Hanoi. A meeting
Honestly, I don't know if I can make conservation meetings interesting but they hold so much of the story. Here goes.
Tuesday 7th March.
I have been up, once again, since 2am in my room. I’m in the London Hotel, Hanoi, eating from the minibar, working on my presentation. It brings back haunting memories to be dragging huge map files out of spotty WiFi link-ups so that I can paste them into a Powerpoint. They aren't the kind of memories you want to linger over but nor are they the kind you want to avoid exactly either. There's a satisfaction now in seeing some old habits that no longer have quite their old force. I forced myself out of the data early to sketch the narrative, avoiding over-focus. I didn't end up doing all the maps myself but gave them to Đ-, who came through brilliantly in the end. I wasted less time defending unreliable data and subjective interpretation; let the audience offer better options if they can. I didn't put in a single slide that belonged in an academic presentation. I worked steadily, and well.
I caught a flavour about 4am, of the crash coming, the willpower receding. I was scared, though I didn't waste energy, as I would have done once, worrying that it showed my passionate conservationist persona was a facade for middle-class boredom. I'd been drinking lots of coffee, working late and early (though not till exhaustion). I was being efficient. It was a good feeling. I'd just read Caro Ross's piece about returning to practices of presence in the moment. It’s very good:
"Being profoundly dislocated is not a barrier to getting stuff done, in fact one can be much more efficient when existing slightly beside oneself. The Machine values efficiency, and people like it when your intricate systems mean you remember their birthday."
But it had been my wife's birthday a few days after I'd left and I'd actually managed to get our little one to paint her a card, order and wrap the present she asked for and get our older boy to pick some items up on his Spanish exchange trip, as well as order a box of chocolates. That is high-level functionality for me. I am not good with remembering birthdays. I was happy to be efficient. I knew there would be a payback but I could get the presentation delivered and worry about that later. I was still pasting in the last images on the taxi ride over but I felt good about the work I'd done.
We arrive at the NGO office and are invited into the arbour at the side for green tea D- and T- are drawn in and sit down but I hover at the edge to be embraced by K-, who took me on my first field trip in the country back in 2007. We reminisce a little but I down my tea and drag myself out of the tendrilled space and in to the office. I want to get set up and prepare.
Familiar faces greet me, some of which I can match to names and histories, and some of which float free. The security guard and the cleaner are the most immediately recognizable because they have always been there; even when the office was in a different building. Others bewilder me, the same faces introduced in various combinations of 'finance', 'project', field' and 'conservation', combined with 'officer', 'manager', 'director' and 'coordinator'. I fail to place some people I actually know quite well because I don’t expect to see them. They have the advantage over me, of course; here, I have a face people shout at in the street, but I do think my brain’s deficient in that area. Or I don’t care enough about people.
In the staircase, alone, I stop a moment before the photo of the little Bạch Mã saola, the orphan who was brought to an enclosure at that National Park in... 1996, I think; I'd have to check my database. It’s taken in such a way that no chain-link fence or other man-made object is visible but I note the little half-petalled Bidens daisy in the corner; a hyperabundant, pantropical weed of neotropical origin, ubiquitous in anthropogenic habitats in Vietnam but absent from primary forest. Two office locations ago, I remember images in the stairwell that propagated less sophisticated deceptions. This one is international standard; the same kind that is only just recognizable back in England if David Attenborough's involved. Later I wonder if this picture, taken by a westerner, would actually fool a Vietnamese person; everyone from the tropics would recognise Bidens. This time last year, H- & Đ- were showing me schookids' tricks with its hooked seeds while we loitered in the football field outside a commune office somewhere in Hạ Tĩnh. Would they know it doesn't grow in the high Trường Sơn, though? I can't be sure.
Well I get my presentation onto the system and of course the fonts go all wrong, so I spend a few minutes correcting them. A few minutes in an empty meeting room before the people file in; I feel so organized, even though I haven't practised the thing. The table is laden with plates of fruit; including strawberries, which are grown in Da Lat. It's hard to keep my hands off them.
The room fills up with faces and bodies, some familiar and middle-aged, some young and, as it will turn out, to be connected with familiar email chains, and some middle-aged and unfamiliar, mostly 'counterparts' from a government agency. There are, I think, four women's faces in the room and the same number of western ones. "Final nail in the coffin for me." I hear a familiar voice say; and I don't know for sure what he's referring to, but it's not hard to guess. He goes on: "that needs to be backed up with grants; it doesn't commit us to give that.." standard talk from the level above 'implementation' and 'management' where creativity is less dangerous and the true craft is captaining the rafts of funding for a time. I'm surprised, and oddly warmed, to see an unexpected face across the table; tanned and lined and older. A reserved, almost reclusive, biodiversity expert from another NGO with whom I worked briefly just after I first arrived in Vietnam. He's a figure from an earlier age, in a country where ages are briefer than decades, an age where professors carried more authority than managers. I notice, as the preamble starts, that myself and T- are introduced as 'misters' not 'doctors'; I doubt that would have happened in the past, or that it would have gone uncorrected if it had. I remember also how little I cared for status then. That's because I thought I could get things done without it. The man chairing the meeting is in a project manager role and it's hard for me to hold his words in my head: "I know that the meeting is technical so we are kind of friendly but still we should have some formal [...] the leaders who work a long time to give some direction..." It seems that someone at the ministry wanted the honour of being invited to a proper project launch workshop. I vaguely wonder who, but realise I am not likely to ask. Then a director is invited to speak and talks, with apparent passion about the commitment of all present to the cause of saola. "No information content," would have been my old response. Now I wonder how much he really means it, and how much he might be trying to convince himself. Then I'm distracted from that line of thought when he says: "B- talked a long time about whether we can do the cologne," and it takes me a moment to realise he means "cloning". I wonder about that for a second, and then I'm up.
