Grandma and the Vietnam War
When I was young, friends would visit, and there was one photo on the shelf that caught their attention in my room.  It was a photo of an elderly Caucasian lady and their first question to me was, “How come you didn’t take the stock photo out of the frame?”  I replied that she was my grandma, and they became even more confused because they thought I was 100% Vietnamese, so why would my grandma be white?

In 1975, my mom was working in the Saigon Adventist Hospital in Vietnam, and around April 20, conditions were deteriorating quickly in the capital with rumors that the communists would take over soon.  She witnessed firsthand horrors of the war working in the emergency room, with one memory of treating an 8-year old where a grenade had exploded near his head.  Due to the severity of the injuries, the child passed away and she grieved heavily with her family.

Similar to the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, people became desperate to get out of the country, especially if they were associated with the Americans.  Charter flights were leaving around the clock organized by the US State Department to evacuate as many people out of Vietnam as possible.

There was one charter flight where one lady was a no-show and my mom took her place.  At that moment, she left everything behind, her family, her possessions, and was only left with a US $20 dollar bill given to her.

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, my foster grandma, Beryl Bason heard calls from the Loma Linda Adventist church about sponsoring Vietnamese refugees to help get them on their feet.  My grandma ended up hosting my mom, and two of her nursing school classmates in San Diego for a couple of months where they all went back to nursing to become certified nurses to work in the US.

My mom met my dad after immigrating to the US and settled in Orange County, California where it would end up having one of the biggest populations of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam. 

Return to the home land part 1

It is a bit strange, but according to my parents, my first language was actually Vietnamese. They were afraid I would be confused learning two languages, so they switched to speaking to me in English when I was young.  Since then new research has shown kids can learn multiple languages without issue. Because I never learned Vietnamese formally, my proficiency was stunted, unlike my Spanish which I consider myself semi-fluent in due to four great years of education in high school.

There was a running joke that since I really didn’t look Vietnamese, my friends bought me a 23andme genetic test to settle the issue once and for all.  Funnily enough, the first result of the test showed 1% speculative European, but the results eventually tightened up to confirm that my origins are indeed 100% Vietnamese.

Most kids of immigrants make some type of ‘return to the homeland’ type journey when they are young, and for me it was when I was 13.  A priority for my parents was to meet my grandparents while they were still alive and to meet my extended family.

I have to admit, that was a rough trip.   My mom’s hometown of Tam Kỳ wasn’t really well developed and I remember when I had to go to the bathroom, it was in an outhouse not unlike a camping trip.  Hardly anyone spoke much English so I struggled talking with my cousins and just about everyone else

For some reason, my parents also had wacky expectations that after I went to Vietnam I would become fluent in Vietnamese.  Let’s just say that didn’t happen; becoming fluent in something requires understanding the foundational basics of grammar, language, and some schooling which I didn’t get.

As an adult, Vietnam was never really on my radar to visit.  I befriended some Europeans at a previous job, and they told me they spent months in the country visiting every nook and cranny.  Because of my last trip, my memories of Vietnam were primarily associated with seeing family, extended family, and more family so I didn’t get to see the country on my own terms (although I would have been too young anyways to make my own decisions).

Return to the homeland  part 2– 27 years later

In 2014, I took a trip to Mexico with my partner and parents since they had a time share in Cabo San Lucas.  It was the first international-ish trip with my parents and I was a bit nervous as I had never traveled with them as adults.

I was pleasantly surprised that we all had a great time with each other, and the trip went really well.  There was even a time where I said, let’s go snorkeling in Cabo Pulmo (about 2 hours away) and they were okay with the drive.  On the way the road seemed to end and I took the right fork when I should have taken the left fork and got the car stuck in the ditch in the sand.  There was nobody around, and I didn’t have any cell phone data (at that time North America plans didn’t exist yet).  I don’t know why exactly but my partner and my dad pushed the car while I hit the accelerator and we got the car out of the ditch.  After such an incident like that, I’m happy my parents didn’t disown me after such a scary incident. Happy to say, that snorkeling was probably some of the best I’ve ever seen, with a travel adventure to back it up.

Since then I’ve been intentional to travel with my parents as much as possible as I know they are getting older, and there will be a time they won’t be able to travel anymore due to their age or health.  Unfortunately this type of thinking boded true as when my dad passed away, I am grateful that I could travel with him quite a bit.

In March 2020, we scheduled a trip to visit Vietnam all together, and it would have been 27 years since I had last visited.  However at around February 2020 we were getting news that schools in Vietnam were getting shut down due to Covid.  At the time there weren’t hard shut downs, but out of an abundance of caution we cancelled the trip.

In early 2023, my partner proposed we go to Vietnam all together around Thanksgiving time.  My parents initially were going to go, but then declined to hang out with the grandkids.  Initially I was relying on my parents to do a lot of the planning, but now that we were on our own we began doing research on what to do.  My parents not going ended up being fortunate, as my dad got seriously sick around the same time, so it was good he was in North America.

