CHAPTER IV

LOTUS LOVE UNDER

THE PHOENIX WING

Once upon a time, in a far away land, lived a hundred small children born from a Dragon King and a Fairy Queen, among a confluence of historical streams, sharing a common consensus of beliefs and values, with a collective consciousness and social conscience, and so the story is told, and retold. This is a self-reflective story about a delicate but tough people, a very old yarn retold in a new way; another variation upon an ancient theme, cognizant of the simple fact that many have retold the same old story before, and demonstrating the basic truth that each time the story is told, it is a little different than before. This version merely has an existential twist of fate.

Discussing the story of the phoenix people is a little like peeling away the layers of an onion to get at its core, reaching into the center of what it means to be Vietnamese. In the process of doing so, social space becomes stereotypically sanctioned, social time typologically telescoped, in mythological manner. It is to speak primarily of ethnohistorical dynamics and their mechanisms and recurrent processes, and of ethnocultural dialectics and their configurations and repetitive patternings, and of synergism and symbolism, just as the story of these people has always been portrayed, but with a reflexive difference of viewing at a distance only an ephemeral reflection of the present, a momentary image at the interface of mythos and reality. In this process of delineating people-space and people-time a mythological transformation is eventually constructed, a dialectical synthesis of contrapuntal elements, such that history becomes culture, and then, the story is magically transformed into living, breathing people.

This is the story of a young woman, actually only a little girl at heart, who, once upon a time, followed a very simple dream, the romantic dream of a man, a husband, not so uncommon a dream shared by many young women all over the world. She followed him at risk of everything, even her life, to find a new home in a new homeland. As I have come to know her, I have nicknamed her Lotus, though this is not her real name, because like the lotus flower that blossoms so splendidly in the dirtiest of water, Lotus is a flower of Vietnamese womanhood who has bloomed in the direst of social circumstances. But the plight of Lotus, and the plight of her phoenix people, has not yet ended. Today there are many young mothers in the world who share a similar plight as Lotus. But if the story of Lotus and her phoenix people has been written in such sad tragedy, there is also a great deal of common dignity to be shared, a kind of dignity born only through human suffering.

To write a personal phenomenology of my ethnographic field experience is unprecedented—not that it probably hadn’t been done before, but that it is a new phenomenon to my own experience. This is not ethnocentric vanity, but only plain honesty. One definition of "phenomena" is "the appearance or observed features of something experienced as distinguished from reality or the thing in itself." (Webster’s Dict. 1983) From this "phenomenology" is derived as "1. The science dealing with phenomena as distinct from the science of being (ontology). 2. The branch of a science that classifies and describes its phenomena without any attempt at explanation." I will use phenomenology here as a key metaphor for talking about and comprehending my own personal experiences and involvement in relationship to Lotus and her phoenix people, without purporting to be an emic description or evaluation of the existential being of these people. He relationship itself, between self and other, subject and object, etic and emic, knower and known, observer and observed, is the focus of this phenomenology, such that ethnographer as self and the other as observed people merge and become a unity, a group in communion. The organizational metaphor of this grouping is mutual commitment that is emergent and unavoidable in on going human involvement. All connotations of phenomenology as science: must be dispelled, rather it is merely a-scientific, being instead what I prefer to call  humanological in orientation. It involves not a professional commitment to scientific reality, but rather a humanological commitment in the sense of one human being relating to another as a human being, during which the prioritization of values skews, focus blurs, lines between self and other subject as knower and object as known, disappear beneath the magnifying glass and the macroscopic process of knowing and being known becomes a process of touching and being touched, spiritually and well as physically.

Claiming to be neither strictly etic or emic necessarily means coming under fire and attack from both sides of the fence. Grey bearded gurus and professional gatekeepers alike have explained to me that I lack the authority to write an objective etic description of any kind, the only kind that counts in their $80,000.00 a year rulebook. On the other hand many Vietnamese have attempted to explain to me in their broken English that I cannot possibly know about them unless I learn their language, supposedly an easy thing to do.

