Tam Coc Bich Dong is even better than it sounds

The swarm of tourists, cameras around necks, visors against the sun, umbrellas against the rain, and socks up to the knees beat me to the entrance. Crud. But they milled a moment, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, so I smiled and slid through them like unfamiliar street food to get in line for a ticket.

I wanted to see Tam Coc-Bích Đông and its flooded caves, but preferably without 70 gawking foreigners. Granted they’d been born closer to this place than I had, but their mass seemed inauthentic, obstructive to the sort of Vietnamese experiences I was seeking. As with all other bajillion tourists, I wanted to be the only one.

The blob of them started oozing towards the boats, but in the unfocused way of passive participants. More of that time-proven tourism technique, aggressive-with-a-smile, and I cut through their shuffling tsunami to the line of waiting skiffs.

“Xxxxzzzz” I have no idea what she said, but the efficient woman pointed me towards the first boat, followed by the two women behind me. Our rower arrived, one of the women in conical hats who’d been chatting in the shade.

In my weeks in Vietnam I’d noticed a trend. Most of the people I saw working were women. The motorbike taxis and barbers were men, but women staffed the shops, hawked in the market, poured the tea, cooked the food, and now, rowed the boats. Most afternoons I’d take a low plastic stool by the side of the street with the men. They’d smoke and play a board game, we’d all drink a beer and share smiling motions before settling in for silent camaraderie. But the work? Women did most of that.

I’m not inclined to tell anyone how to run their culture, but having this lady do all the physical labor while I sat back and relaxed? Just not how I was raised. I accompanied my words of “Can I help you row?” with more useful gestures, and a big smile erupted under the conical hat. She passed forward an oar made from a section of a bucket strapped it to a piece of PVC pipe, and I dug in.

We passed through cave after cave, sometimes leaning low under the sharp karst stalactites and jagged cave mouths. We three visitors got out to explore temples and pathways, then rejoined our hostess in boat 11.

My companions were a mother and daughter from Hanoi, but that’s as far as our gestures could take us. They found it uproarious every time I thanked them in Vietnamese. “Cảm ợn!” they’d cry after I said it, and we’d all grin at each other. (I don’t think it’s supposed to have that dot under the o, but I’m lost in Fontlandia.)

As we moved from place to place, something else became apparent. We were the jet boat superstars of Tam Coc. I don’t really know what I’m doing with an oar, but it’s not hard to fly past everyone else when they’re not helping. Boat after boat of fit young men, doing nothing. It was weird.

My mother and daughter friends loved it. “Oh yeah!” the daughter would laugh and pump her fist every time we passed another boat, especially when they’d take up oars and try to race us, splashing ineffectually before falling behind. I admit it was a bit of an ego stroke for me, but more importantly, it was just fun. My Vietnamese ladies and I, out for a cruise on the cool green waters of Tam Coc, our laughter bumping around the karst canyons.

That set the tone for my time in Ninh Binh, smiles and Vietnamese encounters. A day-trip from Hanoi, it had its tourist enclaves, but if I avoided those I’d go days without seeing another white face. (It was a great place for local kids wanting to practice English.)

Yes, Ninh Binh was my semi-secret town, discovered enough to have good, cheap hotels, but not railroaded by tourism. Just as long as Hollywood didn’t come along and film a major blockbuster action movie in its gorgeous scenery.

Dang.

What would you like to know about Cuban women?

The classic cars of Cuba are obvious. Music jumps into your ear from every angle. Lavish colors surround you, blending with the heat into a chromatic and caloric smoothie of multisensory stimulation from which there is no escape, and none you’d want anyway.

It took me a little longer to notice something else quintessentially Cuban. The women. Well, no, I noticed the Cuban women immediately. Believe me. What took me longer to notice was the absence of…how do I say this...pseudo-women? Because in America, they’re everywhere. They’re in every magazine, every commercial, every billboard. They peer down and out at you with unnaturally long limbs, enlarged eyes, and preposterously skinny waistlines. The photoshopped American misinformation of what a woman looks like.

