A few Days in Vietnam with Ken Barnes: Part 2 – Sept/Oct 2006

Editors: When we left Ken Barnes in the last issue, he was describing a typical carving day in Vietnam. Let’s listen in again as Ken picks up the narrative of his unforgettable trip.

Typical day continued

Each of us had at least one helper and one sun shade. The sun shade structure was a flat bamboo rectangle with palm thatch matrix to keep out the sun. You would prop it up on a single bamboo pole and move it during the day to keep yourself in shade. As the 40 days wore on these gradually broke down, as did everything else, making it a scramble each morning to cobble together two poles and some wire to hold up the shade, since the structure had become too loose and wobbly to stand in its original configuration. Everyone else was scavenging for the same material for the same reason, so if you were gone from the site for a day you knew your shade would be disassembled and the parts used to shade two or three other sculptors.

After securing the sun shade in the right position I might have to go looking for a power cord or water hose. I made the mistake of paying no attention to a guy working on the power box next to my stone one day (I was working with a pneumatic tool that day), only to discover the next day that my outlet had been scavenged and a new power line was now snaking its way 150 feet to a sculptor across the way. There was no outlet left for me.

More routine was the theft of my water line. They don’t use water hoses as we do, but braze multiple small copper pipes (think ice maker lines) onto larger copper pipes to make a water manifold. They push small rubber hoses onto these small copper pipes. You take the rubber hose and tie an overhand knot close to the end, slip this knot over the grinder handle such that it is between the grinder body and the handle and with the hose end touching the top of the blade. Not quite as good as center water feed, but pretty damned close. There is no way to turn off the hose, so it runs all night and all day. The site is former delta that has been entirely filled with sand, so the water just disappears into the sand as soon as it comes out of the hose. These flexible hoses also turn out to make good tie-down material for the rickety sun shades, so my 20 foot water hose would frequently find new life as two 10-foot sections of shade tie-down. Entropy. The organizers supplied all needed materials, until they ran out, which was the first week. I frequently found myself thinking “Who was drinking and singing last night?  I can steal their hose because they are still in bed.”

We were initially given one brand new 8-inch Metabo grinder per person, with brand new granite or marble blades, our choice. These grinders were worked 10 to 13 hours per day by the helpers, and up to 8 hours per day by the sculptors.  By the time I left I would guess two-thirds of the grinders were in a carcass pile in the tool shed. The new blades were used up and most grinders had blades with missing segments. This did not seem to bother the Vietnamese, but I bought my own 4-inch grinder in town and used a blade I had brought from home.

Day 5

I grab a grinder and start carving. I have picked two white marble pieces that have entirely natural surfaces, no quarry marks. One is approximately 8 feet tall by 3 feet by two feet, the other 5 by 5 by 3 feet.  A helper shows up shortly thereafter and takes over where I am cutting. I move to another part of the stone to keep the process moving. After a bit my helper either wants to show me something or wants to save me from real work so he moves over and motions to take over my grinder to work where I have been sitting. Not content to sit in the shade like some bwana while my helper keeps going, I pick up his grinder and start working where he left off. That picture repeated itself multiple times throughout the first days, with us doing some strange dance of swapping grinders and chisels and places on the stone. Finally my helper let me do some of the work. By and large the Vietnamese sculptors provided a maquette and the workers did the actual carving, while most of the foreign sculptors wanted to get their hands on the stone themselves.

My hands hurt. I spent 5 hours on the stone today, my helper spent 13. The hammer is heavier than the one I use at home, and my usual job of pounding out reports turns out to be poor training for pounding on rock. In a couple days my grip muscles will adapt and the blisters will abate. I have gone through most of my first bottle of sunscreen. Carole, another light-skinned northwesterner, looks like a lobster tonight. The sunscreen she bought here locally must not be real sunblock. I am changing strategy and will abandon my shorts and t-shirt for long pants and long-sleeved shirt tomorrow. I have only two bottles of sunscreen and will be toast(ed) if I cannot find some genuine SPF here.