The limitations of a personal, humanological phenomenology are the limitations of myself. I lack the professional resources, the cooperation, the officiousness and the training to conduct a valid field study. On the other hand, I lacked the time, energy, native intelligence, sociability and interest to acquire Vietnamese as a second language in a span of a year’s allotment of ethnographic research. Of course I lack the professionalism to do an etic analysis, and because I lack the Vietnamese language I cannot hope to emically understand the Vietnamese. But I also have the facility and savvy of turning my personal weaknesses into my own advantageous strengths. On the one hand having limited professional access to information forced me to adopt a diversified strategy of gleaning within my own narrow means every possible bit of information, shred of evidence, relevant idea, and of collecting all of this into some quasi-formal organization best suited to my own personal style. It also forced me to adopt an encounter approach, versus a set piece strategy, in which I more readily availed myself to unplanned, hence unexpected events versus applying some a priori structure to my experiences. 

Thus things happened more-or-less spontaneously forcing me to immediately sort the relevant from the irrelevant without any prior criteria. Not knowing the language always prevented me from emically comprehending what was going on with others around me, but it has an advantage often hidden in its obviousness of forcing me to understand and evaluate others on the basis of what they are doing in relation to me, and what I was doing in relation to them, or not doing, instead of what they were just trying to say to me. Sometimes actions speak louder than words, and words have a way of obfuscating behavior, and sometimes inaction is louder than action. Not knowing the language did not prevent me from relating humanologically, and probably more genuinely, naturally and honestly, with them. Lotus was my key informant and interpreter, in her uneducated, broken pidgin English, and I have no doubt she was usually telling me what she wanted me to know, or though I wanted to know. Even in this there was a modicum of strength, for it allowed to learn openly a side of Lotus and of myself, of self-deception and honesty, that reliance on words tend to obscure.

There is a modicum of power in doing ethnography, and a whole lot of hypocrisy, and false power and ethnocentrism underlying participant observation soon becomes recognized by those being observed, and this is the turning point beyond which real ethnographic process proceeds with genuine human commitment, and false ethnography retreats to the ivory tower. And ethnography, as a synthesizing process, a synergism, is much like the synergism of the process of living itself. Both have a beginning, a time for living, and an ending. Disengagement is as traumatic as engagement in ethnographic existence.

The values to be reinforced and lessons to be learned from engagement and disengagement in ethnographic process are the values and lessons of human existence itself. Human commitment, as long as it is human, is not necessarily a dirty word, that trust and respect to be earned through promise of commitment is more important than even money, or the many things opportunities and pleasures money can buy, or the lack of money, and the suffering that fatefully ensues, and finally and most importantly, the value of human sharing and reciprocity, of any and all human resources, material or otherwise, according to the dictum "From each according to his/her means, to each according to his/her needs." Equality becomes a relative matter.

Ethnography, as a phenomenological process, needs no extrinsic justification, for most essentially it is an end in and of itself. If it is genuine existential engagement in human cultural reality, it unavoidably involves facing, questioning and confronting our own unquestioned ethnocentrism, of right or wrong, good or bad, ugliness or beauty, better or worse, and those of others. Piercing through the obfuscating clouds of ethnocentrism, whether simple ignorance or sophisticated prejudice, pops the bubble of the Grand Illusion of our Modern prides and prejudice, and clarifies human social reality to pin point sharpness. In our modern age of national nuclear arsenals poised on the verge of Armageddon, there can be no higher or more noble ideal.

Ethnography provides, in and of itself, a whole new, alternative framework for human existence. Its processes of engagement and disengagement in the pursuit of phenomenological and humanological involvement with other human beings through existential commitment, constitutes a rite of passage, an integration of existential being and becoming, a coming of age upon a transcendental plain of shared existence. And through it, we grow in existential, ethnographic power.

There is also more than a little self-reflectivity and reflexivity in the ethnographic process, coming through recognition of our own ethnocentrism of which we were previously quite ignorant, of apperceptive self-enlightenment. Looking back upon the growth experience of the ethnographic process itself, we see ourselves at the ethnocentric center of the whole, and realize how much the predicament and plight of others is a reflection of our own existential predicament and plight. In sharing with others our strengths and weaknesses, they share with us their own.

