Man and Ultraman

Chúc mừng năm mới, friends. Or, as you say in the Western hemisphere, happy New Year!

Yes, yes, I know all of my American friends reading this are thinking, You fool, you addled ignoramus, you rice-besotted chucklehead, New Year’s Eve was more than a month ago, are you so deluded by life in that backwards, hopelessly unhip nation that you’ve lost sense of time altogether? The coming holiday is not New Year’s but Valentine’s Day, shit-for-brains. We know this because every retail establishment in America is assaulting us with that invaluable information every moment of our waking lives until Sunday, when it will all transform smoothly overnight into a full-scale marketplace offensive of behalf of Easter. So thanks very much, Captain Caveman, we’ve got a pretty good handle on which holidays are which over here. Go back to sucking on your boiled egg fetuses and leave us alone until you’ve got something intelligent or at least interesting to say.

Ah, the intimacy of true fellowship. What you fail to understand, my dear American friends, is that while in your indulgent corner of the world the coming Sunday is indeed Valentine’s Day, here in Asia the date of February 14 coincides this year with the Lunar New Year, known locally as Tết (yes, the same as that Tet). Tết in Vietnam is far and away the biggest and most popular holiday of the year, so much so that they’ve stretched it out to a full week or more. By this time tomorrow, Ho Chi Minh City will be a ghost town, all its transient residents returned to the countryside to spend the next week imposing on their families, participating in pointless and obscure rituals, exchanging gifts into which little or no thought went, overeating shamelessly and drinking more than is either safe or legal, and opening old wounds with relatives they’d not squabbled with since last year’s forced reunion. In other words, Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ll be spending Tết alone next week, as my girlfriend will be returning to her hometown, Hanoi, where she will ring in the Year of the Tiger with her loved ones in traditional fashion and very likely be forced to answer some difficult questions about why she is still dating an aging foreigner with a receding hairline and no trust fund. Dear heart that she is, she’s made me my very own Tết tree, trimmed with envelopes of ‘lucky money ’ – a compulsory part of every Vietnamese New Year. (And they call this a communist nation. Pah.)

Life in Vietnam has its privileges: for example, a karaoke machine on every corner and in a fair portion of the personal domiciles in the city. Did I say privileges? Well, privileges, punishments, it’s mostly a question of semantics, isn’t it? Rather like ‘torture’ and ‘enhanced interrogation,’ not that I’m making analogies.

Here in the developing world, a karaoke machine is as necessary a part of life as the With this simple bit of technology, easily entertained local residents serenade their friends, peers, colleagues, and the immediate neighborhood with “traditional” songs pirated from the Chinese and re-rendered in the vernacular of synthesizers and electronic drum kits. The singers typically do not have any formal training, nor, indeed, bathroom showers in which to train. (Or even bathrooms, judging from the number of Vietnamese men urinating on the side of the road at all hours of the day). This does nothing to dampen their zeal for the pastime, however, and they indulge it with masochistic lust, apparently nowhere more so than in my apartment block.

Given the number of Vietnamese men hopped up on locally-brewed bia hoi and yowling like car-struck cats into microphones every evening beginning at dusk, one might expect there to be more violence — as for example in this striking bit of reportage from the Philippines, where bloody carnage often accompanies the performance of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” among other similarly incendiary fare.

The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks, and the country’s many Sinatra lovers are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.

It seems karaoke-induced butchery is not limited to the Philippines.

In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.

In fairness, you’ve got to admit John Denver and Coldplay will have that effect on people almost anywhere. I find it interesting that Vietnam’s not on that list. After some reflection, I realize this must have to do with the facts that 1) there are no guns in Vietnam (although you can blow up a cow with a claymore if you know the right people), and 2) drunkenness is Vietnam is not undertaken lightly but with the seriousness as befits life in a developing, communist-ruled nation.