Life is a Trip (6 page)

They shook their heads. Undaunted, I asked every person I met, but the answer was always the same.

“How about the outer islands? Any life ceremonies there?” I asked.

I was informed that the outer islands were remote and largely inaccessible. Every few months, a boat named the Micronesia Spirit came to Yap to transport folks to the islands, but there was no fixed schedule. If you happened to hear about a crossing, you could book passage. Otherwise, no way. A few expats who lived on the island of Yap said they had never been able to visit the outer islands, even though they had tried.

Just as I was about to give up any hope of witnessing a life ceremony, the manager of the hotel where I was staying knocked on my door. “There is a funeral ship going to the outer island of Mog Mog,” she declared, beaming, “and you are booked on it. Congratulations!”

When I told some locals of my good fortune, they turned ashen. “Hasn’t an
y
one warned you about the Micronesia Spirit?” they asked. I shook my head and laughed.

Two days later, at dusk, I was on my way. I watched as a coffin was solemnly carried onto the three-tiered boat and then I boarded the Micronesia Spirit with a rolled-up yoga mat, a sandwich, and two bottles of water. The ship, licensed to transport l50 mortals, was dange
r
ously over-crowded with close to 250 passengers. It seemed that everyone but me had staked out a place to sleep, and most were a
l
ready lying on overlapping woven mats or flattened cardboard boxes so that the decks were a human carpet. I’d been told that you never step over a prostrate M
i
cronesian, so how could I walk around the ship without stepping over bodies? I stood still and plotted what I would do to get through the next fourteen hours. F
i
nally I decided to retreat to the lo
w
er deck and settle near the coffin. After all, I couldn’t offend the dead.

All night a group of women encircling the coffin sang as I was drenched by waves crashing over the side of the dangerously overloaded ship. Soaked and e
x
hausted, I eventually climbed to the top deck where I found myself a wedge of floor space.

“It’s wet there,” warned a passenger.

“So?” I said. I was already wet.

“Where you put your mat,” he explained, “you’re next to the only men’s bat
h
room. People have been drinking and . . . they miss.”

Horrified, I grabbed my mat and contemplated my next move. It was late and the darkness was punctuated by choral snoring. After tiptoeing around the top deck, I finally found another spot, settled down, and as I unwrapped my san
d
wich, a palm-sized cockroach bolted across my legs. I dropped the food. Be calm, be centered, I told myself, and picked it up again. A roach the size of a regulation softball crawled onto the bread. I screamed.

A gentleman named Brodney approached me. “Do you need help?” he asked gently.

Pale and exhausted, I gazed at him, and, smiling sweetly, he o
f
fered me a large loincloth. Was I supposed to strip and put it on as a prelude to swinging from the ship’s mast like Tarzan? I felt dumb and dumbfounded.

“Okay?” Brodney asked.

I raised one eyebrow.

Taking this to mean “yes,” Brodney deftly twisted the loincloth into a ha
m
mock which he suspended from two nails. Then he helped me climb inside. At last I felt safe, and I closed my eyes. Suspended above the deck in a gently rocking loincloth, I would finally catch some winks. Five minutes later, the rains came—pelting thick ribbons of water that drenched me and Brodney’s loincloth.

Fourteen hours after leaving Yap I arrived at Mog Mog, where I encountered topless girls in grass skirts and men wearing loincloths. Only the fourth outside visitor in a year, I was chided for changing my shoes on the steps of what turned out to be the sacred men’s house. I hobbled across sharp stones until my feet bled. A few locals took pity on me and invited me to their outdoor cooking areas where they o
f
fered me fresh fish, tarot, stew, and as much coconut water as I could drink.

Eventually, I camped outside the house where the coffin lay amid the ritualized crying of grief-stricken women. As they wailed, they also expressed their feelings about the deceased—which were not always positive.

A man from Mog Mog who acted as my translator said mourners may talk about the generosity of the deceased and also his drinking and abusive behavior. They can praise his skills as a storyteller and regret his periodic irresponsibility and lying to cover up for his wron
g
doing. They can lionize or lambaste him.

At first I was shocked.
Can’t they just leave the dead in peace?
I wondered. But I said nothing, sitting and listening to the wailing and talk. And the more I thought about it, the more I began to understand. During a Mog Mog funeral, people are e
x
pected to air all of their fee
l
ings about the deceased person publicly, so the negative emotions don’t fester. The bad feelings are expressed, rather than repressed, and then they are buried along with the body. At a funeral, people unleash their true feelings, but speaking ill of the deceased outside of this context is taboo. And it is forbidden to bad-mouth the dead person once he is lying in his final resting place.

“It’s good,” I said to the translator. “It was worth traveling on the Micronesia Spirit. I learned something important today.”

