The Wedding Guest -- Peter Leyland

The Wedding Guest

                                                         

Motorbikes pass through each other as through though air, and an occasional car meanders within this disorganised melee as we head towards the restaurant. There are u-turns, criss- crossing at impossible angles, side panniers leaning dangerously, two and three seated on the tiny seeming bikes sometimes traveling in opposing directions. Our driver indicates to me the site of a Saigon beer company. 

 

We are in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for my nephew Martin's wedding to Linh, an NHS doctor. We are staying at a Five Star hotel in the city centre thanks to the tremendous generosity of Ba Nhan and Tin who are Linh’s parents. They are both doctors too, having medically trained in St Petersburg, Russia. The car is taking us to the Windsor Plaza Hotel which has a fabulous entrance, a reminder of Vietnam's French Colonial past, where we are treated to one of many lavish family meals. This one is Cantonese and involves a whirling circular table and the use of chopsticks from which I am thankfully excused. I’m not the only one. Forks appear around the table. The parents' time spent in Russia is of great interest to me as I studied the language at school and I am able to make a few attempts at conversation with Linh's godmother - ya idu va shkolye - is received with laughter.

 

We have now recovered after the long flight from the UK during which I managed to read most of the first Richard Osman book. We have wandered around the city close to the hotel, awash with pavement stalls selling car and motorbike parts. There must be many collisions, I say to Sue as we drink iced tea at a pavement café while looking out across the street at the passing bikes. We have met other members of Linh’s family, a brother, a uncle, an aunt, a niece and we have received presents of the most delicious lychees delightfully arranged in a basket. I have swum in the hotel pool situated a couple of floors below our own.

 

Before too long, however, we are whisked away by plane to another earthly paradise, which is in North Vietnam - Ha Long Bay - where we are welcomed aboard a small cruise ship and spend three days sailing through some of the most delightful scenery that I have ever encountered. The boat is fully air-conditioned and again we are royally treated. I sit outside the cabin reading a book by Vietnamese American author, Ocean Vuong. A boat comes alongside offering to sell me drinks. Sue attends cookery classes, showing how spring-rolls are made.

In the evening I have a conversation with Linh's brother, Tuan, over a couple of cold beers on the boat. He has been schooled in Singapore and he knows a little about English life and customs, but surprisingly not cricket and the vagaries of English rituals like the 'Ashes' tests, so I am happy to explain this to him. I also explain what is meant by 'public schools' and how our English politicians are in many ways shaped by them. He is receptive to information about our English political system, particularly the way that it is impacting so negatively upon the National Health Service, which his sister LInh is now very much a part of. He is having medical training himself in Hungary to become a doctor.

 

When we return to Ho Chi Minh City my niece, Lisa and her partner, Connagh have arrived from Canada where they are living. The family, with my sister Shirley and her husband Mark, veterans of missionary work in Cambodia, now fall into a number of conversations around the breakfast table. Lisa is a translator and editor, and she talks to me about developmental editing, something that I expect other writers on this site will know all about. Later, I discuss Slaughterhouse Five with Connagh which he recommends. I recall that I have it on loan from the library, still unread. I later learn that, 'So it goes,' is Kurt Vonnegut's ironic commentary throughout the novel. 

And, away from the paradise of Ha Long Bay, a deeper note is sounded. We visit the War Remnants Museum. There I contemplate pictures of the American war suffered by the Vietnamese people while I was growing up. It was the first television war and there are many photographs on display depicting amongst other things a picture of a victim of Agent Orange, which continues to haunt me. Another memorable one is a photograph which I recognise as the cover of The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, a book which I used in one of my WEA literature courses. It is a book about the idealism of young men in war, very much like All Quiet on the Western Front, recently an updated and award-winning film. Outside the museum is a clip from a video reel showing the American singer Joan Baez protesting the war with her song, Farewell Angelina.

 Agent Orange Victim

Joan Baez, video clip

 

The wedding itself takes up an entire day. The first part is at Linh’s parents’ home with around twenty or so relatives who sit in rows facing the bride and groom while speeches are made. The ancestors look on from photographs mounted on a sideboard. Sparkling wine is passed around. amongst the guests. At this stage of the ceremony the bride is wearing red: ‘Red as a rose is she’ in Coleridge's famous poem which gives me the title for this blog. 

We are taken by car back to the hotel for the main event, where a more traditional Western wedding dress is worn. The photograph at the start of this blog shows the stage at the front of the banqueting hall, and behind it Martin & Linh in their English home taken during the year of the pandemic when only half a dozen people were allowed to attend events like funerals, births and weddings. At the current event there are about 300 people, thirty tables each seating ten guests. All Linh's parents’ colleagues and friends and family from down through the ages have been invited to attend. Nine courses, all carefully selected, are served by an army of attentive waiters. It is a truly splendid feast.

In the hotel lobby on the last day we talk to Martin and Linh about the future. She speaks of the NHS and how difficult it is for her to do the job she really wants to do, that caring and healing role that is so evidently shared by all the members of her family. Her father had told me that he is a plastic surgeon which seemed to me significant in a country so torn by past conflict and yet he did not dwell on that. I mention ideals to Linh and how sometimes we have to compromise. I scrabble around somewhat desperately to find examples and yet in truth the evidence is all around me - her country and a people that has striven to rebuild after a most brutal war and which has succeeded in surviving and thriving. 

 

Our taxi arrives to take us to the airport. I am not sad like Coleridge's wedding guest but I am a little wiser. 

          Fresh lychees in our hotel room, a gift of friendship

References:

War Remnants Museum by Vo Anh Tuan

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge