When I first came through Vietnam in June 2008, just after being politely bounced from Japan, I knew I had a friend here, sort of. Two friends, actually – brothers named Steve and Ken Mueller. The Mueller boys had gone to Bishop England High School just a couple of years ahead of me, though I hadn’t really known them then, as it was an unwritten but strictly enforced law at my high school that one could not speak to or acknowledge anyone in any grade below than you, upon pain of the worst kinds of adolescent punishment. (Paradoxically, having a friend in the grades above you was the ultimate coup, made fiendishly difficult by the former rule and often rendered pointless once achieved, due to the fact that your new friend had become, by dint of his willingness to speak to you, a leprous pariah of no use to you or anyone else.)

Steve and Ken had both attended Clemson University slightly ahead of me as well, but I hadn’t really known them there, either, as we’d effectively exchanged one set of rules for another, the new ones being even more rigid and unforgiving – that of the university Greek system. Younger and older were now okay, but fraternizing, as it were, with people not in the frat resulted in a kind of living death – imprisoned in a friendless purgatory, scorned by the ‘brotherhood,’ shunned by the non-Greek population for being in a loathed fraternity.

In any event, I’d managed to keep up with the Muller brothers by proxy in the years after university, and so I knew they’d both left the U.S. shortly after graduating and had been living in Vietnam for some time. It seemed like a good idea to look them up as I was traveling through Vietnam, as I knew nobody else this side of the Korean peninsula, and after attending my friend Andrew’s wedding in Bali two months hence, I would once again be jobless, homeless and without a plan. It felt like a good time to look up dear old friends.

Almost two years later, I’m in business with Steve Mueller. Turns out he’d been living in Ho Chi Minh City for ten years, had a Vietnamese wife and a son, owned several successful businesses including a popular cafe in Pham Ngu Lao ward, and was just about as happy as a pig in shit. One of these businesses, though now winding down, was keeping up with orders for restored vintage Vespa scooters, which he sold and shipped all over the world. (See more on that story here.) The gig was slowing down when I arrived because, in the ten years since he’d begun, other folks had got wind of the international demand for restored vintage Vespas, and restorable bikes had become much harder to find in Vietnam, though labor was still inexpensive.

The result was that when I met up with him on my swing through Saigon in June 2008, Steve was trying to repurpose his Vespa business into a high-end tour company offering guided trips through southern Vietnam’s coastal nether reaches on vintage Vespa scooters. All he needed was a partner to handle sales and marketing. The rest, you can figure out yourself.

Last week, Vietnam Vespa Adventures had our biggest week of business yet – a group of ten young Australians and an American contractor working in Iraq. The tour: three days on the coastal road from Ho Chi Minh City to Vung Tau (via hydrofoil ferry) and then onwards to the the tiny fishing village-slash-local resort town of Mui Ne. Including the Vespa Adventures team we took along (myself, Steve and his wife, Phuong, tour chief Josh Baker and friend Kurt , plus a road crew of three, a driver for the support van, and various other miscellaneous groupies and hangers-on), we had a convoy of nearly 20 people. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the great fortune to ride a classic 1968 Vespa Sport along the Gulf of Thailand, eating authentic local cuisine, staying in three- and four-star resorts, driving through the countryside of a developing nation where life is almost as simple and pure as it was 100 or 1,000 years ago, but I highly recommend it. Fortunately, I now get paid to do so.

Next week, it’s our eight-day tour to Nha Trang. I won’t be able to make the whole thing (classes at RMIT resumed this week), but I’ll hook up with the team in the old French hill town of Dalat on March 6 and join them for the downhill run to the coast. Come to Vietnam some time and join us. I’ll make sure you get a dear-old-friend discount.

The Vespas outside the ferry terminal at Vung Tau, where we orient our guests on how not to die immediately on the roads in Vietnam

The 'adventure' part starts for many with learning to ride the scooters

First stop: Long Hai hills and memorial pagoda, followed by lunch à la campagne

With the Gulf of Thailand mere meters away, it's almost possible to forget about your aching bottom

Not all those we share the road with are lucky enough to be followed by a support van

Nothing amuses the local residents in the countryside more than white people riding 40-year-old motorbikes with expensive new cameras

Workplaces here are still catching up to bleeding-edge technology like the internal combustion engine

Sometimes there ends up being just as much traffic in the country as there is in the city

The fragrance of low tide and dead fish recognizes no national borders

Mom, if you're wondering how I took this photo, you don't want to know

In Italy, all roads lead to Rome. In Vietnam, they generally just peter out and die

Sure, it's hard, grueling, thankless work, but somebody's gotta do it

One of the strangest things about living as near to the equator as I do is that the length of the days never really changes. No matter whether it’s January, August, or December, the sun rises around 5:30am and sets around 6:30pm. Winter solstice, summer solstice, whatever, there’s no difference to speak of. That means that on Fridays, once I’ve finished my last class and have established that the mess on my desk can probably wait until Monday, when I’m finally ready to pack it in for the weekend, this is the scene I’m handed by the universe as I head out the third-floor north exit at RMIT and make for the motorcycle parking lot (which you can see down there, mostly empty at 6:30pm on a Friday). That’s not Saigon per se in the background — not downtown Saigon anyway — but the section of District 7 known as Phu My Hung. Otherwise known as home.

This one’s for the folks back home. The other day, I did a double-take as I was walking down the aisles of a local supermarket. Anyone notice anything familiar about the friendly brand logo on these cans? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Piggly Wiggly has probably not begun producing Vietnamese-style beans ‘n’ franks (suòn hâm dâu) in which the “franks” are gristly chunks of ham and bone. (Of course I tried it.) What we have here is a pirated pig.

My mom was a lovely women, but she had a terrible hangup about having her picture taken. You could trick her into busting out a smile for a camera, but only if you snuck up on her and gave her no chance to think about it. This was a person with roughly the spontaneity of a philodendron.

Yet in most photos of my mother, she’s cracking a funny face. This was rarely deliberate. Her discomfort with photographs stemmed from the fact that she was afflicted with a genetic disorder known as unphotogenecity. It’s a common affliction that causes otherwise perfectly attractive, even beautiful, people to take horrible, ghastly photographs. In picture after picture, my mother has got her eyes closed, or she’s peering off-camera with a confused look on her face, or she’s in the middle of blinking and chewing with her mouth open at the same time. In person, my mother turned heads at the supermarket or the nearby bar and boat landing that qualified as a yacht club on James Island until well into her fifties. But in photos, she often looks like a cast extra from an after-school special about mentally disabled kids – the one where you find out the kid’s mom is a few sandwiches shy of a picnic, too, but she’s still a good mom, goddammit.

I can personally attest to the fact that this disorder is an inherited one, as can, I suspect, my sisters. The only person in my family who ever managed to take a photo that was worth a damn is my father, who is, ironically, the one person among us who cares the least about his appearance. Isn’t that always the way? The greatest gifts are wasted on those to whom they mean the least.

My mother also had this infuriating habit of pretending not to know the answers to questions her children asked her, instead sending the querulous child – who meanwhile while was mentally punching him- or herself repeatedly in the face – to the bookshelves in the living room. There, we knew, with a certainty born of innumerable trips past, we could find all 27 volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia, bought from Time Life Books at a special discount rate through Reader’s Digest, a subscription my mother had picked up at a bargain-basement rate by mailing in the proof-of-purchase labels from 12 cases of Tab with a hand-written letter about how much weight she’d lost drinking a diet soda product that tastes like the carbonated tears of unhappy, chronically obese people.

To us kids, this always seemed like a cop out. It would be a simple enough question, often just an offhand musing-out-loud during family TV hour: How did Klinger manage to get all those snazzy dresses when the rest of the M*A*S*H unit couldn’t even get a regular supply of antibiotics and Hawkeye had to brew his own booze? Next thing you knew, the TV was turned off and the petitioner was being directed to the hated Encyclopedia, volume K-L, to enlighten the family with a 20-minute dissertation on the Korean War. It got to where my sisters and I were afraid to ask any kind of question at all. We didn’t really care whether John-Boy could have left Walton Mountain and become a WWII fighter pilot with prescription eyeglasses. But my mother could see the skepticism brimming beneath our adolescent eyes, and some unlucky sap would be sent to the WBE for a riveting discussion of Charlottesville, VA during the Great Depression.

My mother died eleven years ago today. My father was a huge influence on me, as fathers always will be. It’s him I have to thank for being such a sentimentalist, and also for being a writer who struggles daily with a weakness for rationality. But it was my mother who shaped my character – the singular lens through which I view the experience of life. I miss her as deeply as I would miss, if it were possible, myself. She breathed in life like oxygen, and sometimes she breathed too deeply. She allowed herself to be as battered by the world as she was by her own fears of it. Yet she was also a fearless student of experience. Her own mother died when she was 13 in a car accident, and she ran away from home four years later, rather than submit to a stepmother. She saw, and imagined, a side of the world that only the rarest, luckiest among us catch glimpses of, and she did her best to share that vision with her children. At my very best moments of observation, I have but a fraction of her gift for seeing the spark of truth in the artificial, the wonder of perfection in the mundane, and the majesty in the small, the unseen, and the overlooked.

