Lon's Pointy Hat

Lan is our next tour guide on the boat itself. We paid $45, and it seems like he purchased a guide for each strip of land in the Mekong Delta. She has one of those pointed bamboo hats that we always see in the explosion scenes in Good Morning, Vietnam-type movies worn by crouching rice field workers. She smiles a lot and her eyes turn upward at the outer corners. She’d look nefarious if she didn’t look so happy. Her English is rough, but she tries to communicate. She repeats herself often. Not like our grandmothers do by telling the same story about the Depression or what it was like to wear knickers in the winter. Rather, Lon punctuates her sentences by repeating the phrase she ended with. When we were starting our journey, she reviewed the itinerary. She said, “Here we will visit a coconut candy factory. A coconut candy factory. Then, we will go to the south to have a traditional meal. A traditional meal.” She is one of those guides that feels she must earn her keep by a constant volley of words. Of words. As if she is the Charles Dickens of the Southeast Asian tourism world, getting paid Vietnam dong per spoken word.

Nietzsche
Lon tells me about the local people in their fishing boats as we pass by. I’m not understanding it all, but I dutifully nod and smile, resentful of Kristie’s freedom to look at whatever she wants. She tells me about the local people on the island and their crops. She said something that sounded a lot like, “The local people look like Nietzsche. Look like Nietzsche. You know Nietzsche?” Now, I know this isn’t what she said, so before I launched into a philosophical discussion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, I simply said no.

Rolling Down Your Sleeves and Working
On our canoe-like boat trip through a canal that splits one of the islands, our other guide pointed out the gloves on the boat drivers’ arms. These gloves cover fingertips to biceps, something Batman would wear. They do this, he said, to avoid getting a tan. They want to look white. I told him that white people want to look darker, so they tan. He said both want the same thing. For the Vietnamese, dark skins equates to hard, outdoor labor and a lower social status. The gloves help keep the skin underneath white, so they can go out, take off the gloves, and hide what they do for a living. White Americans want to portray the image of a life sitting on a beach, rather than the whiter-than-Dilbert alabaster that comes from working in an office. Their bronzed bodies show that they live a life of Riley. Color, he said, puts one’s status in society out for all to see.

We wear our social status on our literal sleeves, I guess.