-^-for posterity-^-

sometimes i go and shoot pool. when the day gets a little long and there’s no one about, i get bored. they have one sixteen ball table in long xuyen. it’s owned by a man named thanh. he is an incredible pool player. every shot he takes is miraculous and void of effort. he can clear a table and have a conversation with his wife.

today i went. i had just eaten lunch and couldn’t be asked to go home and grade more english literature tests. i have one hundred and four of them and each test takes me about five minutes to grade. do the math.

the pool hall is a converted warehouse located on one of the main streets here. it’s front door is a huge garage door. there are about six vietnamese pool tables and one sixteen ball table. normally it’s full of older vietnamese men wasting away the afternoon. today there were two foreigners there. well, there were three foreigners and one vietnamese person that looked like an american.

i walked in and noticed a caucasian face. i stopped, looked again and made sure. you never see foreigners in long xuyen. i walked up to the man and said hello. he was dressed like most youngish americans would dress: he had a fashionable shirt on and baggy pants. he didn’t respond right away but a man next to him did. they were both from boston. the vietnamese looking man had lived there for about thirty years and spoke perfect english. the american looking man had lived there for about eight years and barely spoke any.

there was also another man there. he had an american accent strongly laced with slang. everything was, “hey man.” he was from oakland and bore complicated blue tattoos on both of his forearms. he was thickly build and walked with a limp. he looked strong and mean. he explained to me that it was impossible to get an american citizenship if you had a felony on your record. i didn’t ask him if he had a felony. that may have been a little inappropriate.

the american looking vietnamese man living in america happened to be fathered by an american soldier during the war. his mother is vietnamese and his father is american. he didn’t seem to have one vietnaemse feature about him except, maybe, darkish hair. his friend explained to me that he grew up in long xuyen. he lived his whole life looking exactly like an american.

he looked lost. he smiled but he was out of place. he walked around the pool table quietly. he didn't have a bette-than-thou attitude. he was humble. what a life this man was given.

what a world we have created for ourselves. i know how many hardships i’ve gone through just driving my bicycle down the street let alone growing up here. this is such a homogeneous place that he must have stuck out like a soar thumb. what a world where we can have such innocent victims. his whole life has been defined, if my experience is any reference, by an event that he didn’t even witness. he is the creation of war and he has had to suffer because of the mistakes of others.