Learning by Heart: A Letter Home
Laurie Moberg
I'm sure we've all heard the phrase "learn by heart" implying a need to memorize the spelling of "supercalifragilistic" or the words to "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," but I find myself experiencing this words in a different way in Asia, and specifically in Vietnam. For me, learning by heart is a practice of experiential learning... essentially the purpose of my time abroad.
For so long, education has been something quantitative - numbers, percentages, grades - as though intelligence is something levied to each person as a baker might measure ingredients - 2cups of flour, 3 tbsp butter. St. Olaf helped me turn the tide of education and to understand the value of complex thinking, embracing the idea of so much that is impossible to learn. One of my professors likes the analogy of the ever-growing circle: inside the circle is what you know and learn; the perimeter is the boundary to the unknown. As you learn more, the circle expands to accommodate, but so does the border around it; the more you know, the more you realize you do not know. In the rigid quantitative learning frame, this would have been frightening enough to drown a person, perhaps. Now, it is beautifully enriching to know I can always learn and never be limited or satiated.
While my education on campus helped me turn the tide of understanding, this trip has thrown the waves of my learning against boulders on the waterfront. Like breakers crashing at Lake Superior, this startling scattering of water is not frightening, but like a peaceful release into feeling my education. In this way, "learning by heart" now means something more connected to learning by feeling, by the emotions of my heart. My learning is centered less in the classroom and more in the incredible surges of fear, tranquility, confidence, stupidity, ignorance, courage, loss, gain, defeat, hope, despair, confusion, joy, care, incomprehension, incoherence, connection, disconnect, solemnity, cheer, patience, tenderness, disillusionment, and peace, and all the sensations involved in living with people in places far and near.
Centered in Saigon, the sensations of "learning by heart" have been a bit overwhelming, fostering more tears, solemnity, and discomfort than any of the places so far. Worse than crowds in China train stations, harder than learning Thai language, and more complex than my interactions with my host family, Vietnam leaves me sometimes feeling like I am in an emotional-no-man's land - perhaps that is the perfect description to accompany my interactions with the still sensitive American War. I am not sure how to understand the sacrifices and secrets and horror of living in
tunnels several meters underground simply to survive. As I crawled through these spaces at the Cu Chi Tunnels I was swathed in my own sweat and tears. I took the first exit to the surface only to be greeted by the jarring blast of rifles from the shooting range. This war site has turned into tourism. The stories proclaim the great ingenuity of the Viet Cong and the villagers, their clever guerrilla tactics that offered more than survival, but a way to attack. Though the guide refrains from saying who these fighters attacked, I impose the sensation of "the evil Americans" tucked beneath the fine gauzy omissions like a wound hidden but still bleeding from the American side of the ocean, but not the Vietnamese. The shooting range that pierces my ears and keeps me crying as I tense at each
shot is another way to draw tourist: you may never have another opportunity to fire one of these fine American and Soviet weapons from the past era of war, these machines that served both camps of war - guerrilla and "civilized." As we leave, I can feel my body numbed to the sound but I cannot help but think no war is civilized; war, in conception, is inherently uncivilized.
I am also not accustomed to leaving a museum and feeling like I should be wearing the American flag as though a target for all forms of retribution from the Vietnamese people on the streets. After the War Remnants Museum (formerly called the Museum of American Atrocities), I felt myself sensitive to any comments from the Vietnamese people along the walk to class. On many corners, people sit with their motorbikes offering a cheap taxi service. Others sit near their mobile market windows offering fresh French bread and a few smaller specialty pastries. One family sets up their fake-flower display on the corner everyday against the cement walls of a private estate. The man smiles at us, showing us his rainbow of artistically coupled flowers, almost like a garden growing out of the dingy, uneven cement-and-sand sidewalk and the thick exhaust-laden air. Certainly there is nothing of an affront in these simple solicitations. I'm not startled that they speak to me, I'm startled by their kindness.
Yet the hardest people along the street seeking donations to survive. I do not want to call them beggars as it seems so demeaning. I want to call them tragic and beautiful and creative. As I walk by the man who beckons our kindness from his wheelchair, I cannot help but wonder his story: was he part of the war? was it a birth-defect connected or unconnected to the forceful American forms of warfare? was he Viet Cong tortured for information? was he a Republican tortured by reeducation after the war? Or was he a villager caught in the middle of these two forces, someone who was unable to balance his allegiance to both sides equitably and satisfactorily, someone caught in the insecurities of all soldiers striving to survive. I cannot help but bow my head as I slip a bill into his extended hat. He accepts it graciously, smiling, reassuring me as I try to contain the globes of my teary eyes. How does he have the strength to show me kindness? How has he found such peaceful security in living out his sentence of meager subsistence living in a wheelchair? Even as I write that, I'm sure there is much more living inside him than his physical body contains; he showed me just a glimpse in his smile.
I expected Vietnam to be a struggle as the American War is a complex labyrinth of memory and story. I do not mean to contend that these experiences are the only ways that I comprehend
the war and its aftermath; currently, these are just the most present in my heart. There are so many complexities, like kite strings knotted together. The kites fly with their idealistic vision somewhere high against the blue sky in radiant colors - red, brown, green, orange... and somewhere a white one in the shape of a crane for peace. Yet below, their strings are tethered together in a massive ball of string like sticky spider's silk. The reasons and ideas so nobly implanted are tied to the stories to the people who lived them out. I never expect to understand it all, but I'm glad to at least put my hand into the mess and feel the tensions and softness of strands of stories. Take from them all what you
will, but know my heart is in each one in turn.
