This article, a winner of Shareable’s Share or Die Storytelling Contest, originally appeared on Shareable.net.  

Julian and I had been traveling side-by-side almost 24 hours a day. So, it wasn't until two weeks into the trip that I started to notice this awkward thing about Vietnam. The first time it happened it was dusk. Julian was at a tiny copy shop on the side of a busy road in Hanoi; he was making 30 copies of our storytelling workshop packet, for the workshop we were holding with climate activists the next day, and it was taking forever.

I had to pee and I was bored, so I went for a walk in search of a bathroom. I stood at the edge of the road watching the cars weave and whiz by me. I couldn't find the courage to cross the street. The week before, a Vietnamese friend had told me to just close my eyes and step out, and trust the cars will go around me. She said the only time people get hit in Vietnam is when they hesitate because they are trying to predict what the driver will do. I paced back and forth, trying to muster up the courage. I couldn't convince myself to close my eyes, but I stiffened my back and imagined I was Frankenstein, walking step by step, trusting that the cars, scooters, and vans would go around me. They did. And as I took my last step out of the traffic, I felt a rush of wind from a van passing too close behind me and I thought I heard an “I love you” fly out from the window. I wondered if they could have been talking to me.

I headed to a building with bright lights at the end of the road. When I got to the gate, I asked the thin, little, 60-year-old security guard if I could use the bathroom. He didn’t speak English, but after a few tries he understood and he nodded enthusiastically, saying, “Toilet, toilet!” and pointing to the bathroom door as he shepherded me toward it.

When I came out, he was standing there waiting for me. I laughed and said goodbye to him, he nodded and smiled big. It looked like he wanted to say something, so I turned around and looked back. He quickly and quietly said, “I love you,” and a smile lit up across his face. Turns out that almost everyone in Vietnam knows how to say “I love you” in English.

My project, the Million Person Project, is all about love, and I must say the word love 100 times a day. I am constantly blabbing on about our oneness, about our universal love, and about how all that is wrong in the world is because of our ability to deny sharing our inherit love for one another. Actually, leaving my job, my apartment, and all my friends in San Francisco to start the Million Person Project have all been in an attempt to prove to myself that life can really just be about love, about being all of who you are, and finding and sharing that common humanity with anyone. Yet, when confronted with a sweet old man stranger, with soft eyes and and pants hiked up well above his belly button, telling me that he loved me, I stood there awkwardly, rolled my eyes and then walked away. I had made it 30 feet down the road when I looked back and saw him standing at the gate. I shouted, “I LOVE YOU, TOO!” I felt weird about myself, but oh well.

When I rounded the corner, I just about bumped into Julian. The copier had broken down and it was going to be another hour or so. “Was that you yelling I love you?” He asked. He looked at me like I was crazy. I laughed and tried to brush it off.

It was the first of many I love yous I shared with people in the streets in Vietnam. Anytime Julian and I were apart, I love yous would be hurled at me. When Julian was at the ATM, when Julian was taking too long trying on suits, or when Julian refused to go to the internet café, I would walk down the sidewalks alone and just field the I love yous from men or kids riding by on bikes, out car windows, or from shop owners out their front doors. It always felt like more of a greeting to an obvious foreigner than any sort of pick-up line. It was their way of saying something nice in my language – a kind of "Hey, nice to meet you. You look friendly. I hope you enjoy our country!" It was all summed up in "Hi, I love you" -- four simple words they could share with me.

But, for me, it was boot camp in practicing what I preached and in fighting through the awkwardness to stand by what I know is deeply true to me: that we all actually love each other, even as strangers on the street. And, if we can commit to sharing that reality with one another, the world will be a much better place. So I committed to saying I love you back, no matter what -- or, at least, I committed to doing my best. The embarrassment was too much sometimes to shout it out, especially as I Frankenstein-stomped across traffic. In those cases, I would just say it under my breath. “I love you, too,” I'd whisper, just to stay straight with the universe.

Image by watchsmart, licensed under Creative Commons.   