With the Lonely Planet book, I began researching things to do and oddly enough realized that I actually didn’t know much about Vietnam in terms of the cities, regions, or even things to do.  After much research (and talking to my cousins and friends), we decided to stick mainly in the north because it was drier, and the central area was rainy season so we didn’t spend too much time there.

Vietnamese – Forked

We started our trip in the city of Hanoi, which is the capital in the north.  Probably the most important expression everyone learns when visiting a foreign country is, “where is the bathroom?”.  My proficiency in Vietnamese is kind of like a bunch of lego blocks in my head with limited abilities of building certain structures.  Everything kind of comes out in bits and pieces, but at the least I know how to say

Cầu tiêu ở đâu? (Where is the bathroom – but literal translation is ‘where is the toilet’)

Of course the waiter in the restaurant gives me a really confused look, and says, you mean

Nhà vệ sinh ở đâu? (‘Where is the bathroom – but literal translation is ‘where is the hygienic house’)

Now I give the puzzled look as I don’t understand.  I’ve never heard of a bathroom called “Nhà vệ sinh” in my life growing up in Southern California at all.

One of the things which is important to realize is when the refugees came from Vietnam to North America and other parts of the world in 1975, two Vietnamese diaspora now existed in different locations around the world.  One in Vietnam the main branch, and another branch in North America.

Talking to my mom and some relatives about this, my guess is the etymology of “where is the bathroom” in Vietnam pre 1975 probably was “Cầu tiêu”, and that at some time post 1975 it changed to “Nhà vệ sinh”.  Even the English language, has radically changed much in 40 years.  When I talk with the newest generation in high school, there are a bunch of words that I have no idea what they mean.

Soleil Ho, talks about this how Vietnamese food in North America is basically food from Vietnam from the 1970s.  Again, it makes sense because the food traditions were from the initial wave of refugees.

I talked to a good friend living in Vietnam about this, and she mentioned how Vietnamese people living in North America now have a Vietnamese – North American accent.  The Vietnamese spoken in North America comes off as a lighter tone and people in the north consider this tone as someone who has studied formally.

This kind of explains a weird situation I had in a grocery market.  I was asking what was in the center of this candy, and the lady remarked in Vietnamese, “Your Vietnamese is so good, how many years did you study for?”.  Inside I was dying because I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was an overseas Vietnamese (Việt kiều Mỹ).  I’m sure if she knew that she probably would have instead asked, “why is your Vietnamese so bad?”

The other surprising fork which I hadn’t really considered is how different the northern dialects are different from the southern dialects.  I distinctly recall several friends learning Vietnamese through duolingo, and their parents asking why they are learning the northern accent.  In the eyes of the north, their dialect is often viewed as the gold standard of speaking.  Below are examples of English Word – Northern Vietnamese Dialect – Southern Vietnamese Dialect as explained by one of my friends in Vietnam.

You don’t have to be proficient in Vietnamese just to see these are totally different words.  I am happy to report when I later went to my parent’s hometown Đà Nẵng (central Vietnam), I did have an easier time understanding and speaking to people.

Reconciliation

Maybe it isn’t me not giving Vietnam enough credit, but the museum scene in Hanoi was unexpectedly stellar.  There is the Hoa Lo Prison Museum (made famous where John McCain was held as a POW), Ethnology Museum (about minority populations), Women’s Museum, Ho Chi Minh Museum, and the list actually does go on and on quite a bit.

One day we were kind of tired so we went to a museum right next to the hotel, aptly called the Hanoi Museum.  On the second floor was an exhibit on the American War.  That’s right, in Vietnam, it is not called the Vietnam War, it is called the American War.  Much of the panels were spent talking about Americans as the aggressors, and the breaking of the Paris peace accords.  However, the last panel discussed a lot about reconciliation between Vietnam and America.

It is amazing to me that 40 years later, formerly bitter enemies are now actually allies.  In the midst of some of the grand global conflicts occurring now, it is helpful to have hope that I truly believe anything is possible in terms of peace. 

Hà Giang Loop Tour

From family friends we heard about a trek that was not exactly off the beaten path, but not the first thing tourists do.  There is a 3 day loop tour that most people rent motorcycles and drive up the Ma Li Peng pass bordering China.  Given we didn’t want to be riding motorcycles on mountain roads for 3 days, we booked a 3 day car trip.

We booked with the Yesd travel agency (huge plug for them here, I do recommend this agency), where the tour guides consist of ethnic minorities of the region.  Talking to the guide, there are over 54 ethnic minorities there.  I was kind of shocked, and humbled that I really knew so little of Vietnam.  The drive consisted of driving through spectacular greenery on the mountain roads and we took many stops for photos. 

Our accommodations were at houses belonging to the ethnic tribes in the region.  We first stayed with the Tay people, and I was pretty surprised that our accommodation, despite being on the second floor of a traditional wood structure had a shower, heat pump, and pretty fast wifi.

