-^-for posterity-^-

reality.

sitting at a table across from my friends. the table cloth is checkered red and green and looks Scottish. the music pumping in through the sound system is old rock ballads from the american 80’s. the waiter is vietnamese and speaks poor english. he wears a nike t-shirt that was made in china somewhere outside the watchful eye of intellectual property rights. we order food that is italian.

one of my friends orders a pizza and we debate where pizza was invented. some say it was invented in america and taken back to italy and others say it was invented in italy. one person speculates whether or not it was invented in american and italy at the same time. we drink soda that was bottled in the central highlands of vietnam. i drink coke. it tastes the same as every other coke i’ve ever had at any one of the hundreds of the mcdonalds i ate at as a child.

i am wearing a shirt that is an advertisement for coke written in thai. the shirt was made in cambodia. i’m wearing shoes my brother brought for me from america. the shoes were made in china, sent to the states, bought and brought back to asia.

the food comes. i ordered chicken. the ingredients came from all over. they don’t make flour noodles here so they were imported. they don’t make cheese here so it was imported. the tomato sauce could have been made here but tastes a little to canned. who knows where everything came from.

sitting around the table, we are an odd mixture. i am mennonite hailing from south-eastern pennsylvania. jack is hungarian, second or third generation, hailing from the north west. virginia is vietnamese/japanese hailing from the north west also. one of virginia’s friends names be is vietnamese born in vietnam but raised in america. the man sitting behind us is french and has a vietnamese girlfriend. she is tiny and beautiful. he is large and oafish. they talk but her french isn’t that great. they eat italian food and wear clothes from who knows where.

a lanky american man walks in and orders rice. he does what a lot of expats do in these places and orders in english and then tries to say it again in vietnamese, thus establishing his place as a local. his vietnamese is terrible and we giggle. he complains when it doesn’t come and tells them he wants it to go. he went to an italian restaurant in da lat and ordered white rice to take home. i guarantee they don’t have the best rice in town.

we sit in a country that my government was bombing about thirty years ago. we were all invited to come here and teach. no one is sure what they believe and we could all find faults with everything. there isn’t one system of power we particularly enjoy. everything is a little right and a little wrong. we live with a million contradictions and are happy enough to ignore them. we sit back and enjoy a life of luxury and have all developed a wonderful ability to ignore beggars and crippled people. we talk about social justice but none of us has any idea what to do about it. we all want to change the world but are all fatalistic to realize we can’t do anything.

we also don’t know what real culture is. everything is such a strange mixture of authentic and fake that it’s really hard to put a finger on anything. we, however, ignore all of this. we talk about silly things, ignore the children outside, order another coke and eat our imported food wearing our well-traveled clothes. that’s life and i haven’t even decided if i like it, love it or just put up with it.