My apologies for having fallen off here a bit, and my thanks to those who cared enough to call attention to it…Some of you will know of at least one of the two factors that have made my job a bit overwhelming lately: the permanent departure of a faculty member due to a family illness, and our one-day delay in arriving here in Ho Chi Minh City, each of which left me scurrying to find substitutes for essential pieces of the academic program, and at a time that would already have been very busy. For those of you who care about the outcomes of those details, I can say that the news gets better and better: we have not fixed everything yet, but pieces are being fixed bit by bit and sometimes in ways far better than we could have reasonably hoped for. Some of it is dumb luck, and some of it is very hard work by people in the Field Office both on board and back in Charlottesville and Colorado Springs.
So to recap: Shanghai was brutally cold, and, I think, a challenge for a lot of us, but also thrilling in all kinds of ways; Hong Kong was a relief in terms of weather and mood, perhaps, but posed new challenges because of an inconveniently located berth for the ship, and some unexpected complexities of a kind that are inevitable when so many people engage together in international travel. Those of us on the administrative team came away from that stay delighted by the behavior of the majority of those on board and disappointed and worried about the behavior of a few, so our logistical pre-port for Vietnam concluded with an unusual session from which we excluded all but a few of the grown-ups, in order to try to communicate in an unimpeded way to the students their responsibility for themselves and each other. All this happened in the context of that weather-related delay. A few students, disappointed that the delay would cost them trips they'd eagerly anticipated, wondered whether the calm seas we had between China and Vietnam meant that our waiting a day before heading here had been a mistake; those of you who followed the weather map know that in fact the captain had performed with his accustomed brilliance and found for us calm seas when few were to be had around here. I sat the other night in the Fritz Lounge with the voyage engineer, who reiterated that the comfort of the passengers comes first. We benefited from, that, more than most of us could know, these past few days. This is the way to be safe on the seas.
We have arrived in Vietnam during Tet. The atmosphere in the city yesterday was as joyful as any I have ever found in an urban setting: it's thrilling. Our cultural pre-port briefing had benefitted , as had every moment of our trip here, from the presence of a wonderful visitor named Dan Quynh Pham Ngoc, our "inter-port student', who was generous and smart in preparing us, alongside some enrolled Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American students, for what we'd find here; it benefitted too from presentations from three members of our faculty who briefly but profoundly reminded us of or introduced us to (this depends on matters of age) some matters of Vietnamese history that are essential to understanding our voyagers' astonishing experience here. For we are welcomed here, as warmly as in any place I've ever been. I couldn't get over it when I was last year on an SAS voyage in Spring 2012; if anything I feel more profoundly affected by it this time. America's history here would seem to me either to bar me, as American, from coming here, or to sentence me to resentment or worse. Instead there is some kind of genuine collective embrace. Why?, I asked the guide on the little trip I took with my family yesterday. "We cannot have a good day if we don't forgive," she said.
