Eyeball Extraction

The majority of the people who I talked to before having my eyeball poked and burned claimed that I would be fine the next day, ready to bounce off the walls with my new found sight. Most of them said how much I would absolutely love opening my eyes and being able to see!

The adventure starts with $250 worth of prescriptions eye drops that I start taking two weeks before surgery. I end up absorbing the costs because that is what you do when you have a Health Savings Account. I asked the nurse if I really needed to have those eye drops because she had hinted that they were optional. She asked what my age was. I asked her what that had to do with the answer. She said that after the age of 30 your tear ducts don’t work as well. I said “I get it you’re saying I’m old”. She said “Sorry, but yes I am.” I learn that my tear ducts are connected to my mucus membranes that end up in my mouth. So all the wonderfully bitter antibiotics, steroids, and 3 other interesting eye drops I take throughout this episode would end up in my mouth.

At the surgery center after all the money and CYA documentation have been taken care of they put me in a chair where they drop one numbing drop in each eye and offer me an oral pain killer\relaxer with a shot of carrot juice to wash it down. After a few minutes they give me a second numbing drop in each eye. I am prepped by a pretty assistant and think well at least if I went blind she would be one of the last things I saw.

They lay me down and use a device to keep my eyelids from shutting. My reflexive muscles start firing to close the lids to protect my eyes. I find this mildly uncomfortable but am able to control my muscles from firing after a few seconds. The doctor starts poking at my eye with a tool. After about the fourth poke the assistant asks if I can feel it. I respond with a very definite yes. She then floods my eye with about 8 numbing drops. I lay there wondering why they didn’t do that in the first place. After a few more pokes they place a ring around my eyeball. I still have feeling in my eye at this time. Luckily my eye would finally lose feeling shortly after this because it is quite uncomfortable to have a ring put around your eyeball and have it poked. Just about when I lose sensory in my eye the whole world goes dark. I had been warned that at a certain point in the procedure everything would go dark. This is very valuable information because you can imagine the reaction of some people when her eyes are open but everything goes pitch black while someone is working on her eye. One really understands how serious of a decision he has made to have surgery when his whole world goes dark. As I start regaining light in my eye I can hear the laser going and smell the scorching of my eyeball.

Strangely the second eye was even more uncomfortable for me. My reflexive flinching was much more sever. My reflexes are causing my eye to close against the suppressor tools while my active mind is trying to keep them open. This causes me to shake and I try to alert the doctor that my head is shaking. He misunderstands it as me being fearful and tells me to take deep breaths…I would have rolled my eyes at him except I knew that would have been a very bad thing to do during eye surgery. The way I saw it was that even though my eyes weren’t closing the reflexive muscles were still causing my head to move. Apparently they were not moving my head enough to bother the doctor though and he continues poking at the eyeball. Again after the assistant asks if I can feel it and again I respond with a very definite yes. Again she floods my eyeball with numbing drops. I would have thought she would have figured out the first time that two drops were not enough for me. The numbing drops do help stop the reflexive eyelid flinching.

The doctor puts a heavily weighted medical contact on my right eye because it is supposed to help it heal better. They give me sunglasses to put on as I go out the door to keep anything from flying into my eye.
I go into the surgery center for LASIK to improve my vision. Ironically I leave with worse vision, a medical contact lens in one eye AND glasses.

The second day my left eye is working fairly well (but definitely not 20/20 yet). My right eye (with the contact) cannot see very well at all. My right eye can’t read, see middle or long distances. The doctor decides to leave the medical contact in for another three days. Day three I see improvement in my right eye. Day four more improvement in the right eye, it is good enough that I can read now. Tomorrow is day 5, hopefully they can take the medical contact lens out. My eyes are still very gruesomely bloodshot.

Vietnam-Introduction

I have decided to take a departure from my previous writing style for this series of entries because this trip was a departure from my standard travels. I set out on a cultural adventure that would help me understand more about where I came from, and who I would have been if life took a different turn. A vacation was the secondary goal and understanding was the primary goal. In telling these stories it would be incredibly cumbersome for me to use ambiguous pronouns. Also because this will also serve as a family history the 5 people that I know read this blog on a regular basis may benefit from the greater detail.