The other day I ran across a short essay I wrote about my mother shortly after she died. It was never published, which was probably for the best. But this seemed like a good time to pull it out, dust it off, and lay it down on the table again for a look. She couldn’t take a picture if you gave her money. But pictures are for fools without memory or imagination.

I love you, mom.

I’ve been thinking recently about how the worst situations often have a weird tendency to bring about wonderful things.

This has been on my mind because it was four years ago this week that my mother died. It wasn’t a sudden death, which was both a blessing and a tragedy. It was one of those difficult, extended deaths that one hears about-worse than some, but also easier than many, I imagine. No matter how you look at it, though, it was the most difficult thing I or anyone in my immediate family had ever endured. To say nothing of her.

When she was first diagnosed with cancer in 1996, my mother, whose name was Carmen, was given only a few months to live. She’d been in Louisiana for several months caring for her own parents, who were both quite ill with heart disease, and she had ignored the signs that something was wrong with her own body until she found herself in the emergency room, panic-stricken, alone, her insides a wreck. When she arrived at the airport in Charleston a week later, my father, my two younger sisters, and I were waiting for her.

It was the first time for us together as a family for many months: not only had my mother been in Louisiana for almost a year, but she and my father had been estranged for several months prior to that. The reasons were many and complex, and we children were the least likely of anyone to be capable of understanding them. But it was every bit as real as her sickness, and we hated both the cancer and the division between my parents with the same bitter lack of comprehension.

She emerged from the gate red-eyed and weak, her abdomen distended with ascites as if she were eight months pregnant. She cried at seeing us, and we cried at seeing her cry and at the fear we all felt. We huddled together for a little while, a little ball of family, crying together, drawing strength from each other and trying to pass it on in equal measure. But the terror crept in among us, bubbling up in that group hug as if our closeness was all the permission it needed.

“I’m going to die,” she cried into my and my sisters ears necks. “I don’t want to die.”

“Don’t be silly, mom,” we cried back. “You’re not going to die. You’re just scared, and that’s okay.”

Yet inside, we all suspected she was right. The doctors in Louisiana had been clear: advanced ovarian cancer, not yet metastasized but almost certain to do so without extraordinary luck.

But what could we say?

Even after my mother was admitted to the hospital and her doctors told us the cancer was still treatable, she knew her chances were slim. But she grasped at that sliver of hope with the astonishing strength that only nearly hopeless people can muster. And she did it with such grace, such consummate eloquence. I lose my breath thinking what that must have cost her.

But my mother was a rock, unwavering in her conviction that she could beat the thing that was killing her if she wanted to badly enough, unwilling to give in to the numbing fear that would cause most ordinary people to withdraw into themselves like beaten animals, people who remain uncaring and unaware that the overwhelming beauty of the world and the people in it persists, even if they themselves do not. My mother poured her heart into her friends and children, and we spent as much time with her as we could, which was, for my part at least, hopelessly inadequate.

She was living in an apartment, which my sister shared with her many nights. Still, she kept my father at a distance. Sadness leaked out of her in silent waves when we spoke of him, but she was unrelenting.

The doctors finally gave up on the chemotherapy. It was doing her about as much good as a warm glass of gasoline each morning, noon and night, and it was a lot less pleasant. She didn’t despair but rather continued to hope that an alternative therapy might be found. My father spent the majority of his waking time calling physician friends, researching new or untried therapies on the internet, sorting through the thousands of snake oil peddlers and legitimate medical programs across the country, none of which would ultimately prove a salvation in any sense but in the hope that one might be. But we prayed, and my mother prayed, and my father prayed perhaps hardest of all.

In August 1997, my father announced that he and my mother were traveling to Houston to participate in an experimental procedure at a hospital there.

“It’s a little unconventional,” he told me, “but there’s a real chance it could do the trick.”

Somehow, I allowed myself to be persuaded that this was not a fantastic exaggeration. My sisters both knew the truth, of course: experimental procedures exist only for those who have exhausted every other possible medical recourse. They are the straws at which refugees of modern medical science clutch in their last, desperate hopes.