Utne Reader has partnered with Link TV to present Global Spirit, an "internal travel series" covering the spiritual, mental, and physical practices that define us as human beings. Watch excerpts from the series here, or view entire episodes at the Link TV website. 

In this excerpt from Link TV's Global Spirit program, Dr. Ed Tick leads a group Vietnam veterans back to Vietnam in search of healing.

Political protest and designated green spaces are both uncommon sights in Vietnam’s capital city. Recently however, prompted by the protest of one dedicated woman, the Prime Minister of Vietnam officially halted plans to erect a $40 million, American-backed, 4-star hotel from being built at one of the city’s most historically sensitive sites. 

That site is Reunification Park, which GlobalPost explains was "a signature project of 'socialist labor' in Vietnam. Unpaid students built it by hand between 1958 and 1960 in a swamp that had served as a garbage dump in colonial times." Tran Thi Thanh Van, a retired landscape architect and leader of the crusade, sprung into action when she witnessed a corner of the park getting bulldozed.

“In one of the documents," says Van, who helped build the park with several thousand other young people years ago, "they said that the hotel will become a resort in the city. What is a ‘resort’? Vietnamese people don’t know English, but they understand that a ‘resort’ is a place for the other people, not for them.”

Now, with the help of angry citizens and foreign NGOs, the city is being forced to find a new location and compensate for some of the $15 million investors had already put into the project.

Source: GlobalPost

Image by  alex-s  licensed under  Creative Commons   

Cinema’s response to war has changed since Vietnam, Michael Bronski postulates in Z Magazine. For instance, the war in Iraq has been immediately made into documentaries (No End in Sight and Standard Operating Procedure), independent films (Redacted and Battle for Haditha), and even Hollywood productions (In the Valley of Elah and Stop-Loss), while it took years for many films to be made about Vietnam. Mainstream movies like Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now weren’t released until the late 1970s, almost a decade after the war ended.

Bronski credits Vietnam with influencing other film genres as well: The slasher film, beginning with Halloween in 1978, was created as an avatar for the senseless killing of American youth during the Vietnam War, and testosterone-swelling action hero films like Rocky (1976), Terminator (1974), and Die Hard (1988) were used to reassert our postwar nation’s masculinity, as if to say, “We could have won in Vietnam!”

Further, Bronski claims that the stoner buddy movie genre, with a new understanding of masculinity, was invented in response to the absurd man-movies emblematic of the “unholy three” (Willis, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone). Films like Dumb and Dumber, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle and Dude, Where’s My Car? exhibit an apolitical, peace-and-love sense of masculinity that is a direct backlash to action hero archetypes. 

Bronski’s argument is interesting, but I believe he is ignoring some important, much earlier incarnations of this same sensitive masculinity—the two most prevalent examples being Harold Ramis’ Animal House and Stripes. Both of these films, released in 1978 and 1981, respectively, put goofball, slacker men in positions where they are confronted by archetypal masculinity. Further, in both of these films this masculinity is represented by military figures (ROTC Cadet Officer Niedermeyer in Animal House and Sergeant Hulka in Stripes). The characters use disarming and nonthreatening humor to combat aggression, much like modern-day stoner comedies. But, instead of remaining apolitical, the heroes in Ramis’ films are forced to face the warlike masculinity emblematic of Vietnam militarism, proving that nonviolence can be an answer. 

Reading his article made me think of how we view masculinity in our modern time of war. If cinema is any refection, then our current perceptions equate masculinity with naïveté. Films like Jarhead and Stop-Loss present characters anxious to go to war, blinded by masculinity and a sense of duty, then humbled by the true nature of the conflict. Even stoner buddy movies like Harold and Kumar have ignorant über-masculine villains blinded by testosterone. The current trend seems to be that of peace and intelligence, which is itself a critique on war in general.  

It’s impossible to say what, if any, genres will come in response to the current Iraq War, but it seems safe to say that glorified violent masculinity is no longer something to be admired; rather it is a manifestation of ignorance and last resorts.

(Image by Jurek Durczak, licensed under Creative Commons.)