7 January - Hoi An & Memory tricks

I was in this country a mere 8 years ago. But for example in Saigon, it’s only as I turned into a street and I saw a bar that I remembered yes my hotel then was a few doors down from it. The bar is where all the westerners were and the chewing gum kid vendors had to proffer their stuff from outside the windows as they were not allowed in. But in Nha Trang I’d never be able to find my hotel, it was just … a newish building, the whole town is new but sort of sad. it’s even more apparent now, a cross between Blackpool Torremolinos, minus the bars. There aren’t that many and the only stylish one could be in Madrid or Barcelona for all that it distinguishes itself. No locals there. I also had plenty of dinners with people I befriended briefly and I can’t recall faces or names except for HSM, a New Jersey Jewish man who was busy learning how to write Chinese characters. We met on a coach trip. He was in IT? living in an empty house bar a bed and a TV I think. Why did he have money to travel? An inheritance? A silicon valley style cashing in? He’s still travelling, he’s never gone back. He lives in Taiwan now and acted as a white man extra in local movies. He says his Chinese girlfriend doesn’t speak English. I guess I could ask him to fill in some of the gaps in my memory.

But where did I stay? I went on the spliff-boat trip (the one that attempts to re-create what a fun life demobbed GI’s must have had a few hundred miles down at China beach in Danang) and the Israeli guy played with me in the water when we stopped for lunch, under the watchful and doleful eyes of his girlfriend. She was not up to his standards and she knew it, and I had not much remorse… But he chickened out of coming up to my room later. Where was HSM? We were not a couple but were sharing some rooms. Local people thought we were though and would ask… I’d show them a picture of me and Canadian loverboy and they’d look at HSM and grin happily and point, ‘Yes it’s him!!’ And no he wasn’t. First time I realise that we all look the same to them too.