It has been raining a lot in Long Xuyen this week. The rainy season in southern Vietnam is typically from June or July through October. Rain in December is usually only a palm’s worth of accumulated dabbles in the afternoon from time to time. Since I arrived in Long Xuyen on Christmas Day it has rained every evening as well as many early mornings. I awoke at four this morning to the pounding of heavy droplets on the roof me and the pounding didn’t subside until nearly seven.
The weather is certainly atypical and everyone is talking about the peculiarity of this week. For me the peculiar feeling extends beyond to the weather as each time I return to this place I used to call home I expect to feel a sense of sentimental attachment, a torrent of memories, and an overwhelming nostalgia. But this time I feel…
I remember reading a word on my friend’s blog a few years ago: “vô cảm.” It was the last line of a poem he had written about his feelings when visiting a particularly Romantic place and when we discussed the poem he explained that this word (not in my dictionary) was actually combination of two particles: “vô” and “cảm.”
The Vietnamese language contains many of these pasted-together words and he told me that “vô” means “without” and of course that cảm was the first syllable of the word “cảm thấy” which means “to feel” and “cảm giác” which means “sensation.”
“Vô cảm,” then, means that someone is without feeling, without sensation. I sat for a moment thinking about this and he went on to say that upon reading this last line of his poem, many friends and family members had posted comments asking “What’s wrong?” They assumed that “vô cảm” meant that he was sad.
But “vô cảm” is not that at all, quite the opposite, he continued. It means just what it says, without feeling, and nothing more. There was no negative connotation implied with this word. He was simply a poet digging deeply into the recesses of his mind for the perfect words to describe his emotions and finding that in fact there were no emotions to describe.
It has been nearly one year since I waved goodbye to my students and friends with tears in my eyes. Many things in Long Xuyen have changed. Several friends have gotten married. Several former students have received scholarships to study abroad. Several former colleagues have been promoted in the university…I am vô cảm.
Many things are still the same, such as the woman who sells vegetables at the market, the guy who fixes bike tires on Võ Thị Sáu street, the little coffee shop across from the university with 3,000 VND iced coffee…I am vô cảm.
The closest I came to feeling any pressure from the chisels of memory chipping away at the icy shell of my heart occurred on a bike ride. My favorite bike ride (see former posts) is a narrow dirt track that runs behind the university’s new campus. It is flanked by rice paddies along the left side with occasional tufts of coconut trees shading the low wooden houses, and on the right side a deep canal carries silt from the fields to the Hậu River.
My mind often wanders on this ride as my eyes accordingly wander across the landscape and a few days ago while riding along the dirt track I thought to myself, “When they pave this road, maybe that will be my signal.” Signal for what, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe that it is time for me to leave Long Xuyen. I think that must have been it.
Not more than two minutes later I rounded a bend to see a large blue backhoe digging away at my sacred dirt path. I lowered my head to avoid stares as I dragged my bike past the machine and when I passed I noticed that my dirt track was the width of a typical country road and had been recently flattened by a steam roller. I pushed a gulp of tears down my throat to my stomach, a painful swallow.
But other than that, my visit to this, my home for two years, has been pleasant, productive, but decisively…vô cảm.