The style will also change in that it will not be a chronological recall of events. This is because my level of understanding continued to evolve, often from first impressions to a different level of awareness. Many things I would not stretch as far as to say that I understand because my initial impression were usually correct, it is more that I see how a significant group of people may reach these behaviors.

So now the disclaimers: Of course being politically correct I could not generalize. Not all people in any group can generalized. To save myself the ambiguity of framing every entry politically correctly I will state that the observations were of as many data points as I deemed available. I know that I will get comments from family and Vietnamese friends. I welcome these comments to continue expanding my understanding.

Vietnam-Time Table

This will provide a backbone for the timing of when all the events happened:

Day 1 (Sat)- Fly to Saigon

Day 2 (Sun)- Arrive at "Hotel" that cost $200/month

Day 3 (Mon)- Historic walk thru Saigon with Dad.
-Learned where he met mom.
-Saw grandpa's shop
-Grandma's last condo
-Sat on plastic stools at resturant, just like my house!
-Lots of exotic fruits
-Dinner with Ba

Day 4 (Tu)
-Suoi Tein Amusement Park
-Hall of monsters (deformed mutations preserved or stuffed)
-Grandma's last apartment; 12" rat, this could be home
-Cit-go negotations with dad

Day 5 (Wed) Trip to Nang Trang
-Stuck in the back of the bus with the luggage and exhaust
-Met Tham
-Met Amy, Xien (seen) and QUOC (not a mispelling)

Day 6 (Th) Nang Trang
-Beach
-Fish Market
-Met Packer
-Vinpearl Amusement park, rode an electric bull with one hand and didn't fall off.

Day 7 (Fr) Nang Trang - Da Lat
-Mud Bath
-Ghost House
-Went shopping for roses with Than
-Met Mohawk

Day 8 (Sat) - Da Lat
-De Marie Church - bought sweater for Tham
-Botanical Gardens "Yellow Flower Valley"
-Luge down Mountain
-Embroidery shop
-Traditional Dance
-Monk with Chainsaw
-Bar/Club that served watermelon, pineapple, strawberries and no napkins for the drink condensation. 3 year old child was in the club at 10:30 at night.

Day 9 (Sun) Back to Saigon

Day 10 (Mon)
-Downtown Saigon with Dad, family history chapter 2.
-Airport overlook with Packer, Mohawk, Tham and wives.

Day 11 (Tues) Ben Tre
-Motorbikes to Cu Chi Tunnels
-M16 and M60 firing range
-Met Uncle, aunt and cousins
-Uncle's farm house residency
-6 hours on motorbikes

Day 12 (Wed) Ben Tre
-Poverty of rural community

Day 13 (Th) Saigon
-Fine arts Museum
-Dinner with Linda's son

Day 14
-Shop 5 slacks for $23
-Hair cut for $1.15, straigh razor shave on forehead

Day 15
-Presidential Palace

Vietnam- Cast of Characters

Linda: Dad's long time girlfriend that still has family in Vietnam. She has a moderate English mastery.

Ba: Elderly lady that my dad says has many similarities with my grandmother. She has no English comprehension and lives in Los Angeles. I do not know her real name and dad says don't bother trying to learn it because I can never use it anyway. I address here as Chao Ba (respectfully hello elderly woman), thus the name Ba. Within a few minutes of meeting her she is showing me pictures of her grand daughters. Later she invites me to visit here in CA. It is not hard to guess her motives since she and I can not communicate. The next day she would tell my father that she thinks I have a kinder aura than my brother. I guess she can tell all this from the way I carry myself because I am sure it is not something I said.

Packer: This is the nickname I gave the Cantonese speaker I met on the 2nd day of the tour. I helped him with a user-generated problem with his camera, thus winning his friendship. From that point on he and his wife actually spoke to me. He speaks Cantonese and his wife moderately speaks English.

Mohawk: I would interact with him and his wife more on the 3rd day of the tour onward. His wife has a moderate mastery of English and he has a weak comprehension of it.

