The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the world, it’s just different. The grass in Vietnam isn’t as comfortable to sit on as the grass at home. It grows more sparsely and it’s a different green. It’s sharper and pointier and thinner and yellower. The cows that graze it are docile, also worn out by the heat. They’re not as wild as the cows at home.
The weather’s been great. The summer was the best in a generation as Mam keeps reminding us, recounting the various things and trips that happened in the Great Summer of ’95. You could even go to the beach. And even my Christmas visit home was greeted with the weather as mild as it could be for that time of year. Mild is good. Middling is grand. There are still twenty-odd people surfing at Enniscrone on the second of January. “My first Christmas home in 3 years” I tell people, and I don’t know why. The dry cold is more nostalgic than the foreign heat of the summer. Every day is a day for burning turf, and now that I’m gone again, almost 10,000km and several weeks away, every day spent at home has a memory of the last turf being burned in it. It might have just been the shape of the clouds.
Scenery may be grander elsewhere, bigger and more epic, but the Irish countryside is grand in our own sense of the word. You could lose yourself for days gazing on the soft hills and lonely cottages. For a long time I was sceptical of the claims of foreign visitors who gushed about their visits to Ireland. “Sure it can’t be that impressive if you’re from New Zealand, or France, or the States” I’d think. “And we’re hardly that sound.” But a few years ago I grew to believe them.
And Irish people are sound. We care about the mundane details of people’s lives,even though we’ve a habit of making people question whether or not we’re taking the piss out of everything. It could be taken for rudeness but humour is a good way to make a serious point. I’m not very fond of conflict but I can take a joke. I’ve spent almost three years living in Vietnam, where the cultural concept of ‘saving face’ makes it more morally acceptable to politely lie than to get into any sort of disagreement with someone, well-meaning or otherwise. There’s a certain level of dishonesty that comes with the people being polite and inoffensive all of the time. And sometimes nothing is achieved through people overindulging in politeness. That’s why they do business drunk.
All the same, I am pleased that people still go for pints. It’s important. I’m also glad that there are still a few pubs left. People with locals live longer. In Dublin there are more pubs than ever before, at least in this generation, though I doubt if any of the newer ones would ever be someone’s local. Tinder date, sure.
It’s nice being able to talk to anyone here. Our willingness to throw the elbow up on the counter – of the pub, of the shop, of the kitchen– and just ask ‘Howiya’ is one of our greatest assets. I had an elderly acquaintance in Hanoi whom I used to bump into at my local café (local in the same sense as the pub). He spoke calculated Vietnamese and French in a perfect accent, acquired from when he went to live and study there as a teenager in 1945. He used to say to me – in both his native languages, which I have an intermediate but superficial grasp of, lacking the proficiency required for deep and meaningful conversation –
“You should learn more of the language, to be able to speak to everyone about interesting and important things.”
How right he was. I wished I knew more Vietnamese. The interesting and important things that could be told, first hand. I don’t take it for granted at home anymore, at least. I can talk to anyone.
I spent several years living in Hanoi, a city which offers the most vibrant display of everyday human life you could hope to witness – neighbours chatting, kids playing, babies toddling around near their homes unsupervised, people eating eating eating, workers banging hammers, lifting steel, painting, welding, transporting impossible loads on the back of their 50cc Honda Dreams. It’s a wonderful place to people watch. People doing normal things in strange ways and people doing strange things in normal ways.
And there’s a beautiful space of communication between people who don’t share each other’s languages. As an English teacher I learned so much about communication where you don’t understand the other person’s words but you can still – truly – understand what they’re trying to say to you. It could be concrete information or it could be something deeper. Sometimes you can get the joke even if you don’t understand any of the words.
But still, it’s great to be at home and to be able to ask and to listen. And we’re great listeners. That part is often complicated by awkward but genuine attempts to offer advice but sometimes all it takes is letting someone have their say to make them feel cared about. To understand but not judge. As good and all as smiles and shared attempts at simple communication are, it can get lonely on the other side. How lucky to be able to talk to everyone.
My mother has to give the DHL driver directions to someone’s house because the old houses in the town don’t have numbers. Sure the postman knows everyone anyway.
“Oh she’s [such and such]’s daughter,” Mam explains. “He’s dead now. Remember he used to do the [thingy]. She does the [insert local community activity] with us.”
Sure this is it. These are interesting and important things. The grass is green. This is home.