09/12/06, Hà Nội, Việt Nam.
Today I went birding on the Long Biên island with JP and Toon. Black-winged kites hover and float over the pink-dust and the raked places. Atop a tomato crop, a little thing on a bamboo cane, singing. JP does his trademark slow lift of the glasses and says that it looks like a rubythroat. I am quiet.
A little thrush, yes I can see it, a modulation of the London blackbird which is Turdus: they have tight waistcoats, they run in bursts and then consider boldly; you see them all over the world. A span or two away from that on the tree is Luscinia, bordering robinhood, including the dove-backed bluethroats we flush on this same islands and the nightingales of the abandoned orchards in the south of France. The rubythroat is a Luscinia, I think, just a brown bird with a thin beak and a dark swipe back through the eye. On the crossways bamboo cane, over the places where the green skinned tomatoes grow taut in the bushes, he is whistling. His voicebox slung low as his body slouches like a bulbul’s; the song warping him out of thrush shape entirely. His downslung back is a businesslike watercolour tone, an unmottled one-wash brown. There’s just a single perfect petal of red on his throat and it shakes a little with a half-distracted song. It’s just a reedy run-through, a winter song, and a watchful one (he’s watching us) but still a song that the whole bird is slung into. Over the surface of his red throat, flashes a lilac iridescence which wasn’t in the book. What a colour! I haven’t seen it in any bird before in any forest. It’s off the map of birds, off the map of Mars. This is a bird which would not look out of place in an English garden which, unlike some of the wilder exotica on the British list, seems somehow to belong in our fauna; it’s just that only a handful of English autumns seem to reach the rarefaction needed to precipitate one. Siberian rubythroat; even appearing as the butt of a birder’s joke, even as the rumour of feathers in a trap after a weasel got in, the name carried a drop of awe in its tail. Men must stop a moment and look into their drinks. Here he is, singing in a vegetable patch.
Toon and JP talk quietly about the first time they each saw one. I say, even more quietly, that I have not ever seen one before. “This is a lifer for you?” JP asks, surprised. I nod and he retreats a step giving me space which a bird which, in this place, is no news at all. This wasn’t what I’d expected of Hanoi.
Toad at our feet, and dung. The Red River moves as slow as a hot chocolate; the malted kind of hot chocolate, the grainy malty syrup in the bottom of the cup. Surely grinds against the land as it turns its corners, thick and silt and with white plastic bags held in it, fossilising already, passing the island. The river’s too big for the city; the other bank is somewhere else, like New Jersey. This island, in the middle, is nowhere: too unstable to develop; shaped like a fish and for similar reasons. The soil is rich, though, and the place is finely patchworked. Mist nets hang in the marshes, but not for research on migration; the rubythroat’s right to be wary. Mattocks fall.
We came down the bridge to get there but we take the boat back.
In our bed in our rented house, I read ‘Strange tales from a Chinese Studio.’ Bored young men of the Mandarin class: some only laugh and drink and place mad bets, others collect strange stones, or uncanny girlfriends: “The crystal bowl was from the underwater palace of the Dragon King. There was no sign of the goldfish.” The glossary says that the Chinese word qí doesn’t simply mean ‘strange’, but rare, uncanny. It means something almost like “refined,” but it’s more specific, more flavoured. Outré, recherche, that kind of thing. Qí is what one seeks out when one has become bored with the common run of men and things. Borges loved this book, which is no surprise. I called my blog ‘far and few’, because wonder if this kind of bored young man is all I am.
I think about the Vietnamese term qúy hiếm, which I’d thought was the term for ‘endangered species’; it’s what people usually use to refer to saola, tiger, douc and snub-nosed monkey and so on. It doesn’t mean that, though, it means ‘rare’. Or rather, as usual, the two word-units formally represent two faces of that meaning in separate panels. It seems that hiếm just means there are not many of them whereas qúy means ‘precious’ I’m tempted to say it means ‘rare’ in the sense of ‘rarefied’ but actually I don’t think there’s any etymological relation to qí in Chinese. It doesn’t mean ‘weird.’ I do think it’s a Chinese-derived term, though. I do think it comes from the same world that the Strange Tales come from. In Hanoi, you most often see it in ‘quý khách:’ the precious guest,;which is how Vietnamese businesses have chosen to address ‘the customer’. I’m uncomfortable with the qúy part of qúy hiếm: precious to whom? Precious how?
Poets stand perfectly distracted by the correct purple flower. I write about a goose in the mist raising its shoe-shaped head and turning towards… something. Bellbirds in the forest calling clear from the mist and lichen. Other places than here. It feels like the world ought to point towards something; be bent by some force that isn’t there. I think about what Barney told me about the ridge-lines of the Annamites where the snares are now: tigers used to walk them so perhaps the saola keep away. If I were to try and write about a tiger, I’d imagine it wrong. Wild tigers aren’t a part of my life, though Barney says there are some still out there; some prints were found.
The river moves past, all muscle. Mattocks fall.
Hannah’s got into bed and the train moans in the distance, the dark night's blustery, and for once I don't want to be out in it. The whole point is you couldn't write it. I think of a story of the bird that burnt through its net.
My head heavy, my eyes tired. I’ll miss the next birding trip; I’ll be in the field.
13/12/06. Train. Hanoi to Tam Kỳ.
So I'm off to my first saola survey.