Raise the Red Pen

It’s been tough lately not to follow the blow-by-blow of the recent dust-up between Google and China. Tough, that is, unless you’re one of the 1.3 billion human beings living in China, where all media accounts of the embarrassing fracas, wandering as it has over the sensitive terrain of government censorship, have been censored. Meta-censorship, let’s call it. On mainland China, any and every reference to the actual reasons for Google’s departure, and the fracas itself, have been meticulously removed from the public record by the 40,000-strong legion of government censors who maintain the Great Firewall and its many filters, sieves, traps, honeypots, hack squads, and political prisons.

Here in Vietnam, where the antennae of government officials are carefully tuned to the pronouncements of their communist counterparts in China’s bureacratic hallways, it’s been some surprise that accounts of the Google-China battle have been widely available on the Internet. Vietnam shares China’s distaste for political and religious expression; the only difference is that they lack the resources of their rich northern neighbor. The spirit is strong, you might say, but the flesh is weak. Vietnam would probably love to have a Great Firewall of their very own, but at the moment this developing economy still has to rely on foreign aid (and engineering knowhow) to build roads and bridges.

Recent word out of Mountain View, however, may change that. News reports this morning had the company lambasting a new target for alleged cyber-espionage:

Security engineers at Google Inc. and computer security company McAfee Inc. said malicious software was used to spy on government critics in Vietnam in what analysts suspect is the second major example in recent months of an Asian country trying to quash dissent on the Internet.

A posting on Google’s online security blog Tuesday said the software has targeted “potentially tens of thousands” of people who downloaded software enabling them to type in Vietnamese, and that the software was used by unknown persons to attack blogs criticizing the government’s policies. “Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,” wrote Neel Mehta, a Google engineer.”

At the moment, reports of the story are available in Vietnam on many news sites, though the BBC’s website is unavailable. It’ll be interesting to see how long those reports continue to be available here. For that matter, it’ll be interesting to see how long this particular blog remains available.

The Cyborg Manifesto

That’s Strange, Because They’ll Eat Absolutely Anything Else

With all due respect to both living and deceased parties involved, I’m confident the only reason this beast didn’t end up as dinner for the entire village is because it was already dead and rotting.

Thousands Mourn Dead Whale in Vietnam

An enormous whale known as “Your Excellency” received last rites and was buried today at the mouth of the Cai Cung River at southern Bac Lieu province in Vietnam, according to an Associated Press report.

On Sunday, the 15-ton, 52-foot-long whale was observed floating dead 26 miles off the coast. It took several dozen fishermen on 10 boats just to bring the whale ashore.

Thousands of people were expected to attend today’s funeral. Yesterday, 10,000 mourners had already gathered to honor the whale in the southern Vietnamese village. The air was thick with incense burned during such sacred occasions.

Plans are already underway to build a temple at the site of the whale’s burial.

“Whenever whales arrive, dead or alive, local fishermen believe they bring luck and safety,” Do Tien Ha, a coast guard in the area, told AP.

Also, just so we’re clear, “last rites” are the final prayers and ministrations given to Christians by Christian clergy upon death. There’s a remote chance that one or two of this gang may have been Christain, but you can bet none of them was wearing a cassock and speaking Latin. That goes double for the whale.

Dìn Ký Seafood Restaurant

I spent a significant portion of Sunday mentally salivating over the New York Times article on Saigon eateries I posted the previous day, and so that evening M. and I decided to hit one of the local spots reporter David Farley waxed enthusiastic over, Cơm Niêu Sài Gòn. The article’s account of flying clay pots and caramelized fish hatchlings sounded like a full-sensory dining experience, and it didn’t hurt that Cơm Niêu had appeared in a No Reservations episode back in 2005. If Anthony Bourdain gives it a thumbs-up, you won’t find me second-guessing the man.