This point takes me back to some of the fundamental doctrines of the Eastern religious philosophies, that the craving of the self that gives rise to suffering through projection and identification threatened by "changes in the factors to which it is attached, whether this be the factors of that person, other persons, or other objects and activities in the world," must be eliminated by non-attachment of the self to those cravings which give rise to suffering in the first place. The root cause of attachment of self to existential experience is ignorance—"without this false ego-self, which is only a creation of ignorance, there would be no looking to the past, bemoaning what has been lost, and no looking to the future lamenting over what has not yet come about. Without this ego-self life could be lived in the full richness of the present moment, without distinction, division, or attachment. Consequently, once this ignorance is removed, life would be found complete and perfect just as it is." (Koller 1970:134)

In our ethnographic recognition of the ultimate reflexivity of human existential reality, and through our self reflective transcendence of our own ethnocentrism, we are brought suddenly to the edge of the mise en abyme—the great groundless non-being which paradoxically is the ground of being—"without the production of some scheme, some 'icon' there can be no glimpse of the abyss, no vertigo of the underlying nothingness…." (Miller 1976) Then in our realization that the game of life is an illusion of our own prophetic manufacture, and that our comprehension of its makings is mythological, there is only the existential alternative of not choosing and living at the edge of the abyss, on the margins of existence, laughing ridiculously at the center stage fools who play the game so credibly, or else choose to continue play acting, or not, in acknowledgment that there is, after all, only one game, while still transformed through the wisdom of the Veil of Maya. But all our laughter and comedy are only sardonic and empty echo—an echoing of the tragedy of the illusion of life, in the deepest most tragic suffering in existence is also the most profound and sublime meaning. The paradox of existence is that no matter what choice we shall make, even non-choice, it will always, inevitably be a tragic choice. Through the ethnographic process our being is transformed, through tragic-comic in its dramatic illusion, it is finally tragic. But the ethnographic transformation experience confers as well a self-revitalized power of transcendent non-being.

The mythology of ethnographic experience is three-fold. In its transformational process of engagement-disengagement, being non-being, existence itself becomes its mythology in the form of existentiality. The key metaphors of this mythology are self/other and subject/object. In the human existential reality that the ethnographic process is attempting to synthetically resurrect the mythology is of the form of ethnicity, composed by a dialectic between becoming and being expressed by the key metaphors of purpose and expectation. Finally, in the human process of ethnographic realization, of human engagement, involvement and commitment, there is the mythology of ethics, whose dialectic between nature and values are expressed symbolically in key metaphors of relativity, equality and respect. All these mythologies of existential ethnography are composed by respective dialectical meta-themes that are expressed synthetically in the form of symbolism that are metaphorical in function and meta-logical in meaning. In the expression of the mythologies, elaborate sequences of symbolisms are formed which are related by correlation, by homology, by analogy—by a sympathetic principle of like attracts like. Ethnographic description, the end product of the synthesis of these mythological themes, becomes in essence an elaborate complex, or chains of symbolism.

In the interrelationship of this synthetic reality our identities are formed by attachment to a particular structural order of symbolic referents which define things that are meaningful in our existence. The interrelatedness of these structures form values that are elaborated to form more-or-less coherent value systems on both the individual and cultural levels of articulation. These value systems become expressed conceptually in highly idiographic and ideological idioms that form models for our behavior and help us to organize and prioritize our behavior. Value systems which conforms statistically with the average become normal, those which are extremely different become labeled culturally as abnormal or deviant depending upon cultural standards.

Engaging in interrelationship with other people whose value systems are quite different, ethnographically in terms of another person of another cultural orientation, brings a dialectical conflict and resolution of differences, either through frame elicitation, compartmentalizing our experiences into a tidy package through which we can systematically exclude differences and include similarities through projection and reflection. This is a process of concretization, reification, rationalization, hypostatization, and involves oversimplification of our conceptual reality in order to tolerate and deal with behavioral differences. On the other hand we can opt for frame reevaluation that involves an internal and external restructuring and reorganization of our interrelationships of values. Values become defined only through differentials of meaning between dichotomous contrasts. Altering the meaning, or "significance" through changing the differential relationships results in reevaluation of our existence—instead of compartmentalizing and concretizing reality we synthesize and generalize reality. Instead of simplification through systematic exclusion of differences, we complicate through synthetic integration of differences. Frame elicitation leads us into the maze-way of ethnocentrism. Frame evaluation leads us towards transcendental self-enlightenment.

If the process underlying ethnicity as the existential emergence of frame elicitation then the governor of the process is the past, and the center of the process is ethnocentrism. It becomes a process of replication of uniformity through conformity and imitation. If the process is one of frame reevaluation then, like the ethnographic process, it becomes one of reorganization of diversity through what are known as revitalization movements. Frame elicitation and frame reevaluation exist in a dialectical relationship—"Society (societas) seems to be a process rather than a thing—a dialectical process with successive phases of structure and communitas. There would seem to be—if one can use such a controversial term—a human 'need' to participate in both modalities." (Turner 1969:203)

In the great human drama, individual human beings are actors who have their exits and entrances and one man, in his time, plays many parts. In this theater cultures are streams of existential sub-groupings, scenes and acts of the play, which emerge, converge, diverge and disappear, continually appearing and reappearing in always altered form.

