It’s rather difficult to believe, but it’s been almost exactly one year since I left Japan and became an itinerant in Asia. That number, you may recall, has special significance for me.

It was 11 and a half months ago that the congenitally polite officials of Japan’s Immigration Office took offense at the length of my undocumented stay in their country (”incorrectly documented” is really more accurate) and invited me to take a one-year holiday somewhere - anywhere in the world, really, as long as it was outside the bit of squiggly lines on the map within which lies the word “Japan.” It was an invitation there was no declining. And so on June 5 of last year, I left my first Asian home with slightly less luggage than I’d arrived with, no plan to speak of, even less of an employment strategy, a well-worn-in pair of relatively new hiking boots, and a global recession to welcome me.

It’s been an interesting year. If you’d suggested at that time that in June 2009 I’d be living in Saigon and teaching communications theory at an Australian university to rich Vietnamese kids, I may not have laughed directly at you, but I’d have probably wondered why you were drunk at 8:15 in the morning.

My second semester as a slightly surprised university lecturer ends Friday. My third begins in roughly two and a half weeks. In-between lies the date on which my temporary banishment from the wealthiest, most industrialized, most stylishly eccentric and necessarily vain nation in all Asia ends. My persona non grata status will lose two Latinate suffixes. I will instantly transform from a prodigal son to a where-have-you-been-all-this-time one. The thuggish brutes at the entrance will lift the red velvet rope for me, intone to one another, “He’s on the list,” and usher me into the bright lights and blinking neon fantasy world of modern Japan.

If all goes as planned, I’ll arrive in Osaka International Airport via Malaysia Airlines on Saturday morning at 7:15am - exactly 365 days after leaving. To say I’m looking forward to returning is an understatement on the order of “Sex with that girl from Slumdog Millionaire might not be too bad.” Osaka’s not the prettiest city on earth, but compared to Saigon it’s Shangri La, Xanadu, Neverland and Utopia all rolled into one mouth-watering makizushi. And Kyoto is in point of fact the prettiest city on earth, or at least one of them. Plus, unlike Vietnam, Japan has the benefit of being home to a civilization that’s actually advanced beyond the Iron Age. That’s not necessarily a crack on the Vietnamese people (after all, men pee on the side of the road in both places). But it’ll be nice to spend a little time in a place where the tap water won’t poison you.

This morning The New York Times slobbers over what it pegs at the hottest new condiment of the moment, at least in remote parts of California. Sriracha Chili Sauce (Tuong Ot Sriracha) is manufactured in the good old US of A, but its roots, if sauce can be said to have roots, are Southeast Asian.

The lure of Asian authenticity is part of the appeal. Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods in Los Angeles, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples.”

Be that as it may, Tuong Ot Sriracha is thoroughly Vietnamese, from its wasabi-green cap to its squeezable bottom. Huy Fong Foods (pronounced hwee fong) is owned and operated by an L.A.-based Vietnamese expat named David Tran. The purée of fresh red jalapeños, garlic powder, sugar, salt and vinegar is a southern Vietnamese staple, the perfect complement for everything from pho to roasted dog. I can say this with confidence not because I have had roasted dog (or not only because of that) but because I have some of this very sauce sitting on a shelf in my kitchen cupboard:

Yes, that’s a bag of grits behind it. Is there a problem with that?

China gets ‘Ultra’ sensitive

Prime Minister complains about Japanese cartoon

BEIJING — Chinese viewers are boycotting Japanese toon “Ultraman” after their Prime Minister Wen Jiabao complained recently that his grandson spent too much time watching the superhero instead of homegrown cartoons.

“I sometimes take care of my grandson,” said Wen last month during a visit to Jiangtong Animation in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central south China. “But he always watches ‘Ultraman.’ He should watch more Chinese cartoons.”

He followed this up with a plea to animators to make interesting cartoons.

“Your work is meaningful. You should play a leading role in bringing Chinese culture to the world … let Chinese children watch more of their own history and its own country’s animation,” Wen said.