Unfortunately, I forgot that Vietnamese restaurants are more attuned to the dining schedules of locals than Westerners, which means the dinner rush starts around 5pm and lasts until about 7:30pm at the latest. (After all, these people have to be up at 4:30am the day day so they can get in a good two-hour nap at lunchtime.) By the time we finally arrived at 9:30pm, chairs were being placed on their tables and floors were being mopped. A waiter enjoying a cigarette and grooming his mole hair on the street in front of the entrance harrumphed when we strolled up and gave us the shaking-hand-in-the-air sign — the universal Southeast Asian semaphore meaning “no fucking way.”

I despaired, roundly cursing fate, all the food gods and Vietnamese clocks, not having eaten since breakfast and knowing this probably meant I’d have to settle for pub food somewhere unsavory. But M. had a brainstorm: we’d check out an all-night Vietnamese-Chinese joint she knew a few blocks away called Dìn Ký Seafood Restaurant. Turns out Dìn Ký is one of those Vietnamese places with a menu the size of a capital-city phonebook; you know for a fact there’s no way they cook some of these things more often than once a year. But with M.’s guidance and a look around at what other diners were tucking into, we settled on a grab-bag of crumbled fried softshell crab, vegetable springrolls, a salad of crab-claw meat and needle mushrooms, and stuffed grilled cockles with peanuts and cilantro.

The favorite of the lot was the softshell crab: lightly breaded and perhaps a little too vigorously fried, it was served with the ubiquitous saucer of soy and sliced red chilis that accompanies nearly all southern Vietnamese dishes. The vegetable spring rolls were also fried, the diameter of a V-8 cylinder, and delicious. Crab claw meat and needle mushrooms (who knew there was such a thing?) may go together well in a salad, I don’t know; all we tasted was mayonnaise, in a sea of which both ingredients were drowning. Last on the list: a quartet of cockles, drizzled with oil, cilantro and aforementioned chopped peanuts and grilled. The result was a shellfish with the taste and consistency of galvanized rubber. Probably great for weight loss, as you’d lose 100 calories just masticating the thing. All in all, a mixed bag of results for ol’ Dìn Ký.

The best part of the meal, in fact, was in considering a few of the items we didn’t order. (See photo below.) It’s not that I have anything against ox penis or deer veins or chicken testicles or pig’s brain, necessarily. But braised? Come on. Even I’m not such a country philistine as to eat braised ox dick. At least grill that bad boy, then we can talk about dinner. I suspect Anthony Bourdain would agree.

Good News for Dog Lovers

An interesting pair of news items today from the go-get-’em bulldog reporters over at Thanh Nien News, who never met a soft news story they couldn’t somehow make softer:

CKE Restaurants Inc. said Thursday that it signed an exclusive deal to open 25 of its Carl’s Jr. restaurants in Vietnam. The Vietnam agreement with the Mesa Group will see the first Carl’s Jr. restaurant open in Ho Chi Minh City in April.”

And in a related but equally mortifying development:

Subway, the U.S.-based sandwich-shop chain, plans to open its first store in Vietnam in August and is targeting 25 shops throughout the country by 2015 … The Milford, Connecticut-based company will adapt its standard menu to Vietnamese tastes.

Vietnam, bless its Stone-Age heart, has until now remained almost completely untainted by the culinary disease of Western-style fast food. That’s not to say the food here is disease free; nothing could be further from the truth — even the tap water is potentially deadly — but at least the local cuisine has nearly always been local — at least until the turn of the millennium. In 1999, the Philippines’ biggest hamburger broker, Jollibee, broke into the Vienamese market (signature dish: something called “Chicken Chickenrice,” which must have taken the marketing team a full focus group session and entire minutes of brainstorming to come up with). Around the same time, South Korean beef-’n'-bird joint Lotteria stormed the beaches. A few years later, in 2000, the world’s largest perpetrator of fast-food, U.S.-based Yum! Brands, muscled its fat ass into the room, after which a rash of KFCs and Pizza Huts broke out all over the country. Apart from that grease-spattered mob, however, Vietnam has been otherwise franchise-free. In fact, this may be the only country left in the world without a single Starbucks, which might go a long way toward explaining the mystifying lack of sullen, shaggy-haired, plaid-pants-wearing hipsters among the Vietnamese.