For dinner, we would eat with the families, and it was nice in a way that it wasn’t performative.  The families didn’t talk about their lives or their minority status.  It was just a regular dinner you would eat with a family.  With the eco-tourism booming there, it’s just easier to act like you normally do when you have visitors and not need to put on a show.

On the second day we did a tour through a Hmong village.  It was rural in its location, but not in the stereotypical sense because everyone there had fancy cell phones.  The Hmong people there still adhered to their traditional of marrying early and their agricultural routines.

We sat down for tea with one of the Hmong shop owners when I noticed he was wearing a French beret.  I kind of asked why he was wearing a beret, and he explained that from French colonial rule, this clothing item was introduced.  Ever since that time, the beret in that region became traditional wear.

Thinking about this further, it really has helped me alter my thinking of the word ‘authentic’.  There is this Vietnamese Instant Pot Facebook group which constantly argues about recipes not being ‘authentic’.  Some claim it is only authentic when it is from the source home country.  Others argue a recipe is authentic when you cater towards the spirit of it.

Rachel Ray a little while back then sowed a bit of controversy from her pho video. 2 years ago people were raging against her, “how dare she change the recipe, that’s not authentic!”.

Coming back the Hmong person I wonder, who is the arbiter of when something is authentic and traditional?  After hearing his story, I think it’s difficult to nail down authenticity to a static period of time.  And that the reality is the traditions change through time, and perhaps there is no such thing as authenticity.

Ha Long Bay

After Ha Giang, we went to Ha Long Bay, a large bay of water where cruise ships sail around for about 1-2 days.  We took a shuttle and from Hanoi the trip was only 2 hours.  Expecting the trip to be a straight shot, I was surprised we stopped half way for a ‘restroom stop’.  The restroom stop was next to a pretty fancy gift shop.

At the check-in area of Ha Long Bay, there were tons of people representing a diverse set of people all over the world similar to an airport.  The check-in area was a bit chaotic and you board a small boat to join the big boat.

On our particular cruise boat, we somehow joined everyone from Portugal as there were probably only two other couples who weren’t from Europe.  We befriended one couple who was from New York while watching a cooking demonstration.  The guy was half Vietnamese and half Indian, which was pretty fascinating to me as I have never met anyone of that mix.  He was willing to entertain some of my questions on which side he felt most comfortable with.  I imagine he probably gets asked this question quite a bit being mixed.

After dinner I stood towards the front of the boat looking at the view and the cruise manager was out there also.  He looked pretty young, probably early 20s so I greeted him with “Chào em” (hello little brother).  In Vietnamese when you talk to anybody you address people relative to the age of your parents, or relative to your own age.  Snafus always happen about people incorrectly assuming age causing people to correct you on how you should address them.

I don’t know if that was a good or bad thing, but he took that as a cue that I was in Vietnamese and began speaking to me in Vietnamese.  I explained to him my Vietnamese wasn’t that great and it was my first time visiting Vietnam since I was 13.   He said something really surprising during the conversation said, “Welcome home, even though you forgot a lot of your Vietnamese, it will come back to you.”

We were pretty mixed about the experience especially coming after an awesome cultural and nature experience from Ha Giang.  Ha Long Bay oddly enough was one of our least favorite parts of our trip more so for the feeling of having a Disneyland type experience of tons of people and long lines. Ha Giang in the next couple years will have a faster road built from Hanoi cutting the drive time to about 2 – 2.5 hours so expect tourism in that region to increase soon.

Da Nang

The last part of our trip was to the central area of Da Nang.  My uncle (my dad’s brother) still lives in Da Nang, and my cousins flew from Saigon to meet us up there.  On the first night being there, they took us out to eat at a famous Banh Xeo place.

Bánh  Xèo is crispy turmeric rice crepe where the ingredients are either chicken, pork, or shrimp.  The name of the dish is a fun play of words roughly translating to sizzling item.  Bánh is kind of a weird weird as it could refer to a lot of things depending on the word it is paired with.  My cousins know I don’t eat pork and shrimp, so I was surprised when they mentioned we could order Beef Banh Xeo.

I inquired further why there is a beef banh xeo, as I never heard of that before.  Apparently because of the Korean influences into the city due to tourism and business, the people of Da Nang began changing their food to cater to the Koreans.  Because of that, a couple new dishes emerged like Banh Xeo Bo and Mi Quang Bo.  The latter dish is traditionally made of chicken, turmeric, and shrimp, but now they made a beef version.  What previously was an authentic dish of only chicken, pork, and shrimp now added beef as an option.

Next to Da Nang is Hoi An, the famous town known for its lanterns at night and on the river.  On the way there, my cousins wanted me to visit a street named after my grandfather, Quach Xan.  I asked what he was known for, and she replied that he was a great leader for the country.  Just kind of putting things together, I know that my dad and his brother had a classic story of joining different sides of the war and that would mean my grandfather was a communist.

I had kind of mixed feelings standing there on the street taking pictures by the street sign with an ode to my family name.  As a great leader to Vietnam, I wonder what he did?  What is interesting about Vietnam is that half of the population was born after the war so it is something that isn’t talked about much.

