A little bit about Irony

Last year on this day we were in Vietnam. The day before, while visiting the beautiful ancient capital of Huế, I gleefully (though somewhat to CSB’s chagrin, because he finds masks creepy & thinks I tend to overdo things) posed next to ancient statues wearing my Happy Hilary mask, so confident was I of the following day’s victory and all those newfound opportunities to refer to Madam President.
While in Saigon, otherwise now known as Ho Chi Minh City but more or less universally still called Saigon, I had located the house* where my Belgian grandparents, my mother, and uncle had lived from 1939 until 1941, when they were evacuated, along with most European women and children, as the Japanese army was invading. And quickly. Because she was a Belgian woman, my Bonne Maman had never voted because women were not granted suffrage in Belgium until 1948, and from 1929 onwards she lived in Egypt, Indochina, California during the war, then Egypt again. She finally came to the US in 1956 because that was where all her grandchildren were. (Such is the narcissism of grandchildren; someone else might have said she came because her children were here, married to Americans.) My grandparents never became citizens, preferring to remain “Resident Aliens,” and thus ensure they could enter the Belgian section of Heaven – Bonne Maman told me this, seriously, somewhat.
While visiting Vietnam, I thought a lot about my beloved grandmother, who never voted; I had weeks earlier cast my absentee ballot for Hillary, and eagerly anticipated the election results.
We all know how very wrong that went.
Which is a long way to introduce the question of irony.
Was it ironic, my posing in a Hilary mask next to a statue of a bodyguard of Emperor Khải Định, whose first wife left him in order to become a nun?

I am pondering irony these days.
My mother received in the mail a “Certificate of Recognition” from the Alzheimer’s Association. She handed it to me because, sometimes, when she remembers, though remember is no longer the correct word, she gives me her mail to ‘deal with’. How ironic is that? The certificate recognizes her “extraordinary commitment to the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.” If so, it is a fight she has lost. Presumably, she received this ridiculous ‘certificate’ because, back when she was still writing checks, she sent some money to the AA and they would like her to send some more. To this end she receives countless solicitations at her new address in Hastings, even though I have never given any organization her new address. It is a miracle of the modern phenomenon of annoying requests for money.
Irony is generally defined as a situation that is not what it seems, that differs from what was expected. Irony is often used for comic effect, but at times is tragic. (See the Greeks. See me sporting my Hilary mask.) The word comes from the Greek, eirōneia for ‘simulated ignorance.’
Another chapter of the Azheimer’s Association sent my mother Christmassy address labels, presumably to affix to the Christmas cards she is no longer capable of writing or sending. They also have her address slightly wrong. What part of that is ironic?
Does it differ from the irony of the multiple books stacked on her nightstand about how to prevent memory loss or how to improve your memory?
Or how does it differ from the irony of me buying a book at Costco this morning called The End of Alzheimer’s, even though I have read lots of actual science books about Alzheimer’s and have spoken with doctors and visited labs and attended seminars? And I know damn well that there is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s and I even know that most of the things we are told can stave off the advance of Alzheimer’s, like practicing yoga, speaking multiple languages, and eating healthy, are exactly what my grandmother and mother did all their lives.
Maybe that is not so much ironic, as delusional.

In literature, I love irony. Also in life. Irony makes life interesting. If I refer to someone as living in an “Irony-Free Zone” I do not mean it as a compliment.

On the other hand, this morning I woke up to un-ironic, good news from the elections, locally and in various other states.

* This is true. I knew they had lived at 216, rue Pelerin, and so with the help of an old map and a charming man at our hotel, I figured out that rue Pelerin is now rue Pasteur, and we went to that number to find that there was a house, that looked just like the house in the picture of my mother looking coy in the front yard. It was still there and was now Soul Music & Performing Arts Academy (SMPAA). On the tile floors where my mother once roller-skated indoors (so she claimed) Vietnamese children now dance hip-hop.