Keep talking your smack, Mr. Prime Minister. You just keep shooting off your mouth — and ask Terresdon, Kerronia or Mephilas what happens. An Ultra Chop to the forehead is what, combined with a Specium Ray blast that’ll leave your manhood a pair of charred raisinettes. So go ahead, bring it. You want the pain? You got it.

In exactly 28 hours, I will find myself on a stage in front of an audience for the first time in almost two years. This is a little unnerving for me, because the last time I did this I made a fool of myself.

True, the last time, that was rather the point. It was a goodbye party held for me at Theatre 99 in Charleston, where improv comedy is the specialty and foolishness is not just normal behavior but part of the house rules. Under ideal circumstances, foolishness of the improv comedy variety is accompanied by great loads of humor. Only in my case - a tongue-in-cheek interview by theatre owner and full-on comedy professional Greg Tavares - the comedy occurred all on one side of the stage (his) and the foolishness was pretty well confined to the other (mine). Also, it’s one thing making an idiot out of yourself on purpose, and quite another to do it unintentionally. People can tell the difference.

It’s not that I’ve got no experience on a stage in front of a live audience. I’ve performed hundreds of times in scores of theatrical roles - serious, comedic and everything in between. But being entertaining with the benefit of a director, lots of rehearsal, and someone else’s brilliant words in your mouth is altogether different from being entertaining on your own, on the fly. Whetever small gifts I may have as an actor pack their bags and vanish when I’m called upon to improvise. Give me a good script and a month, and I’ll make you pee your pants. But give me a microphone and a spotlight, and you will shortly wish you hadn’t.

In retrospect, I think the best I managed that evening at Theatre 99 was to come off as a slightly drunk, brainless buffoon to Greg’s straight act, which I achieved with surprising ease. Perhaps I had delusions of, at the very least, being laughed with rather than at. There was a lot of laughter, that much is sure. Fortunately, I was leaving Charleston the following week for what turned out to be a permanent relocation to Asia. This time, it won’t be so easy to walk away.

On Sunday evening at 6pm, I’ll step onto a stage at RMIT University and spend the next four hours as host and emcee of the school’s Couple of the Year Contest. Yes, go ahead, ask yourself what that is - what it possibly could be, what form a live love competition between Vietnamese students who are all members of the Business Club could take. And you will find yourself asking the same questions I did when I was invited to be the emcee.

How do you say no to an invitation like this? I’m not asking that rhetorically. Seriously, does anyone out there have any idea how I can squirm out of this thing? I’m starting to think about faking my own death.

It’s worse that the request came from my own students, who have somehow mistaken a comfortableness with classroom buffoonery in their lecturer for professional improvisational talent. I tried politely demurring - I had other plans, I had too much work, I had acute altitude sickness that prohibits me from standing on a stage, I have a phobia for phallic-shaped instruments that prevents me from using a microphone. I asked if they wanted a reference and gave them the number for Greg Tavares at Theatre 99. I intimated that a union contract required me to charge an impossible sum for my appearance. They promised me two free tickets.

There’s no getting out of it now. All week, students have been congratulating me on my yet-to-be-seen performance and telling me they’ll be in the front row. My name is on the poster (”Emceed by famous lecturer Mr. Patrick!”) It’s unlikely that I can count on the crowd being drunk and easily entertained; the only booze on hand will be what I bring in with me, and I’m going to need all of it.

No, the only thing that’s going to save me on this one is a miracle. Greg, are you out there? Can you catch a flight to Saigon in the next, say, 30 minutes? I’ve got the tab.

Ho Chi Minh City Bus Kills 3 on Motorbike

A public bus ran over a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 8 Thursday morning, killing a man, his daughter and his nephew on the bike.

Hoang Binh Duong, 44, was driving his daughter Hoang Truc Phuong and his nephew Pham Hoang Sang to school.

The bus, which had sped down the Nhi Thien Duong Bridge, crashed into the motorbike, dragged the driver and his two passengers for 20 meters and the motorbike for a further 50 meters before stopping.”