Amy: She is the mother of QUOC and the aunt of Xien. The whole family present speaks Cantonese and she has a mild command of English. At the start of the tour I would start off literally in the back of the bus with the luggage. The seal back there is poor so the exhaust enters the bus from the back corners, one of which I would be sitting at. An hour and a half into the trip I move up to sit next to Amy. When I figure out that they speak Cantonese this is a great relief because going 3 days without understanding anything other than what my Dad chooses to translate for me gets old. She invites me to visit her boutique in Chinatown, LA. After 5 days of speaking Cantonese with the people on the bus I can tell that I have vastly improved and pretty much gotten up to a plateau point. This practice would greatly help me when I got to Ben Tre to see Uncle. I had been worried that because of my lack of use of the language it was deteriorating very rapidly, it appears it had not quite deteriorated as much as I thought.

QUOC: The eldest son of Amy, is an Engineer and if fluent in English. He is about 6 foot tall and laughs about his cousin Xien, saying that she "can't drink". He ends up paying for it the next day. Karma is a wonderful thing when it happens to other people.

Xien (seen): Niece? of Amy? She is a local Vietnamese lady whose primary language is Cantonese and also is fluent in Vietnamese and a number of other languages that I can not translate. She speaks no English. My first interaction with her was after I sat down next to Amy on the bus. Xien offers me a piece of fruit she had just cored. I believe in the saying that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. You know it is going to be a good relationship when the first thing a pretty girl does is feed you. One of the few occasions I spoke with QUOC in English Xien berates us and says that we are in Vietnam so we are not allowed to speak English. I tell her that my Grandmother says that when we speak English around her that we are yelling at her. Therefore Xien sounds like my grandmother, an old lady. She does not appreciate this comment but her cousin and aunt gets a chuckle out of it. She has an interesting complex about being not pretty she seems to think that she was hit by a bus and truck at the same time. Of course I refute this many times, but she does not know how to take a compliment. She questions why I am not courting an American woman and says that's what she would be doing if she were as good-looking as me. She thinks I am too picky. I would later that I find out there is a rumor floating around the bus that I came to Vietnam to find a wife. I can guess where that rumor started. Xien makes two references to having light colored skin is better. Think about it, all the Asian models and superstars are very pale. This makes sense because the Western world went through the same mentality when we had more agricultural influence. The second time was when I ask why she had put on her jacket in the scorching heat and she said it was to keep the sun off. I tell her that in the US people pay to get a tan, ask your cousin. She doesn't appreciate this comment and demands to know why I must always turn everything around on her. Her cousin and I get a chuckle out of it when the bus opens up and she huffs and states that she is getting on the bus and the people who are not afraid of tanning can stay outside. After lunch one day she playfully says that she is jealous that I can just go upstairs and rest while she has to ride the bus back to her [better] hotel. I offer to let her rest in my room on the pillows. She huffs and exclaims in an exasperated tone “Pillows!” I say that if she wants to sleep in the bed that can be arranged too.

Tham: The tour guide. He command of English is weak. My first significant interaction with her is at the mud baths. While we are in the sun waiting for the mud to dry we are the only ones in the immediate vicinity. She explains to me that my skin will be very soft after this mud treatment. She says that all the girls will want to kiss me. I turn my cheek toward her and to allow her to prove her claim. She gets a real chuckle out of this and the story would be retold a number of times throughout the trip. I can tell when the story is being told in Vietnamese because she would point at me and eventually turn her cheek and everyone would laugh.

Uncle/Cousins/Aunt: Interactions between this group will all be observations except with Uncle since none of them speak Cantonese or English except him. He has a mastery of Cantonese. They live in Ben Tre many of them work in the coconut industry as laborers. Uncle commented that I blew through in about 10 minutes the amount of money he makes in 40 hours of shucking 8000 coconuts. That small fortune I burn through was about $30 USD. There is no trash pickup or disposal in the rural areas so the residents get to figure our what they are going to do about it. Many of them choose to leave it lying around, especially if it cannot be burned.

