"My shoulder hurts...do you think I have bird flu?"

Okay, despite my seemingly casual attitude toward all things pandemic, I gotta admit, I'm a little worried. It's hard not to be with the constant drumbeat of news about "it's not IF there's a pandemic, but WHEN". The first thing my editor greeted me with today was, "Vietnam just confirmed another bird flu death" - this time a Hanoi man who lives in MY district. He ate a chicken bought from a local market, developed symptoms, and died a few days later (although nine family members who ate the chicken with him haven't shown any symptoms).

So I inwardly freaked (or not-so-inwardly, if you count the piercing shrieks that permeated the newsroom.). Just yesterday I ate grilled chicken in a neighboring district! Up until this morning, I heard that you couldn't get bird flu from properly cooked chicken (and you possibly still can't; I don't know how his chicken was prepared). But it's a cause for concern and I've sworn off all chicken. Still on the fence about eggs.

When I first came here six months ago, bird flu made an occasional appearance in the news, but it wasn't a huge concern. I saw chickens walking around on sidewalks in the Old Quarter and on Nguyen Thai Hoc, a big street, and laughed to think how unconcerned people were.

Now you definitely won't see chickens strolling about. The government has banned the popular duck blood pudding (truly as DELICIOUS as it sounds...kidding), and the Health Ministry recently advised people not to eat chicken at all. My relatives in the city won't eat it, the street that specializes in grilled chicken is now quiet, and yesterday a restaurant informed us they no longer serve chicken.

I'm still trying to get a feel for what people know. One of the Vietnam Investment Review reporters wrote an article last week that claimed, "Bird flu has appeared in countries like Indonesia and Taiwan. Indonesia has had dozens of deaths and recently reported four more deaths." I changed this to "Bird flu has appeared in Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam. Indonesia recently reported four deaths that pushed the total number of deaths to 62. According to the World Health Organisation, Vietnam has had 41 deaths from bird flu" (although since then the numbers have risen slightly).

I asked my teenage class if they heard of any bird flu deaths in Vietnam. One boy actually said there weren't any yet. The other students quickly corrected him, but some of them were quoting figures like six deaths. Bird flu re-emerged in Vietnam in December 2003 and Vietnam now has 42 bird flu deaths - out of 64 worldwide (65.6 percent). Vietnam has also had 92 human cases out of 125 confirmed by the WHO (73.6 percent).

Anyway, here are some WHO figures, as of Nov. 9. WHO only counts cases which have been confirmed in their laboratory.

CAMBODIA:
4 cases
4 deaths

THAILAND:
20 cases
13 deaths

INDONESIA:
9 cases
5 deaths
*On Nov. 9 Indonesia reported a death it believes is due to bird flu, but this has yet to be confirmed by WHO

VIETNAM:
92 cases
42 deaths

TOTAL:
125 cases
64 deaths

No, I don't have the bird flu...

...although I guess you could say it IS too early to tell.

Sorry for not writing in so long. I'll just give a quick update.

So we moved into the house I mentioned; the owner relented, but on terms more favorable to her (three months' rent in advance and a month's deposit). The house isn't perfect, but we're happy in it. There's me, Patrick (24, also an American Viet Kieu), Daniela (26, an Italian who interns for an NGO) and Thanh (22, a tourism female student at the University of Society and Culture). Thanh pays a less than one-fourth of what I pay, but I don't care. She's still learning English, and we speak primarily in Vietnamese.

As for work, I'm now a regular staffer at Vietnam Investment Review. Despite shoddy journalistic standards (people PAY us to do Q&As with them), I actually do like changing and improving a story. I'm also still with the golf magazine, which I consider pretty damn low, but as established in previous posts, I'm a whore.

Still teaching as well. In fact, the school gave me a new class when I subbed for another teacher and the students requested that I be their permanent teacher. I consider this a nice little coup because the previous teacher was Caucasian, and the Vietnamese tend to prefer a white English teacher to an Asian one (despite knowing I was born in the States).

