At a meeting, gotta decorate yourselves today :(
The place we retrenched the water main to is under slab. There's about a six-foot-wide section between that slab and another slab. Then it hits another slab, which is outdoors. Then it goes under a giant Sequoia. Then it goes under the driveway. Then it's at the street. Or maybe it just goes straight down! So in preparation for my exploration - trying to find a buried water pipe in the 24" of space underneath a bathroom - I decided to appease the ghosts as much as possible. I finished emptying the service pit. It's marvelous. It's between five and five and a half feet deep, 31 inches wide and thirteen feet long. It's even got a drain. And I reinterred Bandit out under the chainsaw sculpture. I planted some hyacinths and dwarf daffodils with him. Not gonna lie I got choked up. I hope he's happy there. And then I got out my mattock and started in. The trench is about 3 feet wide right now, and should have caught that pipe. But then it's only eighteen inches deep. Which means this shit isn't going to be easy, dwarf daffodils or no.
New job is going ok. It's 8 to ten weeks of training. The book work trainers are horrible, they have taught me almost nothing. The practical trainers range from ok to really great. If you told me three years ago I'd be running a dredge and wearing safety orange I wouldn't have believed you.
spent 90 minutes today with the partners family, listening to their first and second hand stories of how they escaped Vietnam starting about a month prior to the fall of Saigon leading to getting on a boat out of Saigon at 3am the morning of surrender, through escaping to the Philippines, Guam, and eventually, the United States. Deeply, deeply sobering and humbling shit. Anyone have any nonfiction book recommendations related to Vietnam?
Related to boat people, related to the war, related to the political climate that led to it? What are you looking for? I ask because there's a blind spot and because the Vietnamese and Hmong friends I've had (A) don't like talking about it (B) are also disgruntled that no one has told their story. "How Vietnam happened" has best been explained by Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly. The dilemma it has, of course, is it's very much the American perspective, as with everything else related to Vietnam. The Vietnam War book most people refer to these days is Matterhorn, which is not non-fiction. I made it about halfway through; it's grim and deals far more with racism within the US military than it does with anything else. In that half there were no vietnamese at all. Superpower Interrupted is useful in that it's a non-American perspective, at least; it paints a portrait of Vietnam as a culture whose principle concern is not running afoul of China. For example, the region has historically been called Nam Viet but the Nguyen Dynasty renamed it Viet Nam to maintain peaceful relations with the Qings.
I think all three? I’ve recently been reading a bit about Vo Nguyen Giáp, the Sino-Vietnamese war, and have had The Sympathizer and a few other books on my to-read list. I think what I’m interested in is the cultural and political context of Vietnam during the 20th century, preferably not from just a Vietnamese War context. Been trying to wrap my head around how this people were in war and conflict for so much of that century both with themselves and with others. This seems like a very complex, very way-too-large-of-a-scope way of coming at this, so apologies if this is not a useful reply. I’m working it out.
Don't apologize, I've come across the subject before but didn't find a satisfactory answer. It's something I'd like to be better read about but haven't found anything satisfactory. I'll bet there's lots of good stuff in Vietnamese, which is more effort than I'm likely to expend. There's an interesting bit in Kaplan's the Revenge of Geography in which he's sitting down with some Vietnamese general in the '80s and observes that the Vietnamese are much friendlier towards the Americans than he expected they would be, considering the circumstances. The General laughs and points out that they'd fought two wars with the Chinese since then and the Chinese were their biggest trading partner. There's a lot of history in Southeast Asia that isn't China or Japan. Visiting Ayutthaya and hearing about the wars between Burma and Siam really gave me a taste of just how euro-centric my historical view was and I've strived to change that ever since. I mean, here's a whole history that never touched you and I'll bet most countries have similar.
Yeah it’s exactly the context of the stuff like this that I’m interested in: One of the hard parts about this is you can’t very well ask a Vietnamese person “hey, what books should I read” because you’ll largely get a blank look back. Because, you know, it’s what they lived! I’ll have to checkout the bookshops around the Wing Luke Museum and the rest of Little Saigon. Will send you some photos of titles if anything stands out! The General laughs and points out that they'd fought two wars with the Chinese since then and the Chinese were their biggest trading partner.