In Hanoi, we did a walking tour with a student from Hanoi University.  We asked what his generation thought about politics and said that mostly everybody was apolitical and most were concerned more about their economic futures rather than the political state of the country. 

When we think of wars, history tends to paint everything in black and white strokes.  There were the good guys and bad guys.  I inquired about my grandfather a little bit with my mom and the war in general and she said really back then, both sides were rather corrupt, and her opinion was neither side really had the people’s interest at heart.

During my time in Vietnam I had a sense that even with my cousins they didn’t want to talk about the war so it is a topic I didn’t approach.

My cousin gave me a quick history of Da Nang, explaining how the city managed to develop quickly and in general Vietnam has managed to raise the living standards of most people around the country.  Da Nang used to be a poorer city, but not has attracted a lot of foreign business and tourists.

After the visit to my grandfather’s street we arrived in Hoi An.  Half the city had been flooded (which apparently is pretty typical), so we walked around the areas we could.  Hoi An is recommended by everyone to visit via people and guidebooks, but I found the city a bit touristy, almost something akin to Venice in Italy.  It was overly crowded and touristy by day and early night, but as further nightfall set, there was a charm to the city as the crowds dissipated.

Áo Dài

On the last day of the trip there, I wanted to buy an áo dài (literally translates to long dress).  It is a traditional Vietnamese dress that has gone through its own evolution.  Originally it was only available in blue and red, but as time has progressed different fabrics, styles, and colors have emerged to make it more modern.

My cousin took me to a mini mall to shop around, and after great negotiation, I bought one that was beautifully hand decorated with a bit more of a modern sensibility.  I asked my cousins how often they wear it, and they said not often at all.  People used to wear it regularly growing up, but now it really is worn on very rare occasions.  They continued to tell me that people now don’t even own any, they just rent it when they need it for pictures on occasions such as weddings.

Growing up I never wore an ao dai, and I kind of wonder why now do I feel the need to reconnect with this item.  I wore it for the first time two years ago at international day at church where I asked to borrow my dad’s ao dai.  It was very traditionally blue, and I think it was made of silk with a hat.  It was a bit janky and needed a bunch of pins to hold it in place.  I still have it at home next to the new one I bought from Vietnam, and I have a bit of sadness when I look at the blue ao dai as since my dad is no longer around I’m not really sure what to do with it.  My intention was to give it back to him last year, but that never came to fruition.

I wore the new áo dài during Lunar New Year at church last year. Having grown up in an all-Vietnamese church, I’ve adjusted surprisingly quickly to being one of only a few Vietnamese people in my church in Vancouver. This transition makes me wonder: am I simply flexible with my identity, or is it still core to my heart?”

Some Closing Thoughts

Overall Vietnam was not what I initially expected. English for the most part was readily accessible, and everyone super kind. Food scene wise, we mostly stuck to what was advertised on the Vietnam Lonely Planet Book (which was a good foundation of exploring), and friend’s recommendations. We found the high-end food scene in Hanoi spectacular

Food in Hanoi

• Cồ Đàm Chay – Vegetarian Tasting Menu
• Luk Lak Restaurant
• Marou Chocolate

Hanoi Things to Do In Advance

• Book the water puppet show in advance as early as possible. It is a free reservation so there is no harm

Customs

• Be aware for North America there is a requirement of a visa in advance. You can do this through an e-portal, although the site looked like it was made during the geocities era. Using one of the passport apps on your phone of taking a photo worked for us. If you plan to do multiple visits, there is a better multiple-entry visa you can get in your local country, otherwise a single entry works.
• https://evisa.xuatnhapcanh.gov.vn/trang-chu-ttdt

Transit
In terms of getting around, the Grab app is essential. It is pretty much the Uber of Vietnam, but we had a lot of problems of using our foreign North American cards so be sure to bring multiple to get the app to work.

Sim Cards

This is a pretty big problem in the touristy cities. Sim Cards at the airport can be about 4-5x more expensive so you have to go a little bit outside of the main tourist areas to get regular rates. Be comforted though that they rip everyone off equally, locals and foreigners.

Tours

The most memorable trip we did was with Yesd, and we booked the 4 days, 3 nights with a car through Ha Giang

https://yesd.org/ha-giang-comfort-car-ride/

Money

As in all SE Asian countries, you get a better exchange rate if you bring brand new crisp bills. Any bills which have rips or tears get deducted at money exchangers.

Fish Sauce

The Vincom markets have a totally different selection of fish sauce you get from North America. Here the fanciest one we have is Red Boat 40, but they have several brands similar to that there which are able half the price. However, bringing fish sauce home is quite the risky endeavor.

Hope
I was happy to hear that throughout the country was a sense of hope. What I mean is most people seem optimistic about the future economic opportunities and that living standards have gradually improved throughout the years.