Going Away

I’ve heard that there are people who buy a ticket, throw clean underwear in a suitcase, grab their passport and cellphone charger, lock the door, and head out to distant lands.
That sounds amazing.

Before leaving for Vietnam and Cambodia we did what I thought was everything we could do to obviate any domestic crises in our absence. (It’s true I could not guarantee Bruno would not die, but he was in fine fettle for one so ancient, and the vet is on speed dial.)

We suspended the newspapers, engaged our chicken sitters, and dog sitters; we bottled honey for the Whitney museum; we made lots of lists; we mixed the paint for the dining room ceiling and floor; I made schedules for my mother’s caregivers for the next month and prepared a three-ring binder with encyclopedic information regarding my mother and her needs. (My mother has since hidden that three-ring binder; hiding things remains something she does remarkably well.)We double checked my mother's furnace. I paid my outstanding parking tickets, and returned my overdue library books. I harvested all the butternut squash and made pesto with the nasturtium leaves. We completed and sent in our absentee ballots.
That was not enough.

Then we flew to Vietnam. After 15 hours we alit at the airport in Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) where there are multitudes of stuffed pandas being sold, and only pandas. Then on to Hanoi.

I don’t know exactly what I imagined we would find in Hanoi: infinite variations on Ho Chi Minh’s beard? French-speaking Communists?
Not at all. For starters, we loved Hanoi. Or decided to love it once we learned how to cross the street. Never in my life have I seen so many motorbikes carrying so many people and animals and large articles unfit for transport by motorbike. We loved Ho Chi Minh’s collection of used cars.
I probably cannot say enough good things about Vietnam: the people, the food, the landscape, the food, and yes, the food.
And all was going well.We visited Halong Bay; we did not swim in the South China sea off Danang because of all the tiny jellyfish washing ashore. In the Hotel Saigon Morin, in Hue, the ancient capital, I saw a picture of Bon Papa, my grandfather, sitting in the lobby in 1939 smoking a cigar. I never knew him to smoke cigars. The next day was Tuesday November 8th in Vietnam, but still Monday the 7th in the USA. It stopped raining, so Hillary joined us in visiting the the tomb of Tự Đứ. Tu Duc was a 19th century Nguyen emperor who, even with 100 wives, never managed to beget himself a son. For all the usual dysfunctional dynastic reasons, Tu Duc actually took up residence in his tomb complex while still alive. And he is buried somewhere else; no one knows where. All the workers who buried the king were beheaded to keep them from revealing the secret. Still, it is called his tomb. There is a lesson here.
The next day was Wednesday morning in Vietnam, and Tuesday afternoon in the USA, and as we took a bus from Saigon to the Mekong Delta, I was texting with my brother and sister about the election results. We were lighthearted. Texting from halfway across the world seemed remarkable of itself. Then something very creepy started to happen. After all those weeks of The New York Times telling us that Hillary’s chance of winning was somewhere in the 80th and 90th percentiles, Trump was now projected to win. I checked other websites because this just seemed too weird and disturbing. And the Wifi on the bus was spotty, so some websites were not loading very quickly, or at all; I fixated on the spinning colored ball, as if the intensity of my gaze could re-align the stars and fix this election.
You all know what happened.
By mid-morning a funeral silence had enveloped our bus, as if we’d been overtaken by volcanic ash.
By the time we arrived at Cần Thơ, known for its floating markets and Vietnam’s worst-ever engineering disaster, it was a ‘fact’ (yes, a bizarre word to use relation to a presidential campaign that had been fact-free, positively fact-allergic.) that Trump had won the electoral college and the world as we know it - the world as we hoped it might become – was no longer.
Drinking and lamentations ensued. I was overcome with shame.
In the days that followed, I felt compelled to apologize to every Vietnamese person we encountered. They had been so gracious, so forgiving, and this is what the Americans just perpetrated on the planet. Almost universally, the Vietnamese had more important things to do than worry about the emergence of Trumpistan: growing rice, raising silkworms, tuning up all-purpose motorbikes, reforesting the mountains, saving the depleted fisheries and making pho.