25 years ago this March, 25 years after the end of the Vietnam war I found myself, almost by accident, in Vietnam, all alone, trying to escape the horrid feeling and situation I was in at home, at the other side of the world. It did not help at all, on the contrary it elevated everything and the sorrow I felt, the loss, was overpowering. Still all I experienced on this trip (supposed to be three months ended up being just one) changed me.
I had only recently met my dad, now two years later he was struggling seriously with his cancer treatment and quickly deteriorating. I was in my early twenties, and had no idea of how to cope with it and no one in my surroundings did anything to talk to me about it, I was suffocating big time. One Sunday, I think it was, I saw a travelling program about Vietnam, I had never thought of travelling there but it looked so exotic, different, beautiful, and friendly, and it felt like a soothing place to be. Next day at my, at that time work in a bookstore owned by a very close friend of my family and someone I had known always, she asked me knowing and realising just how desperate I was in my own skin:
‘What do you want to do?’
‘I want to get away from here?’
‘Were to?’
All I could think of was Vietnam.
‘Vietnam!’ I said.
‘Okey’ she replied, and told me to book a return flight right away before the other employees arrived at work, and I did.
I could leave in two weeks, because I needed to get a visa. And so, I did, first when all documents were gathered, I told others I was leaving, having an open return, not knowing what would happen to my dad or anything else.
I left and was lost totally on the other side of the world, amongst colours, heat, rain, temples I had never experienced before, and food, and truly strong women. A gift of travelling alone is always the women whom you get to talk to, who confide in you. A bad thing about travelling alone, is that, it is almost impossible not to find yourself is weird situations as drinking beers in a brothel with slimy types. But the women saved me, and the food.
Being afraid of travelling by train since always, I found a way to overcome my fear on this trip, it was terrible hard sometimes, but I took the reunion-train most of the way from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, stopping here and there on the way, going inland and also, getting a guide who took me behind on his scooter and drove me into the pale foggy sea-green mountains and the clouds, to Huế. The train was brilliant, sitting amongst piles of travellers and birds in cages, going through what I find to be so extremely exotic, wet coconut oil green palm grooves and green marble mountains, things we for sure do not have in Denmark.
I had never been to Asia before, and it overwhelmed me completely, and it gave me too much time to think about my sick dad, and what I was going to do in my own life. I fell asleep crying many nights and one night especially on a red fish and pink lotus flowered linen on a wood carved bed, this image is stuck in me as a moment when I for real realized I was losing the dad I had just met, and that I had already taken so many wrong turns in my own life, that I had no clue as how to recuperate. This was halfway through my journey, it turned out.
Hanoi soothed me, and Hạ Long Bay was unearthly, but again not what I really needed which was someone to understand me, and so I went back to Hanoi to be soothed again, sitting at the city centre looking at the lake in the grey mist, I knew I had to cut my travel short and return to be with my dad at the end. I called my mum and the travel agency and shortly after I returned to Copenhagen.
My world had changed, I had changed, yet everything in Copenhagen was exactly the same, everyone behaved like I had never been away, the only thing that was different was that, my dad was even more sick and took the chemo and radiation very badly. I was back on the 30th of April on the 30th of May he passed after two weeks in isolation. When he turned 70 on the 16th of May I made a paper-flower for him in the colours of Vietnam and the red-fish-and-lotus coloured bedlinen. He was not allowed real flowers in the isolation ward. I like to think he squeezed my hand a little, that he noticed I was there. When we said goodbye to him, we laid the paper flower on his chest in his hands, and so he took a bit of my Vietnam with him.
I muse that he is flying over all the beautiful places of the world like the emerald Hạ Long Bay, Hanoi – he would have loved Hanoi – his favoured places like Sri Lanka and Italy and that he is surrounded by colourful fish and lotus flowers.
On my photographs from this trip, it’s like there is a presence of a ghost in all of them, a shadow of green doubt and sorrow.
I made this palm tree drawing in my Vietnamese notebook.