Loss and Distance

For the past couple of months, my Facebook usage has started to diminish. In the past, I used to post quite a bit, and I dare say probably 10 years ago to the point of oversharing. It seems to me that the popularity of Facebook has been dropping in my network to the point of many people completely withdrawing. It is hard to imagine, but empires in tech eventually fall (hello Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Friendster anybody?), and it is not hard to imagine Facebook joining one of those empires someday.

Last year when we were traveling through Chile, we made some new friends during a tour. At the end of our excursion, we exchanged contact information, and they wanted my Instagram handle to keep in touch. I was pretty surprised as back in the day when traveling I remember adding people to Facebook to keep in touch, but it seems like times are changing.

6 months ago I was mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and one post caught my eye. Facebook feeds are kind of weird, because our feed is a collection of family, close friends, and acquaintances.

For better or for worse Facebook creates a fake close friend illusion because if a friend posts often and you consume it often, you know everything on what is going on in their life. But does that mean you are actually close?

The post that passed by my screen was from Lara. After I graduated from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) with a degree of Information & Computer Science (ICS) in 2003, my friend Jesse started an alumni chapter.

I was pretty fortunate as my ICS cohort constituted of a bunch of nerds. They pushed me to study more and do better in my classes, and after graduating we all looked out for each other and got each other jobs. One of our complaints is we had no help from our upperclassman or alumni, so my friend took it upon himself to start a program where alumni would help each other network and help mentor current students in their career journey.

Lara worked in the division called external affairs. That entire group’s primary responsibility would be to facilitate communication and events with external groups. Jesse helped lead several events and there was one event I remember distinctly where I was part of a panel to talk to prospective ICS students applying to UCI.

At the event were about 300 high school students where the dean of ICS was there. The panel constituted of myself with some friends and the moderator asked us if we were still using what we learned in university in our current jobs. The panel all answered that we didn’t use what we learned in school, and as we continued our answers we noticed the dean of the school turning a bit white.

Noticing this, we pivoted our answers to how we “learned how to learn” and got out of that networking event without causing much more damage to our school’s reputation.

My communication with Lara would primarily be through these events, and we chatted every time there would be a networking event. However since 2008 I really haven’t talked to her in person and only casually have kept track of her life on Facebook.

The post that came across my feed was her mentioning she had leukemia. As the months progressed I would see her progress in fighting to get better and at one point it seemed she really turned a corner. However only 2 weeks ago I saw this post.


“Well, folks, this is nearing the end of the road for me. The leukemia is back and it’s not good.

Why is this happening? I don’t know, but I can only hold on and go along with it.

If we don’t get to say goodbye, know that i treasure our friendship.

💕”.

Then a couple days later, there was a message that she passed away on Facebook.

It’s weird you know, to find someone who passed away from Facebook. Also strange because I knew her, but really wasn’t close to her. I think we have these defined rituals of funerals for those we are close to, where we can grieve with family or friends. But the passing away of acquaintances has no defined ritual or rite for anybody to fall back to.

Easter Island

Before going on any travel trips, my travel style is usually to do as much research as possible.  My general methodology is to ask friends for advice, read guide books like Lonely Planet, look up travel itineraries on Reddit, and try to schedule zoom calls with travel writers.

The last idea of scheduling zoom calls with travel writers was actually a new idea that has been rather successful.  When we were planning Portugal, we had to make some major decisions on travel routing, and the guide books didn’t provide clear guidance one way or another.  One day I was listening to a Rick Steve’s podcast about Portugal, and a local guide Cristina Duarte seemed rather knowledgeable.  I decided to cold e-mail her to ask if she would be open to doing a one hour paid zoom session.

She actually responded pretty quickly via email and then we scheduled a session on zoom in a couple days.  With zoom we had a google sheets up with a draft itinerary and a google map to ask questions about locations.  Cristina was able to guide us on some major decision points as well as a lot of tips about the country.

This model was so successful in helping plan the Portugal trip that we did the same thing again with another travel writer Mark Johanson for Chile.

As we talked to Mark, he guided us on selecting a few regions, and for Easter Island said you have to book a guide to see the sights so you can’t see things on your own.   Post pandemic, government regulations have changed (I think due to the better) to help protect the moais from tourists.

Oddly enough, I think my first exposure to Easter Island was when I was 8 years old playing a Nintendo game called Gradius.  The game was a 2d side scroller, and you piloted a spaceship basically blowing things up.  For some whatever really weird reason there were enemies in the videos of moai shooting bubbles of their mouths. 

To this day, I wonder why these moais were even in Gradius. Perhaps maybe because of a story you will see later in this post?

Other than that video game, I really didn’t know much about the island at all.  Even guide books for some reason didn’t provide much information about Easter Island.

With the advent of the Internet, I think there definitely are tradeoffs to traveling.  On one hand doing research and learning about your destination is now easier than ever.  There is no shortage of travel influencers creating videos on Youtube about destinations you can watch.  With the Internet you can virtually experience almost everything before getting to your destination.

