At Sea in the South China Sea

Oct. 22

I would like to thank all of you who have been so faithfully following my journey and e-mailing or commenting on my blog. I also want to thank you for your patience with my inability to respond. The e-mail on board is soooooo very slow and frightfully expensive and I am constantly squelching the desire to throw my computer overboard. I try to write off-line and cut and paste as fast as possible so errors occur and I don't always get to say all I want, but most of all thank you for being here for me!!! After November 15th I hope to find some free internet and have a little more freedom with my computer. Many, many thanks to all of you.

Tomorrow, on October 23^rd, we go to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the old Saigon. For my children this is a country they learned about in history class, a weird and prolonged, much debated war, a twentieth century era representing social unrest. To me it is the place that occupied my grade school and high school years; years of heated arguments, polarized friends and families, terrified young men turning 18, scarring a country and generation no matter how you felt, and taking my cousin in a ball of flame from his jet.  Twice I have visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC and twice I have had a man climb a ladder and make a pencil scraping of my cousins name engraved there. They warn us it can be difficult to visit here because of the memories we carry with us from those years. So this will be a test for me.  I’m not sure what I will think or feel. Perhaps it will just be another crowded Asian country with another new culture to be learned about. I hope so. After all, we visit the countries of past enemies all the time and have already on this trip. I would hope that is the way of the world and the way of history and mankind -- to walk forward with one another learning from the past not festering in it.

                             When I first saw the Great Wall my reaction was that nothing, nothing, could compare with this manmade feat. I have never seen the great pyramids, but I am quite sure that they were child’s play compared to 8,800plus kilometers of this huge, solid wall built into and onto the mountains and across China. Whole towns and cities grew up to support the towers and wall populations. These walls were designed to withstand the assault of hundreds of years of invaders. They can be seen by the naked eye from outer space. How phenomenal is that? Yet the very Mongol hordes and Huns they were designed to keep out still got in. The Berlin Wall went up over night to divide a city and protect the East Germans and keep those happy Communists from leaking out into the West. And it worked, for awhile. And in Israel there is a wall and they keep building different barriers, yet nothing seems to keep the one from the other. There is a huge DMZ in Korea between the North and the South. And now in America we talk about a fence between Mexico and the USA. I have seen the Great Wall. The Mongols, and later the Huns made it over. And China became as nothing in the world—poorest of poor. How long has it taken them to recover? Have they learned anything? Will they once again play the bully? Walls do not protect ideas, isms, governments, religions, even people. Walls point to our differences, they delineate, which is good for keeping track of the cows and chickens. And I guess we’ve been putting up walls since Adam and Eve first put up a wall between themselves and God. But in the end we always climb over to see what’s on the other side, whether invited or not. Tomorrow I go to a once divided country, once also an enemy, and it will be interesting to have climbed over the wall invited.

Tonight I am going to the fancy a la carte restaurant on board ship with Mr. Ugly American and his wife and friend. It is formal night so we will get all dressed up and then attend the ball afterword if I haven’t fallen asleep by 9:30 PM.