Yet I was too weak not to believe him. I knew I’d been neglecting my mother in recent months, unwilling to believe she could possibly die, afraid to confront the anger that festered in her toward my father, who, in her less lucid moments, she accused of causing the cancer. I had buried myself in work, pretending that I was too busy to make time for her,

About a week before she died, my mother was lying in bed, so weak she could hardly speak or even turn her head to look at us. Her eyes were sunken deep into her face like flickering bruises, her head hairless but for a few stray wisps, her skin colorless and wan. She wore a mask that fed her oxygen in a regular whish whish of air gurgling through humidifying water beside the bed.

It was an exceptionally good moment for her; she was sitting upright in the bed and smiling, looking around at us as if seeing us for the very first time, a surprised, slightly entranced smile playing across her face. She stared at my sisters and I with wide open eyes, soaking up the glory and the unspeakable magnificence of these things she had created, and she smiled with the happiness of all that. And we all felt it. I will never forget that look for the rest of my life. At that moment, she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.

My father was there with us, standing beside her, holding her hand tightly. As he had been for weeks. He suddenly leaned down, whispered something secret to her, and pulled the mask slightly aside so he could give her a quick, reassuring kiss. Somehow, my mother managed to raise her hand, tremulously, and place it on the back of his head, pulling his face down to hers, where she kissed him for what seemed like an eternity.

And it was.”

It’s been a while since I mentioned it, but I have another blog – a sister blog to Man and Ultraman called The Daily Edamame. I once described that blog as “the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn” in an effort to make a succotash metaphor about the two, forgetting that a) edamame is made from soybeans, which makes for a confusing metaphor, and b) not all that many people really know what succotash is, and even fewer actually like it. The inevitable result is that people stayed away in droves from Edamame, worrying probably that it was a blog about obscure ethnic vegetable dishes.

Fear not. The Daily Edamame is nothing more than a photoblog featuring some of the many thousands of pictures I’ve taken since I’ve been in Japan and Southeast Asia. I’m not a professional photographer, which will be obvious, but every once in a while I get lucky. Now that I’m back in one place for a while and in possession of a new laptop, I thought it made sense to crank things back up. So forget everything you ever heard about beans and get over there, pinto. Er, pronto.

It’s sort of been lost in all the hubbub lately, upstaged by gang-related beatings (do they have witness protection programs in Japan?) and me being shown the door by Japanese Immigration, but a few weeks ago I started a photoblog. It’s sort of a brother blog to this one, like succotash – the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn – except that it’s all photos, with none of the annoying yammering that goes on here. It’s called The Daily Edamame – you may remember the name from the title of an M&A category I introduced with fanfare and subsequently ignored.

The pitch: one photo per day, a brief caption, and nothing else. Like edamame, it’s briefly distracting, tasty but not too filling, and it lets you feel like you’re partaking of something that’s good for you without, of course, being good for you. Unlike succotash, which really is good for you (I’m mixing vegetable dishes on top of metaphors; maybe I’d better bring Hemingway instead of Bukowski to Vietnam). So go ahead, subscribe. One more RSS feed won’t bring your browser crashing down in a smoking pile around your feet. Unless you’re using Internet Explorer.

While I’m on the subject, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to Man and Ultraman for the next few weeks. Best case scenario: It will seamlessly morph from a staid-life-in-Japan blog to a fresh new life-on-the-trail blog. It will fairly crackle with new characters, overflow with tales and adventures from the underbelly of Asia, and groan with the weight of all the new photographs. Revivified by the salt air and the thrill of the road, it will glitter like the sea at night and shine like the eyes of young lovers.

Worst case scenario: Well, we all know what that is.

The crystal ball is hazy because I don’t know if I’ll be taking my laptop with me. I’d like to, but in a stroke of bad luck that I refused at the time to take as a karmic comment on my decision to move to to Japan, it took a body blow during the flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, destroying the monitor entirely. Since the day I arrived, I’ve had to use it with an external monitor. Which has worked fine. Except that now when I most need a mobile computer, mine’s not remotely mobile.

Most of Southeast Asia, I’m told, is more wired than than a roomful of West Hollywood talent agents, and internet cafes are as common as noodle joints. So keeping connected won’t be too much of a chore, but I may have to do most of my writing old school-style, with pencil and paper – which is a lot more conducive to short and to the point than it is to rambling, stream-of-consciousness monlogues. And I have no idea what I’ll do about saving photos without a computer to download them to. The last time I tried that, I lost everything. Of course, the last time I tried anything like this was 1991. Hopefully I’ve learned something since then.