On the other hand, we have lost a sense of truly exploring the unknown and genuine wonder.  I remember backpacking through Europe in 2005 with really limited access to the Internet because smart phones were not widely available.  We got lost so often in the city, and nowadays with Google Maps, it is just really hard to get lost.

Getting to this tiny remote island was an adventure on its own.  You first had to get to Santiago, Chile, then you take a 5 hour flight directly west.  You are such in the middle of nowhere in the ocean that you can take a direct flight to Tahiti and then fly back to North America. 

After landing and settling in our hotel we had a day to explore the tiny town as our tour didn’t begin until the next day.

The first huge surprise was seeing everyone dressed up in the streets in costumes like Batman, The Flash, and even anime characters like Naruto.  After seeing they were getting candy from all of the store owners, we realized it was Halloween, Oct 31^st.  I asked how long this tradition has been around Easter Island and some shop owners said it came probably 10 years ago.  I’m amazed how some of the weirdest holidays in the Western world can migrate all over.

The second surprise I had was I expected Easter Island to be way more touristy.  In the town, barely anyone spoke English, so those old Spanish high school lessons were fortunate to help us survive going around town with Jason.

Kava Kava

To tour or not to tour?  Often this is a question always asked when you visit a foreign country, but for Easter Island, the choice is taken away from you.  Now when you visit Easter Island, you can only visit sites if you are going with a tour or through a local indigenous guide.  Lonely Planet recommended the tour group Kava Kava, so we booked a 2.5 day tour with them.

Our tour guide was Sebastian, and we were super lucky as he is one of the owners of Kava Kava.  In addition to being a tour guide, he formerly was a park ranger, and involved in the tourism ministry for the government.

The first fact we learned from him was that the name Easter Island came because the early colonizers discovered the island on Easter day.  However the local indigenous people call the island Rapa Nui (which is the same name as the indigenous population).

La Pandemia

We all were affected by the pandemic in different ways, but Rapa Nui really was a rough situation.  When borders were shut, the people on the island had to fend and survive mostly by themselves as the island was cut off from the world for about 1.5 years. 

In a normal year, the people of Rapa Nui would get their goods from the bellies of commercial flights, but once that dried up due to the closures, the people had to fend for themselves.

Many of the Rapa Nui people reverted back to their roots of fishing and farming, but many of the Chileans on the island didn’t have that ancestral knowledge to rely on and took free repatriation flights from the government to leave.  The population went from 10,000 people down to 5,000 people.

There was quite a bit of fear of reopening borders for quite a while until Omicron started. Once most people on the island got infected, and there weren’t any deaths, the island finally decided to open in 2022 with the requirement of a negative PCR test. However I think as of this writing, tests are no longer required to enter the island.

One thing which I think changed the experience of Rapa Nui for us was being on the island without many people.  Since at the time they just started to open up to the world, about half of the restaurants and the town generally speaking were understaffed.

Touring

Sebastian could write a whole book about the history of moais and the Rapa Nui people if he wanted to.  The most interesting thing to me about the trip was a reminder that history, contrary to our thinking of it, is not absolute and not set in stone.

Sebastian told us there are 3 important parts of the moai.  First, the ahu, the ceremonial platform the moai is on.  Secondly, the actual moai statue. And lastly the pu’kau, the hat on top of it.

We spent the first day visiting the Rano Raruku – the moai factory.  Moais were painstakingly handcrafted out of a mountain, and then moved up to 11 miles away.  In a totally different part of the island, the pu’kaus were made and then transported to the moais and placed on top of their heads.

Since the island just recently opened we had most of the site to ourselves. It was quite surreal to walk through moais through various state of restoration.

The current theory is that 4 people with 4 ropes were used to ‘walk’ the moai.  With one person on every corner they moved the moais slowly.

Pu’kaus on the other hand are still a big mystery.  To this day, archeologists, don’t have a settled theory on how these huge hats are placed on the moais. The further the mystery of moais, they are unable to carbon date the moais because there is no organic material on it.

The thing which moved me the most was that these people spent most of their lives making the moais, moving them, and repeating this process. Talk about a legacy because we are still admiring these statues 11 centuries later.

Sebastian said that most people ask how long it took to build the moais. He said that in our current capitalistic society that time is the unit of measure which most interested in. Back in the day the Rapa Nui cared of no such thing. I think there is something to be learned from this, where perhaps time shouldn’t be the most important factor, but instead the quality and the journey of what we go through.

I look at my life today and find myself so distracted with so many things I want to do.  Even in my Google Chrome tab, I probably have 50 tabs open with 3 instances of the browser to show the extent of my multi tasking of what is on my mind.

Looking at how the people worked on the moais have got me thinking, what kind of legacy do we want to leave?  And does making whatever legacy require a singular focus? Learning about the history of the Rapa Nui people revealed a beauty of doing one thing well, like really well, for a long time.

The Most Run Down Site

Towards the end of the tour, Sebastian took us to Ahu Te Peu (which oddly is on Google Maps and oddly is rated 4.1) where all the statues were knocked down and still on the ground.  It was definitely out of the beaten path where we had to hike there and nobody else was there at all.