Vietnam-Other Observations

We went to a nightclub in the Nha Trang and instead of bringing peanuts for munchies they brought fresh fruits like watermelon, strawberries and pineapple. They also brought salt to dip the fruit it to help wet our appetites for hydration.

In Nha Trang there was a seafood market next to a private beach. The customer selects the items by the kg and they cook it up and deliver it to your at the beach. The vendors are very good at tracking the customers. They spotted us 30 yards in the water. Dad and I of course were not wearing glasses in the water and were topless, yet they still found and recognized us. This was the first time I had ever has scallops in the shell. After we were done we left all the trash in bags by the gazebos for little local boys. The little boys took the bags. The boys separated the recyclable for money and then took the bags to some adults. They sorted through the trash and ate the leftovers. At the same time they looked like they were collecting the shells. I can only guess as resourceful as they were they were going to use the shells to make something that they could sell like tourist trinkets.

Relative to the large population I saw very few beggars. Most of the people try to be industrious and provide a good or service. Some of the efforts were not very logical from my limited perspective. There were quite a few people providing shoe shining. They were obviously not targeting locals because the locals were flip-flops. In my time there I really did not see very many foreigners with dress shoes that would need shining either although the vendors were persistent about offering to shine our running shoes.

I think the massive amount of people in the country has led to many of the people to pushing, shoving and a disregard for lines. By the 4th day in Vietnam, I had been shoved from behind four different times by someone trying to get past me in a line. One large group decided to try to shove past us in a line starting with a lady, that bugged me a bit. Then I got shoved again by her friend, and I turned this time it was her male friend and cronies. Very few things gets the alpha male testerone going more than a smaller male trying to shove him aside for position. With their behavior to get a few inches further on the platform when the transport car wasn’t even there, I recognized that there were going to try to bully their way past me once the car was there. So as the car approached I let the first of them push and shove past us then braced myself for the impact of the rest of them without ever changing my stride. I calmly sat down in the transport and effectively separated their group. One person of their groups could not fit on the transport and had to wait to catch the next transport, how unfortunate.

When I saw the monk wielding the chainsaw it was a bit of a disconnect. Since Buddhist monks are mostly poor it strange to think of them using technology because technology is usually expensive. I almost associate them with Amish, which I know is a very poor way to categorize them in. Seeing the monk with the chainsaw did help reset the association that they have not lost an appreciation for technology during their spiritual journeys. Sorry Lewis he appeared to be behind a private area of temple. While I did consider snapping a picture, I thought it might have been a bit disrespectful to be taking pictures of them in their private areas and I could not ask them if it was ok since I do not speak Vietnamese.

The Cu Chi Tunnels are the underground bunkers that the Viet Cong used to attack Saigon. There was about 150 km of tunnels with everything from kitchen to meeting rooms. They allow tourist to purchase bullets to use on the firing range. The heavy machine guns ammo would cost more than the pistols. All of the weapons were mounted with a little play for aiming but not enough to be dangerous. After firing the M60 light machine gun I realized that they were mounted so that you could not possibly hit the target. They are locked high. It dawned on me that if the foolish tourist could not hit the targets then they never had to replace them. I fired the M16 assault rifle anyway with this understanding just for the experience, but stopped after that because it takes a lot of fun out of it if you can’t ever hit the target.

Vietnam-Haircut and Luge Ride

I got a haircut for 20,000 dongs ($1.15 USD). They gave me a straight razor shave with that. What was unexpected was that she started shaving my forehead. I never knew that my forehead needed a shave. She asked me if I wanted to have it waxed. I thought that was a bit overboard and declined. I handed her a 50,000 bill and she gave me back a 20,000 and a 10,000. After consulting with dad about what was a normal tip he said 10,000 was very generous (remember that’s 50% tip). I gave her a 100% tip and made her really happy.

