playground

Last Sunday we have been to the hồ bơi lao động – the public swimming-pool of the labour. We, that means Thuy Hang with her son Be, some friends and relevants of her and myself. It was good to get out of the hotel room and wireless-web-cafés that I am using to live at these days, looking for job opportunities in Vietnam. I had no problem to ignore all people staring at me, so the afternoon was relaxing and the liquid clear blue swam in a fresh contrast to the colourful but dirty streets of SaiGon. Later on there was that playground. It seems to be the only one in the quarter, maybe one of very few in the whole city. I observed all those kids playing and enjoying the sand that had been brought here by a foreign funded project. Many came with their parents, ate ice cream and were pleased with a balloon in their hands. One girl of maybe six years asked Thuy for candy floss. She bought it for her. The girl took it and went without any further moves. Then I saw “our” children shoving that girl from the swing. I observed parents of other children sending her away when she intended to play with them. All the time she was wandering around with a glance of despair and reserve. Nobody wanted to play with this lonely little girl in her pink pyjama and plainly haircut. Probably she had the face of a poor, and everybody recognized that when looking at her. Actually, she had the most gentle and lovely appearance of all them. Sometimes people say that children can be cruel. Here, adults are cruel as well. Vietnam is a country with little social responsibility within society. A Socialist Republic, in which ‘self’ counts more than solidarity. The country is a playground of the rich making money out of the poor. And this is not only a local mechanism, it is the system of a whole world. I ask myself what this child will be doing in a few years. I ask myself about the future of the world, of which the influential often tend to enlarge existing gaps for their own benefits. “Chris, wake up! What’s up? Don’t you enjoy it? Stop thinking! Sometimes you have to relax. Don’t think too much. Forget about the girl. You don’t understand about Vietnam” …

Is this the view of a person having put up with the fact of perceiving the world as just a playground after having been fallen into that gap herself? Is this the very Asian idea of fate as the outcome of collected Karma? Or does that gap have to be, in order to make scientific theories of patron-client-relationships work? But who is her patron in those deep gaps between the concrete rows of Ho Chi Minh City? And what am I doing here?