April 25, 2009

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  I have to choose blogging or reading.  It is easy to write in Vietnamese.  In the last couple weeks I wrote three articles, all in Vietnamese.  Two articles, one about butterfly and the other about Yu Hua, were printed in a daily newspaper in California.  I was told, a newspaper in Dallas would print both of them in the same week too.  A Vietnamese literature magazine wanted to publish my review Yu Hua’s Brothers.  To me that was a small success.  I know I am able to write more and better if I have time and I have to shed a few inhibitions.

  Someone says writing is like going up the hill.  The higher you go, the more stuff you have to leave at the bottom of the hill.  I always feel I am cramped with too much thinking, too self critical, and too self demanding.  I have to keep in mind that I am writing for my own enjoyment and so be it, warts and flaws.  I read and read, always feel there are more books I need to read to learn more about American culture and literature.  And it is like I keep stuffing and stuffing into my stomach and do not leave enough room and time for the food to be digested.  Each time I sit down to write all the different ideas pull me into many directions until I become invalid to lay out things I want to write.  On top of that all the self criticism I tell myself make writing even more difficult.

  Let see what I just finish reading.  Frank Pope’s Dragon Sea.  In 2007, I went to San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.  I went there because the museum was included in the visitor’s traveling package.  I browsed without having any particular interests.  To me, all museums are the same if you can forgive my ignorance.  I asked the museum docent if there were any Vietnamese art items especially ceramics.  I was told to go to a very small and out of the way corridor and there I found a few Vietnamese potteries, some of them were broken.  I was sad to think that in the great museum that housed numerous magnificient ancient arts that represented the world civilization and representation of Vietnamese civilization has nothing but a few (no more than ten) broken pieces of ceramics.  They were white ceramics with cobalt blue decoration, similar to Ming China but coarser more stoneware than ceramics.

  In the trip to Washington DC knowing I have only a morning to view museum I narrow my interest only in Freer Art Museum where I researched ahead so I knew there were Vietnamese ceramics.  At the museum door I asked where I could find Vietnamese ceramics.  The desk person searching in the computer but he told me there was none.  He fumbled a little more and told me I could see in the aisle 6A.  There I found a few pieces but this time they were not cobalt blue on white.

  Back home I check with my local library to see if there is any literature about Vietnamese ceramics and I find Dragon Sea of Frank Pope. 

  It is a very interesting book in terms of sea adventure, the danger of diving, treasure hunts, and the difficulty and expensive cost of deep sea excavation.  Frank took readers to the deep sea where divers excavated a sunk boat that was full of ceramics.  It is more an adventure and thriller than a book about ancient ceramics however Frank managed to include some historical background.   In 15 century a boat carried Vietnamese ceramics sunk off Hoi An coast where it was called Dragon Sea because many typhoons seemed to aggravate from there.  Fishermen accidentally caught many pieces of ceramics in their nets.  The pieces were bought with high price so they went back to retrieve more.  Without high tech instrument they resolved to nets and rakes therefore they broke a lot of those ceramic antiques.  In 1999, Mensun, a reknown archeologist teamed with  Ong So Hin, a Chinese-Korean financial backer, Vietnamese government to retrieve the treasure.  The cost of the excavation was multi million dollars according to the book.  Although a large number of ceramic pottery were uncovered, so many of them that they filled two large warehouses, Ong So Hin did not recover the cost of excavation (about 14 millions while the antiques sold only a little more than 2 millions). 

  I am telling myself I need to go home to see them.

   

  • 5:51 pm
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