Mekong Quotes

Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. (...) Dropping acid on the Mekong Delta, smoking grass through a rifle barrel, flying on a helicopter with opera blasting out of loudspeakers, tracer-fire and paddy-field scenery, the smell of napalm in the morning. Long time.

Life is like that." papa turned once again to the Mekong. "Everything is connected, and sometimes we, like little fishes, are awept up in these big and powerful currents. Carried far from home...

meja aku berterima kasih padamu air yang kuletakkan di dadamu tak jadi tumpah

darahku mimpikan satu saat satu saat tanpa ancam dan pelarian darahku mimpikan satu alam satu alam tanpa kabus dan pagar

malam ini ribut dari utara akan tiba tebingmu akan pecah airmu akan merah

Tan Chau lies on the Thanh Hoa canal, which sings with freedom as it flows into the Mekong River on its way to the sea. Only the wind and the water, which you cannot imprison, are truly free.

You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass.

saudara waktunya telah tiba untuk aku melangkah kaki tiket yang kubeli terasa panas di tangan

No matter the border, the Mekong has been an indiscriminate giver and taker of life in Southeast Asia for thousands of years. It’s a paradox like civilization’s other great rivers—be it the Nile, Indus, Euphrates, Ganges or China’s Sorrow the Huang He—for without its waters life is a daily struggle for survival; yet with its waters life is a daily bet that natural disasters and diseases will visit someone else’s village, because it’s not if, but when it’s going to happen that’s the relevant question.

tonight a storm from the north shall come your banks shall burst your waters shall run red

my friend the time has come for me to go the ticket i bought is warm in my hand

kubawa ia bak luka baru di keningku

wajahmu masih berkerut dari jeritan sejarah rumahmu masih berbahang dari tumpahan darah

Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon. Of course the border is really the Tibetan–Indian border – and that is precisely why China has always wanted to control it. This is the geopolitics of fear. If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that. It matters not whether India wants to cut off China’s river supply, only that it would have the power to do so. For centuries China has tried to ensure that it could never happen.

He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance; a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta – he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned.

The PRC’s “deterritorialized nationalism” is compatible with the commoditization of national sovereignty practice of many Mekong countries in which large-scale, long-term land concessions are granted to Chinese companies for lucrative investment in megaprojects (Dwyer 2007). Deterritorialized nationalism mobilized through xin yimin is at

-I’m a girl, I’m his friend and I’m attractive too, so don’t just ignore me like I was a pile of squid guts! She felt like saying back to them.

I was out on the Mekong again today when an entire village of refugees floated past. They had been attacked upriver by the Khmer Rouge. It was a pathetic sight, a flotilla of hundreds of ragged houseboats lashed together into giant rafts, drifting slowly. They were carrying their dead with them. I could see the bodies, wrapped in cloth. They stared at me blankly as I glided silently past, my multicolored sail bright in the sunlight. A small child waved but didn’t smile. Then a gentle gust caught my sail and I was gone.

I recall canoeing with veterans along tranquil meanders of the Saco River in Maine, when one of them, who had served on riverboats in the Mekong Delta, pointed out the tan mudbank on the outside of a curve. He said that such an innocent riverbank would be riddled with tunnels and invisible machine-gun and rock-propelled-grenade positions. The cumulative effect of prolonged attacks on mental function is to undermine the soldier's trust in his own perceptions. Another veteran said: Nothing is what it seems. That mountain there--maybe it wasn't there yesterday, and won't be there tomorrow. You get to the point where you're not even sure it is a mountain.

The river passes through our mountains, changing its name to Mekong where China, Laos, and Burma meet, before flowing through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and eventually to the South China Sea. “Yes! It is called the Danube of the East.

It is seventeen years since she sailed slowly up the Mekong, in a slow boat with canvas awning, to Savannakhet, a large clearing in the virgin forest-land, surrounded by grey rice fields. At night, clusters of mosquitoes on mosquito nets. He cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, picture her at twenty-two, sailing up the Mekong. He cannot picture that face as a young face. He cannot imagine the eyes of an innocent girl seeing what she can see now. He is walking more slowly now. It is already too hot. Gardens everywhere on this side of the town. The funeral scent of oleanders. The land of oleanders. He never wants to see those flowers again. Never. Not anywhere. He had too much to drink last night. He drinks too much. There is a dull ache in the back of his neck. His stomach is queasy. The pink oleanders melt into the pink sky at dawn. The piled-up heaps of lepers scatter and spread. He thinks of her. He tries to think of her, nothing but her: a girlish figure seated on a couch, overlooking a river. She is gazing in front of her, no, he cannot see her, she is lost in the shadows. He can only see her surroundings: the forest, the Mekong river. A crowd of about twenty people has gathered in the metalled road. She is ill. At night she weeps, and it is thought that the best thing would be to send her back to France. Her family are alarmed. They never stop talking. They talk too much, too loudly. Wrought-iron gates in the distance, sentries in khaki uniform. Already they are guarding her, as she will be guarded for the rest of her life. It would be a relief to everyone if she would give vent to her boredom in an angry outburst. It would not surprise them if she were to collapse before their eyes, but no, she is still sitting silently on her couch when Monsieur Stretter arrives, and carries her away in his official launch. He told her: 'I shall leave you in peace. You are free to return to France whenever you wish. You have nothing to fear.' And all this, when he, he, Charles Rossett–he stops in his tracks–oh! he, at this period of Anne-Marie Stretter's life, was no more than a child.