In Da Lat there was a gravity-tracked ride similar to a roller coaster down the mountain. Being completely gravity there were no gears to slow you down. Dad sat in front of the two-person car so I was in the back with control of the break. The car reminded me of the cars that you go down some water slides in, not much more to it than a tray with a brake. We picked a time when there was no one in front of us and took off. I took off under the philosophy of “I don’t need no stinkin breaks!”. So off we go flying down the mountain and swing around the turns at full speed. They have people seated on benches along the way. I hear one of them shout at us, dad hears it too but can’t understand him because we are zipping by. We zip by another one of them that is shouting at us and again dad can’t understand him. We use the context to assume that they are yelling for us to slow down. Those guys on the bench wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop us at those speeds. At this time it dawns on me that we are in Vietnam and they probably do not idiot proof their rides. So I decide to yank the brake slightly before the next turn. I don’t think I actually yanked it hard enough slow us down, I think I just kept us from accelerating. I did notice that this turn had netting around it, I assume that is for those fools that flew off the track because they were going too fast. The netting looks pretty feeble and I wonder if it would actually have stopped a full speed car. I continue this responsible course of action for the rest of the turns down the mountain, never really slowing down just not picking up more speed before a turn. After the ride dad said he was concerned about how fast we were going.

Vietnam-Family history

The whole city of Saigon is a market. So I found it humorous when dad would say that someone was going to the market. Every available inch of street property is a shop in front and living quarters behind it. Even in the alleys and back roads there are carts set up selling wares. The only exceptions were religious structures, and the government properties like the parks and museums. The areas that were not streets were a cross between sidewalks, parking lots (for motorbikes), and vendor store front. So the pedestrians were just as likely to be walking in the streets as the “sidewalks”.

It was well into the dark hours of the night when we walk through the closing street market leading to grandma’s first apartment. Debris from the market completely littered the street. As we left the alley there was a 12 inch rat (8” body, 4” tail) that scurried across the path. This could have been home.

In the daylight dad showed me where grandma’s last condo was. In the same day he showed me where grandpa’s stamp store was and the place where he met mom. He answered the question of how they met each other. He showed me where he proved that wood was stronger than his ribs and the hospital that grandma took him to afterwards. This was how he got all the stitches in his abdomen.

Dad shared with me stories about how he and his father bonded working the stamp shop and his errands to the post office. He told me about what he had heard about his only uncle that lived outside of Shanghai, where grandpa was originally from. He also shared what he knew about his only cousin. We also covered mom’s side of the family and why there was some bad blood with parts of that side of the family.

Spending time with dad in Vietnam provided an opportunity to see and hear things that I would never have experienced otherwise.

Propaganda and War

In the places I visited in Vietnam the monuments and most prominent displays were of the war with America. There is very little mention of the wars preceding and following the Vietnam War. Meaning little is said about the war with the French (before) and about the war in Cambodia (after) and with the Chinese that followed the Vietnam War. Some of the translations were pretty comical, and clearly not done by fluent English speakers. The translations were much harsher than what one would find in a historical monument in the US. Instead of referring to the Southern Forces in a governmental term the translations often referred to them as the “Americans and their Lackeys” or something else derogatory.

Having a chance to interact with Draftees of the Vietnam War it is not surprising to get the sense that they were not really interested in the political side of the war, meaning they only fought because they had to. Spending time in the countryside brings the understanding that wars are conducted by the rich for the interests of the rich and usually fought by the poor. A rice farmer who is happy to makes enough to have 3 meals a day. His free time is spent socializing with his neighbors and family over a cup of tea. He doesn’t have the money for other options. Why would he care whom he pays his taxes to? Why would any government care what is doing out in his rice patty as long as he was not being disruptive? Yet it is the poor rice farmer who was drafted into the wars. It was the draftee rice farmers that were hit by the 500,000 bombs in the front lines, the victims of environmentally destructive chemicals. What happens when that farmer’s family is slaughtered or mistreated because soldiers are incapable of distinguishing the enemy? This sounds like certain elements of Abu Ghraib doesn’t it?