About three months ago, I bought a bicycle in Saigon. Until then, I’d been renting a dinky 125cc Honda motorbike from one of the cafes in the District 1 backpacker ghetto known as Pham Ngu Lau, for which I paid about $65 a month. The day after I bought the bicycle, I returned the motorbike to the cafe and walked away without looking back.

This I did for a variety of reasons. I’d recently moved beyond the tourist-choked streets of District 1 across the river to a newer neighborhood in the trendy part of District 7 known as Saigon South. (Please understand that when I say “trendy,” I mean only that the Vietnamese men urinating on the side of the road here make a token effort to hide their peckers, and being stopped by the police and getting shaken down for a bribe is marginally less common.) Out here, the streets are wider, the traffic less menacing, the chances of death by moving vehicle exponentially less immediate. I even found a cozy two-bedroom loft apartment just 2km from the university where I work.

I’d also noticed a worrisome trend in my waist size since leaving Japan. I reckoned this was due partly to recent changes in my diet - fried spring rolls and buttery baguettes instead of sushi every day. But mostly I thought it was because my motorbike was turning me into a walking twinkie.

In Japan, there was nowhere to which I couldn’t either a) walk, b) ride my bicycle, or c) catch a train. Sometimes I did all three; the bicycle I owned there was a smart little three-geared folding number that I often took on the train with me, doubled over on itself like a Hindi contortionist. If I got tired of riding, I could flip down the kickstand and leave it anywhere I liked, unlocked even, and return later secure in the knowledge that it would remain untouched, safe as a sleeping cow in a Mumbai market.

Trains in Vietnam do exist, but they run only between the bigger cities, and riding on one is like sawing off your own leg: slow, uncomfortable, and usually traumatic. Walking to your destination is similarly pointless. The interesting things are just too far apart here, and the hazards to life and limb too great. People look at you with a mixture of pity, perplexity, and amusement; even the locals know not to walk anywhere. Why should they, when they can hop on one of 100,000 or so idling Xe Oms and catch a harrrowing motorbike ride across the city for less than $2? Nor is there any tranquility to be had in walking anyway; traffic is an assault on the senses, and you can’t move ten meters without being propositioned by one of those 100,000 Xe Om drivers, who take the idea of a person walking - particularly a foreigner - as a personal slap in the face.

In Saigon, the only public transportation options are rust-rotten buses that run on no schedule whatsoever, and taxis. Taxis take at least triple the time to get where you’re going as driving a motorbike does, because cars are limited to driving in the leftmost of two lanes. Cars are also outnumbered by motorbikes by about 20 to 1, and the motorcyclists feel no compunction at all about driving in whichever lane suits them at that split second - or on the sidewalk, or down the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic, if its convenient, which it often is. A precise description is elusive, but imagine if you beat an anthill into dust with a shovel, then sent a remotely controlled toy car through the teeming ruins - and tried to do so without running over any ants. The result would look a lot like your typical Saigon street.

Motorbike riders here also have a breathtaking sense of entitlement to the road. Not just as a group, but individually, too. For example, there’s nothing a Vietnamese motorbike driver hates more than having to apply his brakes. It’s a psychological admission of defeat, a yielding of space and primacy that’s to be avoided at all costs. Case in point: riders emerging from a side street onto a busy highway never, ever stop and look into oncoming traffic before plowing into the stream. Instead they make a very specific point of neither pausing nor looking. It look me a long time to understand this seemingly suicidal behavior. Entire families of four would suddenly appear out of nowhere on a rattling pile of scrap metal atop two wheels, emerging from a parking lot or alleyway without so much as a glance to see who, or what, might be about to run them over - me, in this case. I’d swerve at the last instant, avoiding four counts of manslaughter by mere centimeters, cursing and gasping at the driver’s stupidity.