Tôi tin vào sự vĩ đại... không cần bất cứ một biểu tượng nào để được nhớ đến.

After the earliest temples of the Mekong delta, probably the next oldest group of Hindu temples in South-east Asia lies in the highlands of central Java, on the Dieng plateau.

Riddle of the Sphinx Moth Your hawk eyed wing peers with fierce stillness upon the day scorched Sonoran sands which, humbled in sparseness like the Sinai, found favor in God’s eye to cloak you in Joseph’s many colored coat. Tail horned larvae, thick in hermetic mystery, raise their headsin sphinx-like pose, riddling enemies with their stony gaze,spitting green soup at trespassers, worthy of Linda Blair in the Exorcist. At dusk you emerge from your cryptic shyness to pry the secrets of the Dune Evening Primrose with your well hung proboscis, so tapered to the task she can’t reproduce without your whirring whispers bruited in her ear, her cloying nectar saved only for you. With pugilist’s craft you woo all the desert blooms, bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali midair, swift and relentless, then hovering patiently like predatory helicopters on the Mekong spewing their gift of Agent Orange.

Lancang (better known outside China as the Mekong),

If my family had crossed the river two months later, they would have been massacred. Thailand was no longer taking Hmong refugees from Laos; there were too many coming in because of the continued influx of North Vietnamese soldiers to help the Pathet Lao kill the remaining Hmong. Jane Hamilton-Merritt, a journalist from America, recorded the deaths of two hundred Hmong people, families with small children, on the Mekong on July 27, 1979. The group was on a sandbar gathering vines to weave a bridge to Thailand. They built fires and boiled water in old U.S. Army canteens. The women took off their shirts to put over sticks to shelter their babies and the old women. They fed their hungry children. Many of them were little more than skeletons. The adults didn’t eat. They saved their rice for the children. Thai soldiers appeared on the Thai bank in jeeps with a machine gun bolted to the front hood. In two Thai patrol boats, the soldiers traveled to the island. The Thai soldiers slashed the vines that tried to connect the people to Thailand. Thailand had had enough Hmong refugees. On August 2, 1979, Hamilton-Merritt learned that a group of thirty to forty Pathet Lao soldiers had landed on the river island and the Hmong were massacred.*

My mother and father speak of how little we had when I was born. They had already been in the camp for a year and five months. Each person had only a few pieces of donated clothing. This was much more than they had when they crossed the Mekong River, but they still say that I was born when they were poor because they had stopped wishing for things other than their lives. I was their gift in a time when they could not dare to dream of presents.

We were in America at last. The world was dark, but the lights on the high poles showed the way. The cars had lights too, red and white ones that blinked in front and back. The world was big and I was small and there were lights everywhere, and for the first time since we left Ban Vinai Refugee Camp and lived the six months that had felt like years in Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to America, the dark was no longer full of the dead woman waiting for my soul. That night, I believed that if I followed the lights, I would never get lost in America, just as my mother and father had believed in the lights of Thailand, just as that night in the Mekong River would live forever inside of them—the night we got to America would live forever inside of me. The wind and the night and the lights. I had the feeling that my family had arrived at a place that was more perfect than we knew how to imagine. America was before me, my mother and father were close by me, and the world was open.

Mothering, I learned on the banks of the Mekong River, was a gift given and accepted.

It's something I'm seeing everywhere in Vietnam; what makes its food so good, its people so endearing and impressive: pride. It's everywhere. From top to bottom, everyone seems be doing the absolute best they can with what they have, improvising, repairing, innovating. It's a spirit revealed in every noodle stall, every leaky sampan, every swept and combed dirt porch and green rice paddy. You see it in the mud-packed dikes and levees of their centuries-old irrigation system, every monkey bridge, restored shoe, tire turned sandal, literless urban street, patched roof, and swaddled baby in brightly colored hand-knit cap. Think what you want about Vietnam and about communism and about whatever it was that really happened there all those years ago. Ignore, if you care to, the obvious - that the country is, and was always, primarily about family, village, province, and then country - that ideology is a luxury few can afford. You cannot help but be impressed and blown away by the hard work, the attention to detail, the care taken in every facet of daily life, no matter how mundane, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Spend some time in the Mekong Delta and you'll understand how a nation of farmers could beat the largest and most powerful military presence on the planet. Just watch the women in the rice paddies, bent at the waist for eight, ten hours a day, yanking bundles of rice from knee-deep water, then moving them, replanting them. Take a while to examine the interlocked system of stone-age irrigation, unchanged for hundreds and hundreds of years, the level of cooperation necessary among neighbors simply to scratch out a living, and you'll get the idea.