Other than that, life is going well here. My Vietnamese is improving; I'm not fluent and won't be for a long time, but I can understand some movies and can read some articles from the local women's magazines (the other day I read a short story about a woman who thought her husband was cheating on her, only to find out it was all in her head)(that's right, highbrow literature for Pauline). Unless bird flu dramatically changes my plans, I'm not planning on coming home for four or five months. I love the unhurried pace of life here.

Okay, we didn't get the house

It was our mistake. Patrick and I rejected it because we thought the trung gian (middleman) price - 50 percent of one month's rent - was too high. We thought other Vietnamese people bargained them down to 10 and 15 percent and they were just treating us like foreigners (and we all know the only thing rich foreigners want to is be treated like locals, except when it comes to being paid like a local). Then we realized the trung gian price was standard and tried to get the house back the next day, but this time the owner rejected us for being unreliable. You'd think, developing country, they'll take it, but rich people here aren't desperate.

That's one preconception I had wrong about Vietnam. Another was wireless. For some reason I thought, "It's Vietnam. Will there be any wireless places? Do people even have laptops?" There are about 30 wireless cafes all over Hanoi. It's a hit! Really, I don't know what I was thinking.

New house

I'm moving house again! Almost two weeks ago I left my expensive apartment ($240 a month, a sky-high rate for a simple flat) and have been sponging off a friend since. However, today another friend (and fellow American Viet Kieu) Patrick and I will sign a contract for a gi-normous 4-bedroom house for $316 a month. The only dark spot is the $158 realtor's finding fee, but the total still worked out to cheaper than my last place. The house has five stories - including a lovely balcony and deck space - and is in the heart of Hanoi.

Right now the plan is to find another Westerner to take one of the bedrooms and bring each person's rent to about $100 each. Then we want to rent one of the bedrooms to one or two Vietnamese girls at a fraction of the price (hopefully about $20 each because there's no way they could afford our rent). I've been wanting to live with a Vietnamese person, but not an old person who'll comment on late hours and whatnot. Hopefully doing it this way will be better.

And my Vietnamese is improving. Just about everyone I meet comments that it's soi (fluent). Totally not true, but flattering, nonetheless.

More bad "journalism"

Am I even allowed to call it that? You be the judge.

So I edited the stupidest story in the world for Vietnam Golf magazine (if you're thinking, "Vietnam has a golf magazine?", you're not alone).

This is from the article "One Day at Phan Thiet Golf Course," written by a Vietnamese person:

"...as the ninth [hole] is ranked as one of the 500 finest holes in the world. The fairway of the ninth is like the body of an 18-year-old girl that will stir anybody’s heart. The green is so beautiful and challenging, triggering the golfers’ desire to conquer and to hole the ball...the 180-yard ninth is divided by two small hills. The hills, like two full round breasts, are surrounded by pine trees. The only way to reach the green with one stroke is to drive the ball straight through the cleavage."

I took out the reference to the 18-year-old girl and the breasts. I suppose that's infringing on the writer's creativity, but his creativity made me just a little sick.

He also wrote:

"Each play at the Ocean Sand Dunes Golf Club would remind me about the poetic love story and the unfortunate destiny of the owner of the course, [Larry Lee Hillblom.] With the love for golf and for the beauty of Phan Thiet, Hillblom decided to hire Nick Faldo to design the course and invested a huge sum of money in building the property, without paying much attention to profits.

Probably he had foreseen his short life and decided to bequeath one of the world’s golf masterpieces to the next generations, to golfers and to Vietnam. Maybe he had known that a true love with a Vietnamese girl would come from this golf course and his daughter would become a talented golfer. The love for his daughter has been brought into designing the ninth hole of the course, which is a natural, cultural and humanly legacy."

Okay, Hillblom, who made his billions being the "H" of DHL, died in a plane crash at 52. He was well known for his taste in underage Asians, particularly bargirls and virgins. After he died four of his Asian children successfully won a lawsuit for several million. And with the mentioned Vietnamese woman he fathered a son. I cut the story at the line "to golfers and to Vietnam" and sent this letter to my editor:

"Hi Yen, Here's the golf Phan Thiet story. Please look at the bottom carefully. If you REALLY want to add the part about the Vietnamese girlfriend and "daughter" you can, but that information was wrong. For one thing, he had a son, who he never saw in his life. Also, I don't think you can call it a love story with the girl because the well-known story is that he hopped around Southeast Asia sleeping with virgins. Could we end the story where I suggested?"