Only after some months did I realize this is not stupidity (or not stupidity alone) but strategy. Think about it. If, as a driver, you refuse to look at and acknowledge oncoming traffic, then the oncoming drivers will notice this, as they can’t help seeing what’s in front of them. This places the responsibility for avoiding a collision upon the only party who sees that a collision is iminent, and lets the wilfully blind driver scoot into traffic while the traffic flows around and absorbes him. It’s still insane, of course. But there’s a demented sort of logic behind it that can’t be argued with. If only a few individuals drove this way, fatalities would be through the roof. But it’s a system-wide strategy that everyone understands and uses. (This epiphany also helped me to understand one other thing about Vietnam driving codes: The reason the tumult of horns here never ceases is because horns are what Vietnamese people use instead of brakes. Suddenly it all made perfect sense.)

In other countries, parents teach their children to stop and look both ways before crossing. Here, parents teach their children that they mustn’t stop or look under any circumstances. Because then you’ll never get across.

What with all this, I found myself feeling nostalgic for the old days of bicycling to work every day. I pictured myself gliding into the parking area, the wind ruffling what remains of my hair, calves bulging beneath my work slacks, attractive female colleagues turning their heads to watch in slow motion.

What I failed to take into account was that a) it’s a lot easier to justify bicycling to work when it’s the only option, and b) it’s a hell of a lot hotter in Vietnam than it is in Japan.

I bought my bicycle at a little corner shop in District 1. My girlfriend Malo and I have a sneaky strategy we use when I need to buy anything significant in Vietnam. Knowing that, as a foreigner, the price I’ll be quoted is anywhere from twice to five times what a Vietnamese person will pay for the same item, we let her do the bargaining. But just letting her do the talking isn’t enough; the seller will see that she’s with a foreigner, and the price will be just as outrageous as if I’d asked myself. Bargaining under these circumstances is pointless, as Malo will be told it’s her duty as a patroit and a human being to help the seller ensure that I part with as much of my money as can be managed. For a local to try and lowball a fellow Vietnamese person on behalf of a foreigner is the lowest form of treachery.

Fortunately, Malo doesn’t buy into this notion. (Partly this is because she’s from Hanoi, where contempt for South Vietnam is about the same as you’d find among New Yorkers for residents of Mississippi.) So what we do is first identify an item of the sort I want to buy. Then she moves off to find a seller who hasn’t seen us together. Sometimes, after she’s asked for a price and gotten a reply that’s in the Vietnamese ballpark, I’ll sidle up to see how things are going. This usually results in a very pissed off merchant - doubly so if Malo has managed to haggle him or her down from the original asking price, which every sale involves. Sometimes, in order to avoid being cursed and accused of betraying the spirit of Uncle Ho and the entire communist way, Malo will complete the whole transaction without me. I prefer to avoid this, because too many times I’ve been burned by discovering afterward that my idea of what I wanted and her idea of it were not as close as I thought they were.

My bicycle cost me a little more than it might have, because of this - about $175. But a bicycle is something you want to be sure you’re comfortable with. (Still, I paid a lot less than the Australian guy who bought the same bike while we were there.) It’s got 21 gears, which is about 18 more than I need here, the flattest country this side of Ohio.

It’s just a ten-minute ride from my apartment into work. I arrive with the breeze in my exhaust-fumigated hair, calves bulging invisibly under chain-grease-stained slacks, dripping sweat through my work shirt. My female colleagues all turn their heads to watch, and it is with a mixture of pity, perplexity, and amusement.

If you ever start to feel as though life is no longer the challenge it’s billed as being, that you’re drifting through your days like a celebrity poodle, coddled and catered to by an endless parade of attentive sales clerks, obsequious cashiers, too-helpful bathroom attendants and timely pizza delivery service - if you find yourself being accommodated, assisted and indulged into a drowsy, zombified kind of emotionless stupefaction by the ease of living in a hyperdeveloped world superpower, well then: Vietnam is the place for you.

