Highland Portraits

Dad, Ai and her mother. Sapa, Vietnam.  Circa 1996.

He must have taken this with his old Canon SLR.  I think it was a Canon F1.  The camera that ended up following Andrew and the bicycle in a plunge into West Lake in Hanoi.  I remember dad taking the camera to Thailand in hopes that he could get it fixed.  But to no avail.  Shortly afterwards, he upgraded to digital photography.  This was a print that I scanned recently.

A bit of background.  Dad went to teach management in Hanoi in 1996 as a guest lecturer with an international training program.  Their job was to prepare a new cohort of professors at the National Economics University to teach modern marketing, management, and business economics concepts.

He lived in Hanoi for a year, riding a bicycle that came with the room he rented on Duong Thang across a capitol city that had yet to transition an industrial developing-world metropolis.  It was still pleasantly boring backwater.  Its French quarter was still dilapidated but somehow classy.  It's Chinese old quarter was still crowded and bustling but livable.  And one could still bicycle from one end of the city to the other.  Motorbikes and cars were a relative rarity.  One was more likely to dodge a careening Soviet-Era truck with unreliable brakes than a shiny new Hummer.  In 1996 Hanoi had a pleasant human scale.  But, understandably, the Vietnamese wanted to jump onto the Southeast Asian development miracle that had already blessed Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore with the wealth and prestige of post-industrial modernity.  So, they brought Americans, Australians and Canadian professors to come teach their professors how to teach about business.  Thus, dad started exploring Vietnam.

Being his footloose self, he focused on visiting the highlands on the Vietnamese border with China.  In the main market town, Sapa, he befriended a gang of Hmong girls who came to sell trinkets to the tourists.  He eventually came to know probably 10-20 of these junior entrepreneurs, their families, and their villages.

He met Ai when she was somewhere around 10 or 12 years old.  For two people divided by age, culture, language, and geography, they formed a steady friendship.  She took him out to her village, guided him on treks through the highlands, and introduced him to Hmong music and culture.  He told her about Hanoi, about America, and tried to teach her to read and write.  He'd always wanted a daughter. Two-thirds of the way through his life, half a world away from the rest of his family, he formed a father-daughter relationship ripe with exoticism and adventure.  Sure, paternalism and orientalism too, but they truly enjoyed each others company, so who cares?

Over the next decade and a half, he stayed in  communication with her, visiting Sapa for days at a time when he was in Southeast Asia, emailing and even eventually receiving international cell phone calls from her.

My brother and I also came to know her and her little gang quite well.  I last talked to her a few years before dad died, probably in 2008 or 2009.  She had started working full-time as a trekking guide for the flourishing adventure tourism trade in Sapa.  She'd had two children in the meantime, but still managed to work enough to support her husband, mother, and who knows who else.  She'd procured a cell phone (of which she was immensely proud) and would call us in Costa Mesa, CA from time to time, about once a month.  She would never really have anything to say.  She'd ask after whichever brother she wasn't talking to, ask how our mom was, and that was about it.  We'd tell her just to email and that we'd call her so that she wouldn't have to spend her money on the international calls, but she'd just call again later.

Eventually she either lost her cell phone or returned back to the village to have more kids.  We became caught up in our own lives, none of us had the chance to go back to Vietnam, and we fell out of touch.

During his last month, dad really wanted to talk to her, to tell her why he couldn't come back to see her anymore, that he hadn't forgotten about her, but that he was dying.  I tried calling the old number, tried the old email addresses, but never managed to get back in touch.  Sometimes I daydream about going back to Sapa, tracking her down and bringing her word of dad's concern and love.

But who knows where she is?  Who knows if she's still befriending international tourists and lighting up their hearts with her orange-county-orthodontist-perfect grin?

It's been more than five years, and certainty is far from abundant in our lives.

Although he took some nice landscapes and creative shots, dad really excelled in portraiture.  It's not surprising, given that he was an insatiable people-watcher and always very sensitive to nuances in facial expression.

He took many portraits of what the Vietnamese call "nguoi dan toc it so"  (translated literally as "people of minority ethnicity") or what the French called the "montagnards" (the hill people).  His portraits of Hmong, Dao, and others living in the mountains of northwest Vietnam are among his best photographs.  Of course, this is probably mostly due to the fact that the subjects are innately fascinating to contemporary suburbanites like us (hell, I became an anthropologist after all).  But these portraits also illustrate his technical skill and artistic sensitivity.

These were great prints in the mid to late 1990s when he took them.  And they became even better images a decade later after he had learned the ins and outs of digital scanning and post-processing.  The classes taught by Leslie McCall at Orange Coast College are to blame for hours of time lost in front of photoshop and in the printing lab.  Histograms and white balance and bit depth.

He basically relearned photography in his late 50s for no other reason than a sense of personal development (no pun intended).

 I'll vote for tax increases to support our community college system any day.

Here are some of the aforementioned portraits: