The Fatalism Is All

 Ahh, its one of those days when all is not well back home.  You feel unsettled that you aren't physically there.  You’d like to be able to do more that type messages into a message window, or have choppy calls into the darkness. 

Putting the phone down I return to what's been updated on the New York Times home page, as I'll do a dozen times more today.  There's an editorial that was there before, but I read it this time.  The writer suggests that readers should be careful about precisely what message it was they were deriving from the new Ken Burns series.  Everyone is talking about the series.  My mom has written me about it.  Another business partner of mine has suggested it was powerful.  "Hey girls . . . come here for a sec . . . 

My accelerator, scrambler box lands me internet connection somewhere in Hong Kong and the U.S. servers noting this tell me:  Sorry, you can’t watch a PBS documentary in the country you are residing in.  Why is that?  If you make it free to the American public, why wouldn’t you make it free to the rest of the world?  I guess there are (modest, surely) licensing rights that might be secured in countries whose tax dollars didn’t help to pay for the program?

But if I use a different tool and land my browsing in a U.S. server, I’m suddenly all cleared to watch the program.  My daughters and I watched the first episode together.  And though I know the narrative, it is powerful to absorb it visually rather than simply read it again.  They actors, the setting, the fatalism is all so familiar.  I never have very good viewing manners and regularly yell out “Dien Bien Phu!”  “Geneva Accords!”  etc., when the story is building up to the proper moment Mr. Burns wants to reveal such information. 

America's Vietnam War narrative is intimately tied to China.  It is linked forever to the Korean War, during which my father-in-law was a Chinese 'volunteer.'   And the framing builds towards America’s involvement, fittingly for an American documentary, though the story of Viet resistance to invaders seems back to the Tang Dynasty that I know of and beyond, far beyond certainly, marking somehow what it means to be Vietnamese.  I notice that my daughters are caught up in it and that they have a number of points of entry into this narrative. 

They need a break after the first ninety-minute episode.  I get it.  But I watch the next two ninety minute episodes in succession, unconsciously driven towards the point at which my life begins and the color footage begins and things all get much, much worse for everyone involved.  

Monday, 10/02/17