He said that archeologists have specifically not restored the site to continue to do research on the moais.  I never really thought about it, but most of the historical things we see, look in awe, and post pictures on Instagram are of restored sites. Whether it be sites in Europe, pyramids, or temples, if things weren’t restored you would just see rubble.

As we walked around and looked and everything in a decrepit state, I found this moai site to be my favorite on the island.

Very rarely in life do we see something in its raw, unfiltered state.  Half destroyed, but preserved, and probably never restored again ever in the future.

Japan and Rapa Nui

We were standing by Ahu Tongariki, a set of moais by the ocean. Sebastian explained to us in 1960 a tsunami caused by an earthquake swept the moais way off the platform and all over the place. Since these statues were super huge, specialized cranes had to be used to move it because of its weight.

The Japanese company Tadano had the idea to volunteer to help restore the moai for their marketing material. The idea was that the company would benefit from the press of having one of their cranes restore such a historic site. The goal was to use the cranes and the moais in their marketing material.

As the Japanese worked on the restoration, they ended up learning of the spiritual significance of the site and withdrew all of their marketing materials out of a sign of respect. From that time forward, the Rapa Nui people and Japan have had a special relationship.

In current times, there has been much discussion of repatriation of stolen artifacts from colonial powers. In the British Museum, in the front is a moai where the Rapa Nui have petitioned the British government for its return.

In one sense, museums provide people the ability to experience artifacts and cultures without traveling afar. On the other hand, there is a troublesome history of artifacts stolen from other countries not being returned. In the perspective of the British Museum, once that floodgate opens, then all the countries will start asking for their goods back.

Sebastian told us the Japanese also are helping the Rapa Nui people recoat all the moais every 15ish years or so as the moais are indeed falling victim to weather and time. That eventually there will be a time they don’t exist anymore.

Since the Japanese and Rapa Nui have this special relationship it was interesting to learn that the Rapa Nui volunteered loaned one of their moais to Japan for an exhibit in Osaka in 1982. All this kind of reminds me of the importance of earning respect of cultures we encounter, and the special bonds and relationships that can form from mutual respect of one another.

San Pedro de Atacama – Explora

The Rapa Nui trip was so fulfilling in every sense that if we ended our Chile trip there, we could have just went home happy.  Fortunately we had another leg of the trip, the north of Chile, San Pedro de Atacama.­

Talking with Mark earlier, he mentioned that this area either serviced low end backpackers, or high end fully established excursion experiences.  Given there wasn’t a mid-range end, we opted to splurge on the latter. We chose Explora as they planned all the tour guiding for you.

After departing the plane and being exposed to the elements, it is as if a machine sucked all the moisture from my skin.  I knew San Pedro de Atacama was a desert, but I didn’t realize how harsh it was.  If you have ever been to Death Valley National Park, it is similar to that, but more intense.

Looking at the UV forecast, it was at 14 and uhh, I always thought 10 was the highest number.  After an hour via ground transport, we arrived at the hotel.

Explora is one of those experiences where every one there is on the fancier side of the income spectrum.  We met quite a few people there for their honey moon and chose Explora to not worry about the hassle of planning.

A trip planner helped plan our next 4 days.  We did a mix of hiking, and photogenic driving tours around the city.

The tours we went on were really great and were made in  way to maximize enjoyment.  For example, you would start at one part of the hike, and they would meet you at the end of the hike with a picnic.  In a regular hike you would start at some beginning point, but afterwards you would have to come back.

I had mixed feelings about the experience, as it was super nice, but only available to those with financial means to take these tours.

When I was back in Southern California recently visiting my parents, I met up with an old friend who was also in the computer science program at the University of California, Irvine.  After playing a tennis set, we were just chatting about our jobs and we talked about salary transparency.

I asked if we had an alumni event, would he share his salary with our friends from our graduating class.  He said yes, and we chatted a bit about how our generation is a bit reluctant to share salary with others.

I think within our social networks we probably can guess how much other people make through some visual cues (cars, lifestyles, housing, etc), but if we knew exactly how much our friends made would it affect our relationship with them?

My friend mentioned something super interesting where at his company, generation z employees are transparently sharing their salary with each other, regardless of the gap of salaries present amongst their peers in order to have the most information to see if any of them are getting underpaid.

I think there is a fear in letting people know how much you make.  Fear that perhaps it might change the relationship, but perhaps some transparency might actually help in people make a decision when pondering career paths.  I don’t know, this is really still an unresolved topic in my mind.

Rare Plants

The most memorable tour of the trip in San Pedro de Atacama, was the scariest one.  We started a hike pretty high up, about 4,000 meters to see the Tatio Geysers.  The geysers were super hot and cool to see, but the coolest part was starting a hike there along a hot river which was 40C.  As we walked along the river bed we saw this yellow grass which only exists above 4000m.

Towards the end of the hike we saw these green fuzzy things. Our hiking guide said they were called llaretas, and grew one mm a year. He guessed that this fuzzy plant was probably a thousand years old.

