by Khải Đơn
eyes and grabbing a kid’s growing breasts
here human dignity cannot afford a fish amok
is where they talk about “the world”, meaning meager
parts of Cambodia bending its back
to be tagged on branded shoes and bags
flapping wings and praises in Milan fashion shows
is where they talk about saving the ocean
meaning exporting plastic mountains
floating them in the Pacific of Indonesia
is where they talk about reducing emissions
meaning using money (made of papers and chemicals) purchasing
carbon offsets in Quảng Nam’s jungles
is where rainforests are cheaper than green dollars
ocean—choked on dumpster containers
Seabed lays living museum of DDT barrels
Mountains, aspiring neodymium in clean e-vehicle batteries
Of course, here on earth is where girls are cheaper than air conditioners
Khải Đơn: “Here girls are cheaper than air conditioners” was what I overheard two white tourists say when I was travelling in Cambodia as a backpacker. I would encounter more of the same in years of travelling around my beloved Southeast Asia. This line filled me with an inner rage I couldn’t express. While governments of countries in the region such as Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines try to sell the affordable aspect of the tourist industry, they also sell cultural dignity dirt cheap. Sitting in a bar or a backpacker hostel is the most accessible place to hear this kind of conversation. As a Vietnamese, I imagined myself standing there like the waitresses in the bar, hearing customers gossiping about how cheap our bodies were, how cheap our dignity was, how cheap our pride was. In expat Facebook groups in Thailand, I read white men complaining that their Thai partners were not “faithful” to them and took their money.
Evaluating a country’s dignity in US dollars or euros is the first thing many white people do when they arrive in Southeast Asia, which they see as cheap, innocent and easy. They get upset if they are lured into a money scam because they expect to get cheap partners who are innocent and unquestioningly faithful. At one point, I looked at my body as a Vietnamese woman, and I saw no value beyond those materialistic notions pouring out of white tourists’ mouths. I only gained a sense of self-esteem when I started living in different countries and learned about the inseparable ecosystems that we and the West share.
Every year, the US, Canada, and the UK export millions of tons of unrecyclable plastic and trash to developing countries like Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The same developed Western countries also mobilise “the world” to follow their environmental course at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP). However, they are the same ones depleting the world’s natural resources and suffocating the planet with extreme neoliberal capitalism. The US’s carbon footprint per capita per year is 16 tons, eight times that of Indonesia’s 2.23 tons. Who is the one that needs to “protect the environment”?
Living in California, I hear people discuss protecting the environment by buying new electric vehicles. Tesla’s extravagant business thrives by selling thousands of expensive guilt-salving cars. Americans do not stop buying cars; they just pretend to go with the flow. Money can buy dignity, and wealth can conceal immorality. But white tourists cannot purchase a better destiny for the world by pretending to be environmental enthusiasts and at the same time rushing to consume the world’s resources with an unthinking colonial mindset.
Published: Wednesday 3 November 2021
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Khải Đơn (Phạm Lan Phương) is a Vietnamese writer inspired by the Mekong River. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Singapore Unbound, Orion Magazine, and The Architectural Review. She is learning to write nonfiction at San Jose State University (SJSU). She won the Academy of American Poets/Virginia de Araujo Prize in 2021 at SJSU.