Vietnam's most famous work of literature, 'Kim Vân Kiều', written by Nguyễn Du (1766–1820) at the beginning of the nineteenth century, has a prostitute as its eponymous heroine. Thuý Kiều is a beautiful and talented young woman who, in order to help her family, willingly sells herself into prostitution.

Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.

Poverty has never been the sole reason leading women into prostitution. Promiscuity is publicly disapproved in small communities, but tacitly accepted in large towns and cities. Family conflicts and hopelessness about their husbands or boyfriends also encourage young women to leave their villages and to 'work horizontally' in the country's fast-growing cities, and abroad.

The prostitute has been central to life in Vietnam, a land long noted as exuding 'natural and unashamed sensuality'. Some 70% of Vietnamese married men claim that they have had extra-marital sex, mostly with prostitutes.

It Happened Long Ago” She said, “Why not forget it? It happened long ago!” The deepest wounds, cut to the heart, Will always heal slow. The nightmare of the Mekong, Of death, despair and fear, Could not be left in Vietnam. It’s fresh. It’s crisp. It’s here. My body’s strong. My mind is sound. I suffer from no pain, But once a man has been to war, He’s never quite the same. For I know war for what it is. No glory in the fight. It’s friends who die, and crippled kids, And voices crying in the night. I know the chill of monsoon rain, The heat of tropic sun, The loneliness and heartache, The power of a gun. For some it never happened, And most will never know. Except for those who fought the war, It happened long ago.

Survival, though, means more than going on. It means understanding the past and finding a way to subdue it, to reconcile it, to overcome it.

By Obama’s lights, there was no liberal America, no conservative America, no black America, no white America, no Latino America, no Asian America, only “the United States of America.” All these disparate strands of the American experience were bound together by a common hope: It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

France divided Vietnam into three parts: the French colony of Cochinchina, which encompassed the sprawling, sparsely peopled Mekong Delta in the South; and two “protectorates”—Annam, the poorest and most mountainous part of the country, just thirty miles wide at its narrowest point, and Tonkin, the densely populated Red River Delta. These protectorates were nominally overseen by a compliant descendant of the Nguyen emperors, but actually ruled—along with Laos and Cambodia—as part of the Indochinese Union by a French governor-general from his palace in Hanoi.

Phía Đông của cao nguyên Tây Tạng là chỗ xuất phát của nhiều con sông lớn nữa, trong đó có Hoàng Hà, Trường Giang và Cửu Long. Hoàng Hà và Trường Giang là hai con sông trọng yếu nhất của Trung Quốc, dòng chảy của chúng là quê hương của một nền văn hóa thâm hậu nhất của loài người mà về sau tôi sẽ đi thăm. Còn Cửu Long là nguồn sống của nhiều nước Đông Nam Á, trong đó có Việt Nam. Nếu lấy cao nguyên Tây Tạng làm tâm điểm, vẽ một vòng tròn bán kính chưa đến ngàn cây số thì vòng tròn đó bao gồm tất cả nguồn cội của những con sông nói ở trên. Chỉ điều đó thôi đã gây cho tôi một lòng kính sợ đối với cao nguyên Tây Tạng, "nóc nhà của thế giới". Đúng, không phải là sự ngẫu nhiên khi ánh sáng của minh triết loài người xuất phát từ vùng đất lạ lùng này. Tôi đã đến Cửu Long giang miền Tây Nam Bộ và từng thấy con nước mãnh liệt của nó. Nguồn của nó không phải tầm thường, dòng sông đó là anh em với Hằng hà, Trường Giang, nó mang khí lạnh của Hy Mã, sức sáng của tuyết trắng, sự uy nghi của non cao, cái bí ẩn của các Man-đa-la vô hình. Nếu nó có bị ô nhiễm thì cũng vì con người bạc nghĩa, thế nhưng dù thế nó vẫn nhân hậu sống theo người. Nó vẫn không hế mất tính thiêng liêng của nguồn cội và vì tâm người ô nhiễm nên cảm nhận chúng nhiễm ô. Về sau, tôi còn đến Hằng hà nhiều lần trên bước lữ hành tại Ấn Độ cũng như sẽ có dịp đi dọc Trường Giang qua những vùng linh địa của Trung Quốc. Rồi lại có ngày tôi đã tôi đã đến cao nguyên Tây Tạng, đi dọc sông Tsangpo chảy từ hàm ngựa và thở hít không khí loãng trên miền đất cao 4000m trong Man-đa-la vĩ đại của địa cầu. Một ngày nào đó hy vọng tôi sẽ có dịp đến thượng nguồn Cửu Long, sẽ thấy một màu nước xanh lục như màu nước Hằng hà và sẽ nhớ về miền Tây Nam Bộ của mình.

and province at the mouth of the Mekong River), the plan had

This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as ‘China’s Water Tower’. China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the USA, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.

-To me women are the most unknown factors in the universe, Vieng had then continued, -that is what makes them so interesting to us. So it’s like us men have an instinctively born scientific nature to study women. As I said before it takes a long time to understand women, if it is at all possible, so once you find the right woman to love then you will never get bored of trying to study her.