Sai Gon February 23, 2001. Today I had a simple day -- had breakfast & a cup of joe, and went to work on a Honda. My friend Lan at work (who shares my office with me and is the sister-in-law of the boss) is very sweet and drove me home today (well, her driver did). It turns out that my Uncle A has operated on her 5 times since she was 3 (she's now only about 21 or 22 and had her lung partially removed). Uncle A performs 2-3 surgeries per day, everyday. He's paid a couple of hundred dollars a month. He's a pediatric specialist and the medical director of the Pediatric Hospital in Saigon. Dr. A performs surgeries from gastrointestinal to cardiology to you-name-it. I'm told he's in the Guiness Book of World Records for having separated siamese twins in which both twins survived, and that the surgery time was a record 18 hours. My uncle is famous throughout Asia, and is renowned in the international medical arena, and knowledgeable beyond the pediatric sector. He offered to let me go into the operating room any day if I want to -- I just don't know if I want to. He carries a lot of weight here since he's the guy the officials pick to have operate on any of their own family members in any case.

I stepped into a peacefully quiet home (in which I am now blaring U2) while all the aunts are off in HaNoi. I spent about an hour with Ba Ngoai, my grandmother, who wants me to tell Dad that she misses you very very very much (she started to cry when she told me so) and she told me that since I am here, you must miss me and be sad that I'm gone, so it makes her sad for you that I'm here. But then she said that now that I'm here, she's so happy, and if I leave her, that she'll be sad. So I said, "Ngoai (grammy), I'm screwed. If I stay you're sad for dad and if I go you're sad for yourself." She laughed. Even though I've got cousins here, they didn't grow up with her, so she's not very close to them. Though they love her very much, they have a more formal relationship with her -- one in which she is a respected elder. Not that I don't respect my elders, but I have a different kind of camaraderie with my elders that I think some people here think is odd. I tend to joke and tease in a way that is nearly inconceivable to my cousins. I might occasionally walk a fine line on the brink of disrespect (though not intentional). My excuse is that I'm American.

I forgot to mention the play I saw the first week I was here. It's called "12 Bis May Man." Bis is the Vietnamese way of saying "Encore" and "May man" can be translated roughly to "lucky." It's a comedy based on the unlucky 13 (which is lucky in Italy, by the way), and I was surprised that I actually understood most of it. My mom explained many of the puns for me, though, since I don't quite get all the slang & expressions.

The other day when I was having dinner at my Uncle Minh's house, another Uncle (the husband of my second cousin once removed) asked me "so your brother is Hong Khac what?" It's really strange that a stranger would know my brother's name, but in context, it's actually not odd at all. Dad's name has a very interesting history to it. All sons of all Hongs are given a middle name which indicates their generation. There are eight generation names which are then repeated in a cyclical fashion. My grandfather and all his brothers and all his male cousins were given the name Hong Quang ______. My dad, all his brothers, and all his cousins are given the name Hong Giu (Du) _____. My brother, and all my cousins are given the name Hong Khac (in Lobo's case, it is Hong Khac Huy), and so forth. I'll have to find out what the rest of the names are in the cycle from my Chu (which means Uncle for your father's younger brothers) Minh (who is Hong Du Minh). It's all very cool. At the wedding last week, I met a woman who was married to a Hong Khac and knew my mom and my Aunt 9 since they were kids. Because she was married to a Hong Khac, she realized that she was a relation when she met my mom and dad back in the 60's since dad is a Hong Giu (which then changed her status of being a friend of my mom's to a "niece").

Not much else to report, except that today is a vegetarian day. One eats vegetarian on the beginning and middle of every Lunar month for Vietnamese Buddhism, which follows the Lunar calendar. I also learned that Vietnamese age is higher than American age. For one thing, since it's 2001 and I was born in '73, I'm considered 28 no matter what month I was born. In addition to that, the Vietnamese consider your time in the womb a year, which makes you a year old when you're born, which makes me 29 in Vietnamese years. I also discovered that since I was conceived in the year of the Rat and was born in the year of the Ox, then I have the tail of a rat and the head of an ox (I'm mixed) though most of my year was in the year of the ox. Talk about identity crisis.