This is a country where the customer is not always always right. Quite the opposite, in fact. The customer in Vietnam is generally considered wrong or at least mistaken, especially if the customer is a foreigner. The words “fast,” “friendly,” and “customer service” rarely appear in the same sentence here, and promptness is seen as a personal vice.

The Vietnamese people seem to pride themselves on erecting obstacles to getting any job done. In a communist nation, it’s a political imperative that every person must have a job, no matter how menial or trivial. Popular thinking follows the logic that if one person can do a job well, then five people must be able to do that single job five times as well. A corollary principle maintains that no job should be done by a machine which could be done by a person (or five). Roads and highways, for example, are kept clean by street-sweepers - not the truck-sized kind but the people-sized kind, an army of elderly men and women who’ve been handed crooked straw brooms and can be seen every morning cleaning streets that (one can’t help noticing) are mostly composed of dirt to begin with.

Another result of this arrangement is that every person becomes far more committed to justifying his or her job than to actually doing it, which usually means spending ten times as long undertaking it as necessary and making it appear much more complicated than it needs to be. Layers of bureaucracy pile up atop each other here like breakfast at a Waffle House. Each person in this bloated machine is dedicated to wringing as much relevance as he can out of his little niche, and also to wringing as much under-the-table lucre as he can out of any poor slob over whom he has the slightest leverage.

Case in point: I recently spent close to a month trying to lay hands on a DHL package that my old flatmate in Osaka, Will, had sent to me here. DHL does not deliver to your actual shipping address in Vietnam, nor does any postal carrier. That would be too easy. Rather, knowing how much foreigners here must enjoy a challenge, the government sees to it that all packages are delivered instead to a remote warehouse way out near the airport, where they are opened, rifled through, their contents appraised and often liberated. If you’re expecting a package, the onus is on you to get to it before its contents have disappeared forever.

As to what are they looking for, who knows. Electronic items raise flags, because if they are not pilfered outright, then they can they be taxed to kingdom come when you pick up the parcel. What’s more, while you are spending weeks wading through the red tape piled up between you and your package, they can replace all the inner components with cheap Chinese facsimiles. So you end up paying an exorbitant additional fee to pick up a package whose shipping cost to Vietnam was already preposterous, and then the electronic geegaw inside breaks within a day of getting it home. No wonder the locals tell you not to bother having anything shipped here.

But in my case I had no choice. My parcel contained old clothes, a pair of iPod speakers, three books (carefully vetted to avoid confiscation by the sticky-fingered censors at Customs) and some mail that had been delivered to me in Japan after I left, including an envelope with 5,000 yen ($45) from Will as payment for my bicycle. To claim this bounty, I had to write and fax four letters in Vietnamese (I had help from my girlfriend, Malo), make two trips to the airport warehouse, and navigate a legion of shuffling bureaucrats whose only job seemed to be telling me, in Vietnamese, that they could help me with just one small part of this process before directing me to another godforsaken, unairconditioned office in the bowels of this vast building. I also had to produce not only my passport but the Customs declaration stub I’d received on my first entry to Vietnam six months previous.

Do you know what I’m talking about, this document? It’s an insignificant little piece of paper they give you on the airplane just before you arrive in a foreign country. It’s covered in rows of square boxes the color of anti-nausea medicine. On it, you write your name - one letter per box, I always run out of boxes - your flight number, how much gold you’re carrying on your person, whether or not you’re entering with live animals or uncooked vegetables, that sort of thing. You fill it out in about 60 seconds flat, hand it over to the guy at the Customs counter when you land, he tears a piece off and hands you back the rest with your passport, and that’s that.

Who on earth thinks to keep such a thing? It doesn’t have value even as a memento, because the cheap paper it’s made of biodegrades almost instantly in the festering reaches of your unwashed pants pocket or in your carry-on or wherever you’ve stuffed it once you’ve cleared Customs and have your mind set on retrieving your luggage and finding one of the few honest cab drivers with a meter that actually works rather than the demonic spinning slot machines most have attached to the dash.