More Of The Typical Day

Now it is 8:30 am and I am ready to go to work.  It was hot, but I get to turn on my iPod and ear protection and start the fun stuff. Same as in North America, most of my day involved cutting frets, knocking them off, and starting again.

At 11:30 we break for lunch and a two-hour siesta. We are put into tables of eight at the resort’s covered but outdoor restaurant. Lunch will be the same as dinner; rice and an assortment of critters with fruit for desert. We are in the Mekong Delta, so every meal has to include at least one of its six courses being water critter. Some meals had as many as four or five courses of water critter. We learned the rhythm of the kitchen pretty quickly, so that we could mostly predict if it was water or land critter coming next based upon the previous dish. The grand finale (aside from the fruit) was always a big soup pot placed on a burner on the table, and we got great glee out of taking bets on the meat for the soup before removing the lid in a flourish. I found my North American definition of certain foods was far too limiting.  When Americans say “chicken soup” we really mean “chicken breast and thigh meat soup.” In Vietnam chicken soup is pretty inclusive, with only the feathers left out. Same with beef and pork. I cannot tell you what part of the pig or cow these meals came from, but the meat to gristle/bone ratio was lower than I am accustomed to. Despite my description, I enjoyed the food quite a bit.

More carving time after the siesta, although I frequently took this hottest part of the day to run into town to wander the market or purchase more air fittings or other needed tool parts. I got pretty good at finding my way to the right stores and buying what I needed without a translator. My language skills were no good, but I learned what example parts to bring and how to draw what I needed, and the shopkeepers were good at referring me to other stores when they could not supply a part. Other times they would go out and purchase what I was looking for, presumably negotiating a better price than I could and keeping the margin.

On a couple nights we watched bootleg DVDs projected on the wall of our hotel lobby. Once a week we had artist slide shows, for which I seemed always exhausted, but found to be the best part of the week.

I would return to the carving site at 3ish and work until about 5:30, at which point I trooped back to the hotel for a shower. Post shower we gathered around some pulled together tables for beer and talk, typically segregated into a large international table and several smaller Vietnamese sculptor tables. We got broken up into 8-person tables for dinner, then would variously regroup for drinking and singing on some nights, or reading in our rooms for others. There was an unspoken agreement that kept our visits to the internet cafes well-spaced, so that we would not all be seeking one of the computers at the same time.

Day 9?

Losing track. Sunday I know. Day off from carving. We played tourist, complete with large A/C bus, large boat, tour guide with a bullhorn, identification cards around our necks. This area doesn’t see so much tourism so we are not viewed as walking ATMs. We are mostly a curiosity. Saw an ethnic Cham mosque, some Cham stores with pretty nice woven fabric, a floating fish farm (netting under someone’s floating house), the border market near Cambodia, and then a “rainforest.” It rains everywhere here, and everything is under water half of the year, so I don’t know what differentiates a rainforest from a clump of trees. Could be a marketing label? The forest itself was unremarkable, mostly 10-15 year old trees replanted after being defoliated by the Americans. But the boat ride there was great, seeing people living along the riverside and the most amazing assortment of hand-built boats. Coming back at twilight we saw the bats mobilize.  First one or two, then five, then 20, then 100, all flying across the sky in the same direction.  Big fruit bats, more than a foot across, all flapping in the same slow beat.
Too dark to see their features, but light enough that their dark bodies contrasted with the sky..

Thursday, Day 13

My helper has returned. I thought he just got tired of me and wandered off, never to be seen again. In fact he was sick. I put him on the most miserable task of making a big hole in my stone today. He keeps on asking me “all the way through?” and I say “Yes, Yes”. I am sure he is saying “damn, damn”.  The first part of the hole is easy going, because the chisel work is at surface level.  Once he gets in one foot or more it will be more and more difficult to get a good hammer swing and a good chisel angle inside the hole.

Editor: Stay tuned for the final installment…
Vietnam Part 1
Vietnam Part 3