The mythology of ethics and ethos underlying the human process of ethnographic realization is an existential ethics and ethos, but not necessarily existentialist. Human reality is not inherently meaningless. Indeed it is inescapably meaningful in its grand mythological illusion of its essentially tragic character, and recognition of the illusion is the only escape from this tragedy. The great tragedy is that all things are temporary and must end. Death is the great equalizer which makes all things even and undifferentiated in the process of perpetual change—Nature, the great circle of the web of life in which everything is enmeshed in a never ending network of interrelationships. Nature is universal in that it is all encompassing. Nothing is excepted or excluded from its great law. Nature is the Tao.

The ethical principles of Taoism are to preserve human life from threats to its existence, and to make life great by improvement of its quality. From the Tao of Nature all multiplicity, variability, diversity and differences between things proceed. The Tao makes all things equal in their essential ground of non-being, and yet all things too are different in their expressive being. This infinite diversity is the process of creativity of Nature, of ephemeral, ever emergent changes in relations between things. Streams of change within Nature are differential and variable, to understand this is to recognize the metaphor of relativity, of universal relationship, intrinsic in Nature and guiding our sympathetic comprehension of Nature.

To recognize relativity in Nature is to acknowledge the relativity of the metaphor of human values in existentiality. Nature and values form a mythological dialectic of existential ethos. Values have been defined as the attachment of meaning, of human significance, to symbols with primary referents derived ultimately from Nature. Values are relative, and to recognize this relativity of values is to recognize that ethics is inextricable from ethos—the habits, conditionings, characteristics, attributed to a group, its focal patterning. There is no such thing as an a-priori, noumenal, independent "Law of Ethics" with an upper case "E." There are many little ethics that are ephemeral and emergent, defined by the succession of choices and commitments people make over time in relation to one another.

Ethics and ethos are rooted in human nature and thus in human needs—needs of survival and success in the preservation of life and in its qualitative, evaluative fulfillment, no matter how tragic. To recognize the great ground of being of Nature in its many human forms and manifestations, is to evince respect in the choices made in relation to nature—in accordance with the principles of sympathy with nature and harmony. Respect means trust in interrelationship, earned through ethical commitment and ethos of behavior over time as the basis of respect. Trust implies an ethical attunement, a sympathetic interrelationship to the immediate reality. Relativism, naturalness, trust, respect, equality, evaluation, sympathy, these are the humanological elements of existential ethics and ethos. At the heart of ethnography is a basis naturalness that is honesty in its complete, unconditional form, the basis of ethics and ethos in the encounter of existentiality. The basis of honesty is sympathetic integrity with nature.

From these considerations of existential ethnography proceeds consideration of a model for a kind of ethnographic existentiality. An alternative framework for human cultural life. Some of its boundaries are fairly discernible, in its preservation and perpetuation of all life, and upon its creative fulfillment, in its naturalness and honesty transcending ethnocentrism, in its relativity in all sense of the word, and, foremost, in its pacifism. It entails frame reevaluation of our modern global context, and reevaluation of some basic values, even entailing a revolutionary restructuring of our modern version of progressive civilization based upon a utilitarian utopia of the pleasure principle, even if it means sharing the wealth, instead of a super city on the hill a global working class mega-ghetto or world wide lower middle-class super slum held together by social welfare programming. Better this than global climax and nuclear holocaust.

This is an ethnographic description about the existential emergence of the new ethnic reality of my phoenix people, sometimes labeled some what deridingly as the boat people, of an ethnic sense of being Vietnamese, as opposed to the ethnohistorical or ethnocultural sense of traditional Vietnamese identity. While it is irrefutably important to comprehend the historical and cultural context from which these people came, it is equally important to consider the new existential patterns and processes which are emerging in response to a changed context, and to comprehend ethnographically how past and present, forever sundered, are nonetheless reasonably well reintegrated in makeshift, ad-hoc fashion, preserving a sense of existential continuity, and providing, especially a sense of purpose for a new future. Now, in the synthesis of a new ethnic culture from often inimical elements and contexts, the phoenix people are managing to accomplish in somewhat haphazard fashion what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do.