I, for one, do not keep items like this. That piece of paper had no sentimental value for me, and I have never, ever been asked for it anywhere, at any time. Who knew what I’d done with it on landing in Hanoi in June 2008? It’s probably still on the floor of the cab I took from the airport into Hanoi, just another layer of history in a rancid pile that was six inches deep back then. But that little piece of paper was exactly what the DHL goons wanted. After the faxing of the letters and the passport, after the first futile visit to the giant airport warehouse, where I was treated to the sight of scores of Vietnamese men and women gleefully tearing open hundreds of foreign parcels and pawing through their contents like a sick satire of a Norman Rockwell Christmas morning - after all this, I was asked for my Customs declaration form.

Of what possible use could this thing have been to them? Even my girlfriend, who is Vietnamese and no stranger to the byzantine protocols required to get anything done in this country, was flabbergasted. I half suspected these two men had merely invented this step out of thin air as a prelude to shaking me down for a bribe. Nothing of substance is accomplished here without palms getting greased - at every level of organization, from the lowliest street cleaner to the loftiest Party member. The more official their position, the more money they rake in. No task is completed, no form filed, no ticket issued, no stamp stamped, without somebody getting a little something to ease the process along. This I was prepared for, even having already spent close to $400 to have DHL deliver a battered piece of luggage full of old clothes, books, out-of-date mail, and an iPod speaker set.

But no, they didn’t want money. Well, more accurate to say money was not the fix to this problem. They wanted - needed - that Customs declaration, and there was no way around it. Without it, my suitcase was going back to Osaka. Struggling against the rising need to throw a raging apeshit fit, I looked over at Malo for help, only to find her quietly sobbing in frustration. You know you’ve encountered an epic achievement in organizational ineffectiveness when it can make a lifelong Vietnamese resident weep openly.

Frantic, I claimed suddenly to remember all the information I’d written on the form six months before. Was that good enough? Wary, the two men in the cramped, sweltering office said it might be. What was the date I’d flown in? I tossed off a date that sounded likely, then fabricated an airline and flight number from the clear blue. One of the men wrote this information down on a pad. How much gold had I been carrying? Definitely less than an ounce, I replied, in the same breath disavowing live animals and vegetables in general. The man nodded, said something in Vietnamese to Malo, and left the office.

Malo had stopped crying, spent. We sat, not having anything else to do. We talked about this and that, trying to turn the subject to something less overtly Kafka-esque for a few moments. After about 15 minutes, I wondered aloud where the other man had gone.

“He went to find the paper,” she said.

“What paper?”

“Your paper, the one you told him.”

I stared at her, waiting for her to tell me she was joking. She looked back. “The other part, that they tore off,” she said. “He’s finding it.”

“Where?!”

“Up there,” she waved at the floors above us. “Somewhere. They have them in boxes, he said.”

I pictured a vast room the size of a football field, filled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes containing every torn off stub of every Customs declaration of every passenger who’d ever flown into the Ho Chi Minh City airport. And I pictured this man, ant-sized, peering into box after cardboard box for a useless stub of paper that didn’t even exist. I saw into the very depths of the Vietnamese mind in that instant, and I quailed.

“I made all that stuff up!” I whispered at the top of the whisper register. “I don’t have the slightest idea what my flight number was! I don’t even remember what airline I was on! I just said that so we wouldn’t have to go through all this again with somebody else in another week!”

“They knew you were lying,” she smiled.

I gaped. “So what’s he doing up there?!”

“The date was correct?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I think so.”

“He thinks he can find it.”

“But I didn’t arrive in Ho Chi Minh City. I arrived in Hanoi.”

“Oh,” she said. She thought for a minute. “He might not find it, then.”

I did get my package, eventually. The Customs stub was apparently not as all-critical as I’d been led to believe. A week later the parcel was delivered to another office, where I handed over a “tax” of about $30 and left with a battered suitcase filled with old clothes, some six-month-old mail (missing the 5,000 yen, naturally), and three carefully vetted novels. But no iPod speakers.

It’s just as well. They’d have broken within a week anyway.