There are always two sides to every story. Somewhere between the two stories lies that truth. The truth may not be a single absolute point but rather a fuzzy region that resides with elements of both perspectives. As American children in the US educational system during the eighties we were brainwashed to be terrified of the communist specter. We were told that democracy is the best form of government and that almost everything else was evil. Does that kind of remind you of Bush Junior’s “Axis of Evil”? We were told how we were so heavily oppressed by the British so we had this glorious revolution leading us to believe that everyone in the colonies were furious with the tyranny. I got straight A’s in history, so I was pretty good at absorbing the propaganda and repeating it back to the educators what they wanted to hear even being classified as “Gifted and Talented” in that subject. If one has and interest he can find out that the majority of American’s did not actually actively participate in the revolution. The various historical accounts put the Patriot support at less than half of the population. About 20% of the population were Loyalist and actively supported the British. The victors write history.

Communism was the specter that every American kid was taught to fear in the 80’s. In my time traveling through Vietnam and China there really were no immediately visible effects of Communism, of course I wasn’t trying to find any censored websites or have political discussions or anything as aggressively foolish like that. My ex-girlfriend and I went around China without anything that hindered out movement or activities. Like wise in Vietnam. So is it really the end of the world if not every country is a Democracy?

The collapse of every democracy has been decay from within. The majority population feels apathy for the system and when the remaining figure out that they can vote themselves rich. Consider the voter participation rate and the socialistic actions like Social Security. A bunch of 50+ year old legislators vote into effect a policy that says that they pay in for a few years and then collect money for the rest of their lives. A stroke of genius if you were category to benefit, was it an altruistic policy to benefit society?

Vietnam - Living Conditions

I was pleasantly surprised and not so wonderfully surprised by the living arrangements throughout my stay in Vietnam. My home base consisted of a single room about 12’x10’ including the bathroom. I was very pleasantly surprised that a place costing $200/mo had air conditioning, cable TV, foam bed (no springs), and a refrigerator. The exterior door leading into the complex was a sliding door. The lock on this sliding door would not work from the inside. The bathroom had a sink, toilet and removable showerhead in a 5’x3’ area. The drain hose from the sink deposited onto the floor 2.5’ away from the drain. When the toilet flushed an unexplainable effluent went to a different hose onto the floor and rolled across the floor for 2.5’ before reaching the drain. The effluent was not colored, but was also not a coincidence that it came out only when the toilet was flushed. I tried not to think about why the two events happened at the same time.

At the two hotels we stayed at the night shift slept at the hotel. You could see them sleeping on a mattress or cot either in front or behind the desk. That means a request for a wake up call is useless because the night staff is asleep while customers are sleeping. The first hotel was located inside a 6-story structure, the first story being a large appliance store. You had to walk to the back of the store to get to the stairs leading to the hotel. In the late evenings the store closes and the metal roll-down door prevents anyone from entering. If you are out for a late night you have to open the mail slot and yell\bang hoping that the night staff that is sleeping on the second floor in front of the hotel desk can hear you to open the door.

Uncle’s farmhouse was located in Ben Tre. There is a small, well-maintained road that leads back his home. The road is large enough for two motor scooters to simultaneously travel. The area is lush with foliage, fruit and coconut trees. The area is by the river. There are also lots of ponds of standing water around, perfect for breeding mosquitoes. Being so close to sea level I wonder what happens when the monsoon season comes. The structure is fairly large for the area, about 50’x20’ with one bedroom, a bathroom and a covered kitchen annex. It has three-inch exterior walls and a sheet metal roof. Other than being covered by a grate to prevent intruders the windows are completely open to the exterior environment. The kitchen annex is best described as a covered patio with a large iron stove that burn anything you put into it as fuel. The bathroom had a toilet and a floor drain (no sink). Water is boiled on the stove so that warm water is available in one bucket to mix with the cold water from the other bucket. So each pitcher of water used for the “shower” is a different temperature depending on how good you are at mixing the two solutions. Brushing your teeth works the same way; you just fire away at the floor drain and rinse it afterwards. At night mosquito nets are set up around the sleeping areas.

Cousin’s place was significantly smaller and much poorer construction. The front room’s walls are made of 1”x6” boards with many inches between them exposing the exterior environment. The roof is sheet metal. The entire place is smaller than my one car garage. I have seen barns and sheds in the US of better construction, it is sad to know that hard working members of the family live in such poverty. My guess is the difference is between Uncle’s house and Cousin’s house is having foreign money sponsoring the construction versus all local earnings.