I just stood there in awe at something which could survive for such a long time. When I reflect upon this time frame, I wonder possibility what things we have in our society today will last a thousand years?

The things we collect will inevitably go out of date and decay, but I think nature will reign supreme in the long run in reminding us what is important with its longevity.

Valparaiso

The last part of our trip was visiting the city of Valparaiso.  I had wanted to visit the city (which is about an hour away from Santiago), last time I was there in 2015, but had gotten massively sick from some food at a restaurant back then.

Okay, this is my theory, but Jason disagrees.  Back in 2015 we were eating at Astrid y Gaston in Lima, Peru where we ordered the tasting menu.  There were four of us there, and we had one vegetarian menu as he didn’t eat meat.  Protein wise, we had raw fish, chicken, and some goat.

After the meal, the 3 people who ordered the meat tasting menu all got bad cases of diarrhea, while the vegetarian friend was fine.  Jason said it was because the vegetarian friend was from India and had a better microbiome, but I really just thought we got nailed from the meat.

This was an awful situation because I was going to hike the W, which was a 5 day hike in Patagonia Chile about 4 days later.  After a couple days of suffering with diarrhea, I gave up (as well as the other 3 meat eaters), and took antibiotics to clear out our system.  Seriously, after that experience I considered going vegetarian.

When we flew back from San Pedro de Atacama to Santiago, we took transit directly to Valparaiso.  The city is known for being completely covered with graffiti art.

Our tour guides in the city were Sebastian and Esteban.  We learned about the art of the buildings, and really the art on the buildings reflected either a love letter to the city or a statement of social protest.

This piece describes a protest against big farms taking water from all the smaller farms. Everywhere you turn left or right there is literally graffiti art somewhere. Even for local businesses, they request local artists to paint something local and relevant to their businesses on their storefront.

As with all informal economies, Sebastian told us the unwritten cultural rules of graffiti art. First rule is that artists don’t paint over each others art. If you did it and people found out, you would get a bad rap.

As we drove through byzantine streets, Sebastian stopped to explain this piece of art. What you don’t see is on the right of the building is the ocean front. This is an ode to locals who simply enjoy and never take for granted the sights and scenery of town. Many of the people on murals would be local people, like the old local milk man, newspaper delivery person, fisherman, etc.

This piece of graffiti art is an ode to refugees. As we finished the tour I didn’t actually think of anything as ‘graffiti’ as we have in our urban cities. Instead I saw everything as art, and perhaps this type of guerilla architecture and design is what we need in our hyper planned cities we have in North America.

Chat GPT

By now I’m sure now you have used or heard of Chat GPT. In short, it is the acceleration of something called large language models.

I was actually playing around this with my techie friends quite a bit, and I cannot stress how revolutionary this tool is. I’m sure a lot of people have been playing around with it to write e-mails and do essays, but at my work in software engineering we use it every day.

For me it came really natural to use because I watched a lot of Star Trek growing up. The premise of the show is there is this star ship, and it has a sentient-ish computer. You would just describe the scenes and then it would happen.

Similar stuff happens to Chat GPT. In my line of work, engineers are describing a problem and then asking Chat GPT to actually generate code.

One day I had an engineer approach me with kind of a weird problem. He told me there were a thousand production databases, and he needed a way to dynamically retrieve the meta data from back-up files to obtain the database name.

He showed me a query he performed on a back-up file then we proceeded working on the problem.

1. First with ChatGPT we established the parameters of the problems
2. Then we asked it to generate a script in powershell
3. The script looked good, but we asked for some refinement on how the data was being displayed

Below is a script generated all by Chat GPT

SCRIPT: See the prompts here

# set the SQL Server instance name and the backup file path
$serverName = "localhost"
$backupFilePath = "C:\backup\backupfile.bak"

# create a SQL Server connection object
$connectionString = "Server=$serverName;Database=master;Integrated Security=True"
$connection = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection($connectionString)

# create a SQL command object to execute the RESTORE FILELISTONLY command
$commandString = "RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK='$backupFilePath'"
$command = New-Object System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand($commandString, $connection)

# open the SQL Server connection and execute the command
$connection.Open()
$resultSet = $command.ExecuteReader()

# loop through the result set and retrieve the file names
$logicalName1 = ""
$logicalName2 = ""
while ($resultSet.Read())
{
    $type = $resultSet["Type"]
    if ($type -eq "D") {
        $logicalName1 = $resultSet["LogicalName"]
    } elseif ($type -eq "L") {
        $logicalName2 = $resultSet["LogicalName"]
    }
    $physicalName = $resultSet["PhysicalName"]
    # do something with the file names
}

# close the SQL Server connection
$connection.Close()

# Output the logical names
Write-Host "Logical Name 1: $logicalName1"
Write-Host "Logical Name 2: $logicalName2"

From what I have learned so far, ChatGPT actually works bests for experienced engineers. The results are only as good as how good the questions you ask it.