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times yesterday, writer David Farley explored the foodie scene in Saigon with Manhattan restaurateur and home boy Michael Huynh for that paper’s Asia-Pacific edition of its weekly Travel section. The money quote:

‘You like congealed pigs’ blood?’ my travel companion asked, pulling me over to a street cart in Ho Chi Minh City. Before I could answer, two bowls of chao, a rice porridge bobbing with slices of pork sausage and cubes of coagulated blood, were plopped in our hands.

In all fairness, the coagulated pig’s blood soup is not half bad.

In tangentially related news, the recently announced Ho Chi Minh City subway (a mythical public transit development not to be confused with the sandwich shop) is proceeding apace, with the first of six lines expected to be completed sometime shortly before all matter and space-time in the universe collapse into a infinitely dense, dimensionless singularity.

On the Road Again

It’s been a couple of weeks since I poked my head in this door, but to be fair, I’ve hardly been growing mold on the sofa. Last weekend I was, once again, exploring the pitted highways and byways of southern Vietnam by Vespa scooter, this time up into the modest mountain landscapes of the Central Highlands surrounding the old French hill-town of Dalat, and then down through an endless succession of hairpins and spiraling turns into rice field-packed plains and the oceanside retreat known as Nha Trang.

I flew into Dalat Saturday evening to join up with another of our Vietnam Vespa tour groups, this time a crew of seven who were doing the full Vespa Adventure — seven days worth of scootering from HCMC to Nha Trang. By the time I met up with them around dinnertime, they’d already been riding for three and a half days, having traded the the pang of sea salt and drying fish for the fragrance of fir needles and wood smoke the day before, with the drive up into the highlands from the coast and Mui Ne’s famous white sand dunes. We spent the evening on the outskirts of Dalat, inside one of the traditional wooden longhouses common to the Lat ethnic minority. One of 50-plus such minorities within Vietnam, the Lat can hardly be called Vietnamese; they speak a different language entirely (their Vietnamese language skills are almost nonexistent) and their dress and culture calls to mind Indonesia or French Polynesia more than Vietnam. The evening began with a judicious application of home-distilled rice whiskey, served with two long straws in a pottery jug, which — it became clear afterward — is meant to help visitors loosen up for the singing and dancing that was to come.

The views on the road down to Nha Trang the next day, as always, were spectacular — even along the 20km stretch of mountainside road that’s being resurfaced between Dalat and Nha Trang. The result was a ride that seemed to shake our teeth loose and rearrange our innards permanently. The orange dust of the unsurfaced road covered everything for meters on either side: trees, houses, motorbikes, barnyard animals, sleeping dogs and people. Massive orange clouds billowed up at the touch of a wheel, obscuring the roadway and anything on it in a fog of ochre-colored powder. Visible in glimpses beyong the orange-tinted world of the road was the river, sidling along through hills and forest below and to the left, its lure a song that could not be heard, only imagined. When we finally reached the end of the dirt path, we asked for directions to the nearest swimming hole from a local and plunged as a group into the rishing water beneath a decrepit bridge, some in shorts, some in their undergarments, others wearing considerably less.

An evening in a traditional longhouse with Lat ethnic minority villagers -- from whom Dalat takes its name -- seems more Indonesian than Vietnamese

The group gets an early start the next morning for the downhill run to Nha Trang

The scenery opens up right away

For local shepherds, the mountain roads serve as handy cattle trails

Brunch must be observed, even if it's just for a cool glass of iced tea and a chance to sponge off two hours worth of road grit

Not all of the road down to Nha Trang is paved in the strictest sense of the word

Always leave time for a spontaneous dip in the river (swim trunks optional)

You've got to get out of the city to see views like this.

How does one measure horsepower in a cow?

Nha Trang at last

The beachfront at the Sailing Club, just a few meters walk from Louisiane Restaurant and Brewery

Ancient Cham empire ruins lie just across the bay at Nha Trang