That is the way I remember my most vivid recollection of my first month in Vietnam, following my arrival in Saigon in October The incident jarred me out the familiar contours of my previous life experience, and left me standing on the brink of a world whose outlines I could only dimly grasp.
It was the moment that the limits of my understanding of the world around me were starkly revealed. This was totally alien from anything I had previously encountered. The sun is spinning! Perhaps, induced by hysteria, we were only imagining things. We stood there, awed by what we had witnessed. My neighbors told one another that this could mean only one thing: Diem was going to be overthrown. Despite my physical presence among the crowd, as an uncomprehending foreigner, I was outside the framework of that remembered moment — a disconnect from the collective event that I was keenly aware of at the time.
As Mai later surmised, it could have been due to mass hysteria triggered by the volatility of the Saigon political atmosphere in the last days of the Diem regime. Every Vietnamese was immersed in a shared political culture in which, as illustrated by Chinese popular historical novels like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the loss of the mandate to rule as inevitably prefigured by strange natural phenomenon.
So the perception of the corona around the sun rotating could have been mass hysteria, but I saw it too though I wonder in retrospect how I could have been staring straight at the sun — an alien outside observer, not knowing the deeper significance of what I was witnessing. It is only in retrospect that I can recognize how aptly this incident reflected the chasm in cultural understanding that separated Americans from the Vietnamese whose fate they had come to determine. The sensible program to train Americans in the Vietnamese language to fill the linguistic gap between official America and the society it hoped to transform, could only assure communication at the most superficial and literal levels.
Even the most basic cultural underpinnings of real communication would take much longer to acquire. And even with a rudimentary functional grasp of the language and the personal ties with Vietnamese society provided by my connections with Mai, and her cohort of American-educated Vietnamese who had served as my initial introduction to a country about which I had been totally ignorant, I was disoriented by my initial encounters with Vietnam.
