vietnamerican,” which will hold the written memories that I collect during my time abroad. Through this collection, I wish to not only narrate some of my day-to-day in Vietnam but also lay out the many facets of my personal history and how this history has shaped who I am today. Some posts will be long, others short. Some will be quick logs of what I’m up to, what I’m reading, others substantive thought pieces juxtaposing observations made living here with a mix of autobiographical content and other topics that might include history, art, medicine, anthropology, politics or whatever else comes to mind. 

Though I’m sure the final product of this page will end up looking like a mess, I have no doubt that it will be here, in the writing and making of this archive, that I find my changed, more-present self.