They don’t have that in Cuba. Not yet. (God I hope they never do. What an achievement that would be!)

Growing up in American male privilege, I was only aware of the toxicity of this ubiquitous visual violence when it reflected in the anorexia of this friend, or the bulimia of that one, then once I paid attention, in the harried self-esteem of just about every female I knew, under assault from an early age.

What age? When does this marketing nonsense begin to wound? How does that work? How does it feel, what does it do? And in a place like Cuba, protected from the malignance of an advertising strategy based on convincing women that they’re not good enough (unless they buy this product to “fix” themselves!), how is growing into a woman different? What is it like to be raised without Barbie, without Twiggy, without the wasp-waists of Disney princesses?

These are questions I wondered about, but was helpless to ask. I couldn’t just walk up to a cubana and ask “In my country women are pressured to despise themselves, what’s it like here?” So for me it was just a matter of stifled conjecture. But here’s the thing: Lydia has a master’s degree in American Studies with a focus on gender and popular culture. Basically, a master’s in exactly this stuff. She could actually investigate it, in a more meaningful way.

So that’s what we’re going to do. Starting on Thursday.

Americans still can’t go to Cuba as tourists, but with her degree in one hand and my let’s-call-it-a-career as a writer/journalist in the other, her brain in our head and my Spanish-speaking tongue in the mouth, we qualify under the journalist (or would it be the researcher?) category. So we’re going.

Are you interested in what we find? She already has a set of questions that we hope to ask an assortment of Cuban women (perhaps men too?) but I’m curious: what would you ask? What would you want to know about the influence of media on women’s body image?

To speak or not to speak?

The young woman was determined to be heard. She had the sort of volume that can only be achieved through a combination of theater training, ample quantities of alcohol in the recent past, and an unquestionable confidence in the righteousness of her every word.

“Straight white men should not be allowed to speak” she stated, at eardrum cracking amplitude. “And putting on Shakespeare is just listening to another straight white man.”

We were backstage at Cal Shakes, the beautiful outdoor theater in Orinda where friend and savant Mike Daisey had just given another of his brilliant monologues, this time combining personal revelations, cultural insights, and a powerfully lucid vision of Hamlet.

I’ve been to two of his shows, was blown away both times, and hanging out afterwards, have witnessed the consequence of his provocative monologues, namely that everyone comes up to him after the show and inflicts their own monologues on him. The exhausted man sits and endures speech after speech with grace and good humor. It’s a second impressive performance.

But last Friday the diatribe being shout-talked into the ear drums of every human in the room (and possum, raccoon, and sleeping raven in the woods outside) came from this young lady, swaying moderately, Racer 5 beer tipping up in hand, and opinions crashing around the room like a demolition derby.

We’d communally decided that theater is a medium for a cultural discussion about the rights, roles, and purpose of people (or something like that) when she informed us that straight white men should be allowed no voice in the conversation.

Don’t get me wrong, I know what she means. Here in the West we dwell in the aftereffects of centuries of straight white men screwing things up royally, in a cavalcade of crap, storms of stupidity, avalanches of assholery. It is well past, centuries past, the time when a broader spectrum of voices needs to gain power in our dialogues...all of them.

But NO role? NO voice? Is that the way forward? Should I be bound and gagged because of the skin, anatomy, and sexual preference I was accidentally born into, to pay the penance earned by my pigment predecessors? Is retribution of discrimination the best way forward?

Or is there some way we can take the former criminal class, and let them help drive the progress? Let’s ask Iceland and Suriname.

Those two antipodal countries recently announced an upcoming U.N. panel on gender equality...to which only men and boys will be invited. More oppression? More uninclusive dialogue? Or do, perhaps, straight white men have a role to play?

Do you agree with my opinionated friend and straight white men should bow out (or be forced out), or do straight white men have a responsibility to be involved in advancing equality?