He grinned and offered me one of two coconuts he had just climbed a palm tree to harvest. I looked around but there were no straws. He tossed his head back and sucked the coconut water from his fruit. I did the same. On Mog Mog, I quenched both my thirst and my curiosity. I had witnessed a very significant cer
e
mony.

The funeral experience lingered with me for a long time. Perhaps the inhabi
t
ants of Mog Mog got it right. A person doesn’t automatica
l
ly ascend to sainthood just because he has left the earthly plane. Ma
y
be honoring a person for what he did right or wrong during his lifetime isn’t a bad idea. It may actually be inspired.

People are not perfect. They hurt others knowingly and unknowingly. Perhaps we can honor a person just by being truthful about him. We can allow him to be a human—with strengths and flaws, good behavior and bad.

I wondered if it would bother me if people said the truth about me after I left the earthly plane.

I
f your body likes being worked on,
it will love being in V
i
etnam. And my recommendation is to go to places the locals frequent. You can get a face ma
s
sage in a beauty shop; it lasts ninety minutes, costs less than a ticket to the movies, and involves an upper body massage, more washings and rinsings than you can shake a comb at, and, near the end, they shave your face with a straight-edge razor. It doesn’t matter if you are male, female, or have facial hair. It’s something you can talk about at cocktail parties for the rest of your life.

A whole body massage may entail soaking in red herbal liquid in a wooden tub, and since you are forewarned, you won’t think you are bleeding to death. A
f
terwards, the masseur or masseuse will find and knead body parts you didn’t even know you had. When was the last time you had your ear lobes or nostrils ma
s
saged?

I became addicted to these long, languorous, quirky body trea
t
ments, and I still laugh about them, but one particularly stands out in my mind: it was the time I r
e
clined in a leather lounger in a communal room in a foot massage parlor in Hanoi. With me were three ex-Viet Cong guerrilla fighters from the Vietnam War; during the conflict, they were our officially-designated enemies. Now we all wore striped shorts that looked like prison issue, and we were groaning with plea
s
ure and pain as our sore spots were massaged by young therapists.

As I lay there, I flashed back to the day, more than three decades before, when I left the U.S.A. because I was so angry and disturbed about the loss of young American lives and the millions of Vietna
m
ese we had killed and maimed with our arsenals of weapons, defol
i
ants, deceits, and disinformation.

I went to live in Paris, where negotiations were going on between America and Vietnam, and the anti-war protests were vigorous. I stayed out of the country for nine years—living in Europe and Afr
i
ca—and have always been haunted by that war.

Two years ago, I finally went to Vietnam, driven by the necessity of finding out what had happened since then, and how they felt about Americans now. My guide, Cuong, had been a Viet Cong guerrilla fighter, and it was through him that I met ex-soldiers, Communist Pa
r
ty members, kids, and elders; he had set up the foot massage so I could hang with his old military cronies and find some answers to my que
s
tions.

“Are you angry about the war?” I asked my foot massage buddies, as our too
t
sies soaked in little tubs.

They gave me the same answer everyone had given me all over V
i
etnam.

“It’s over.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“We welcome Americans.”

“Sometimes, when we drink with our military buddies, we talk about the past. But then we come back to our daily lives. We don’t forget the past and the war, but we don’t think about it either. We look to the future.”

“After the war, I hated anything with an American trademark. Now I like it. During the war, we saw distorted caricatures of bloodthirsty Americans in prop
a
ganda cartoons. Now when I meet Amer
i
cans, I think they are so handsome and friendly.”

“We have even met with American soldiers who came back here. They a
r
rived full of guilt and some went to apologize in villages where they had killed people. We embraced them and we even cried together.”

“Some of us still have bad memories and sometimes nightmares, but we don’t suffer as much as the American G.I.s.”

I turned away and a few tears coursed down my cheeks. There are several hu
n
dred thousand Vietnam veterans living on the streets of America. Purportedly, more committed suicide after the war than had died in combat. PTSD wrecks rel
a
tionships and ruins lives. The co
n
flict in Southeast Asia is an open wound on our national conscience. But in Vietnam, there’s another story.

They welcome Americans, French, Japanese—all their former enemies—and look to the West for inspiration. The Communist Party still holds sway, but there is roaring free enterprise, a thriving stock market, open discussion and criticism of the party, and unstoppable individualism and ingenuity. Vietnam is high on the tourist radar b
e
cause it is safe, beautiful, varied, modern, tribal, and exotic.

In Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh once walked the streets in his rubber sandals and did strategic war planning, you can now shop, take a ride in a human-propelled
cyclo
, see a water puppet show, and watch break dancers. In the Gulf of Tonkin—where our government’s b
o
gus claims that an American ship was bombed became our excuse to enter the war—you can now cruise Halong Bay with its 1,969 spe
c
tacular sandstone islands. You can fly to Da Nang, once home to fo
r
ty-five U.S. military bases, and have a custom wardrobe made in twenty-four hours in nearby Hoi An.