I also edited an awful column, more fit to run in a junior high rag than any magazine, about whatever happened to playing golf for fun instead of competition? Apparently when one of the columnist's friends plays poorly the columnist will purposely bogey a few holes to let his friend back in the game. He saw this as good sportsmanship, a "how you play the game" type of thing. I see it as being a pussy and maybe you should get some new friends if yours are that whiny.

The worst part was the ending. "One day when my daughter grows older I'll take her out to the course and teach her to play...

For the love of the game."

Uh-oh, you did not go there.

Katrina

If you're wondering what the Vietnamese think about Katrina and its aftermath, I think it's similar to what the rest of the world thinks. My tutor says news reports have asked how this could happen in a rich country like America. A friend wonders how the government could have left people stranded for so long, and one of my students says people now know America is made up of two classes, rich and poor.

An Irish friend wrote this:

"I've been following the news about the disaster in New Orleans, one of the girls in my workplace was on honeymoon there at the time. She and her husband, James were queuing for a bus for four hours before they were told to turn back. They went back to their hotel which had at this point been half taken over by a gang who were planning on taking over the whole place. There was five of them hold up in a one bed hotel room for four days, before the staff helped them get out. They were warned away from the Superdome, at all costs they were told to stay away from there. They found two English guys with a car and they drove to Houston.
They flew to Chicago and then on home. Carol (the girl from work) is a skinny little thing, she is totally tramatised from the whole experience and has lost a stone weight."

I’m become a journalism whore...

I don’t know how else to put it. I've picked up some editing work over here and my ethics teacher at Northwestern would be horrified at what I'm doing. I'm sorry, Joe Mathewson. Please don't disown me.

CASE 1: English editor for Vietnam Golf Magazine.

At editorial meetings where we discuss what articles to run, we also mention calling any companies these articles mention and asking them to place an ad in the magazine. I'm surprised the ad department doesn't come to the meetings.

Also, I just got an article from one of their reporters that clearly plagiarizes a story from The Star newspaper in Malaysia. I'm talking lifting whole phrases here. I mentioned this to my boss, but in all likelihood this practice is well and fine and my job will be to rearrange the story so that it's not so obviously copied.

CASE 2: Freelance editor for the Foreign Language Publishing House.

From the memoir of Senior Lieutenant General Nguyên Huu An of the North Vietnamese army:

"Viewing the battlefield from the end of 1964 to the beginning of 1965 over South Viet Nam as a whole, one can observe that the liberation army was in a strong, overwhelming, victorious and growing position, while the puppet army was overwhelmed, falling into disfavour, and their complete failure was inevitable."

And:

"The U.S. imperialists suffered heavy failures not only on the battlefield but also in the political arena. The U.S. troops sent to South Viet Nam revealed themselves to be aggressors, and thus hurt the national sentiment, self-respect and pride of our people."

CASE 3: Temporary Sub-editor for Vietnam Investment Review.

I asked another editor why the articles often have two names under the byline, the second one in parenthesis. He said the name in parenthesis is the actual reporter, and the first name is a fake name, listed to give the impression the paper has more reporters than it actually does. I stifled the urge to ask if we should include fake datelines, too.

I also edited a press release as an article. The reporter had literally cut and paste a press release from Motorola about their new General Director in Vietnam, then called the guy and inserted his quotes. That's it. The best I could do was make it not-so-press-releasey, so I rearranged it and cut out phrases like, "Motorola has been instrumental in shaping the telecommunications landscape of Vietnam" and "He is taking charge of an outstanding local team."

If you’re ever in Hanoi, you can find me on the corner of Phô Huê and Hai Bà Trung carrying this sign: "Will Edit Your Propaganda for Food." I’ll be the one in high heels, a short skirt, and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much makeup.