The Supreme good is like water,
Which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain,
Thus it is like the Tao
Fragment of Tao te Ching #8
An early morning beach stroll along the beach at sunrise. The clouds decided to dominate today so the light was cooler, more diffuse. A couple of dogs have adopted Sophie and me. I call them Lady (the mom) and Whitey (Wai Ti), a very nippy and playful white pup with a sweet disposition and razor-like baby teeth. They walked with us along the talcum-soft beach to a fishing village about 1 km to the north.
Shrimp boats were plying in and out of the shallow anchorage. A fisherman was paddling his little craft. It is a circular vessel, probably 5 or so feet in diameter and about the depth of a bathtub. It is made of rush material, woven tightly into a basket shape and then anointed with some waterproof material that resembles pitch. The sole operator stands in the center with a long oar and paddles from the boat to shore – the only way to get to and from the vessels without a jetty or pier. As he gets close to the shore he surfs the rollers in, quite a graceful and challenging feat. Sort of like surfing and snowboarding at once. They get in so close to the sea strand that they can step out without wetting their cuffs. I think the Irish have a very similar vessel called a curragh or coracle or something like that. It has no keel, no bench, no bow or stern. But I believe its operator sits while paddling.
Water seems to be the primary source of life here. The village nearby seems prosperous, the primary industry is shrimp fishing – the boats are fettle and houses are in good repair. The local homeowners paint their houses lilac, chartreuse and coral pink with white trim. The homes tend to be very cubic and quite tall. A lofty modern house will often be bracketed by mean wood and corrugated shacks; residences are the barometer of relative success and progress. Doors are left open to the street revealing dim silhouettes of people going about the mundane, universal tasks of daily living. Wherever you go you smell the sweet, pungent joss sticks that are one of the essentials of life here. Every family begins and end the day burning them. Clusters are placed in crevices in the sidewalk and the margins of the curbs. They burn all day in the markets and in the retail streets, in frowsy sidestreets and in public places too.
We eat shrimp with almost every meal, crabs are plentiful along the beach and some nets are spread and dragged to catch tiny molluscs – whelks and small clams are dumped into piles and sorted by the old ones and the children. Life is simple and humble here – I don’t fantasize that it is easy. The locals are up long before dawn and they work a long day. But they seem also to have time, some of them, to retreat to the nearby waterfall for a cool dip or to languish in a hammock in the heat of the afternoon.
The Tao te Ching passage is about humility. There is a constant reminder at every turn regarding the enormous economic gulf in earning and lifestyle that exists between Westerners and the Vietnamese we meet day to day. There is a wall between the visitors here and the locals. It is tangible. There is an enormous ‘want’ here; not meanness or poverty, but desire. It is palpable everywhere. Improve, rise, succeed. Objectively, it must be difficult for the Vietnamese to understand how the lazy, corpulent, sense-addicted horde of piggies deserve to have what they so clearly have – and are pleased to drop scads of money on crap.
We are all one.
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