They moved it onto another computer and the fonts all went wrong again.
I think my presentation lands pretty well. As soon as I start speaking I hear, to my own surprise, a ripple of relief go round the room. Somehow my manner has broken some tension I hadn't been aware of. I think I've signalled by my tone that this is not a formal occasion, that we are all friends here. I don't know how I managed that.
I go through the 'landscapes' one by one, north to south, bullet-pointing the chances of saola survival for each. At the end, I get fairly grilled by Vietnamese peers. "Can you believe what the local people tell you?", "Have you ever done field surveys for saola?", "Why are you doing this rather than the protected area staff?" I can handle it. Then a communications consultant in an ankle-length pink-crimped dress tentatively introduces herself and the need to collect ‘the right kind of stories’ about saola from local hunters, so she and her team can construct the right kind of message. I bristle, getting ready to deflect a request for informants' names. What she actually asks is: "what does your gut say?"
I'm not sure whether she is talking about whether the species survives or whether it can be saved; it doesn't matter. It's not my job to answer stuff like that; my practice is precisely to resist the magnetic pulls of 'yes' and 'no,' strike out from the stupidity of belief and and tread the probabilities between. I resent the laziness of those who refuse that challenge; they'll get no life-raft from me...
... would have been my answer once. What I think instead is that I just can't afford to fall off another rising hope. I wrote down my feelings one black night in a Hạ Tĩnh hotel and some people read them so they acquired the gravity of story. "I don't want hope that comes in a box." I said with the intention that I wouldn't have to feel that crash again, after the last thing got my hopes up.
Yet without irrationally clinging to one shore or the other, how can I be sure of avoiding hope? The information is never still; new lights are always shining out of it, wheeling and going dark. You can't not see them. Over a caffeinated week I have reviewed the data that our team had collected and began to see as I'd just said in the presentation, that the indications weren't quite as bad everywhere. I had spelled out the evidence for and against, as best as I could in the time. There was, in fact, one place where saola were still referred to as something people saw and a couple of other places with positive indications, all probably of animals crossing over from Lao if they are real at all Not quite as black as it looked that night in Hạ Tĩnh. I've said that already, what more does she want? I doubt the tears in my eyes are visible but I am grateful for the conversation to be deflected, which it is. I promise to talk to her about it later, which I do.
Later, in the beer hall, under brick arches, bottles of Tiger beer and red rượu stand waiting on stainless steel tables. I find myself sitting next to one of the other westerners there, a man I hadn't seen since the last proper Saola Working Group meeting - the one held in - of all places - Lowestoft. He says that maybe if we had done it back then - capture for breeding - as it seemed we were going to, then it might have worked. Now though, even if we find them, what's the chance we will be allowed to catch any? We should just try our best to protect them in situ or at least do our best for other species instead. We'll never get enough animals for a captive population to thrive.
Nonetheless, at the next table, the same person who was saying "last nail in the coffin" is mooting a solution to that same problem:
"I need to see a saola before I die." (laughing but serious)
"A clone...?"
"It's ‘de-extinction’."
And the logic is sound. I can still find it inspiring, in fact. Listen: there are still heads hanging on walls, skins in museums, shrivelled pieces of saola, male and female, run through or shot, strangled or starved. And there are no calves to replace them, like the one whose picture hangs in the stairwell and who died in Bạch Mã. Yet in Bạch Mã, now, there is a chance that, should a mother be found, children could be born to those who have died without children. You might turn away from the idea of cloning as I turned away from the idea of exterminating rats on islands; but that just means I leave it for other conservationists to do. We had all sorts of qualms about captive breeding; thousands of practical ones but also deeper unvoiced ones about whether the product of a captive breeding programme could ever be truly wild again. Whether it rendered the whole thing somehow pointless, in some indefinable way. I've felt those niggles and worries and I've felt how quickly and completely they shrivel away in the face of the real threat of extinction. And, listen, you know the flagship rewilding in Britain at Knepp where, among other things, they've reintroduced storks? I've head birders say that Knepp is the place that ruined White Stork for everyone because it's impossible now to be sure you're seeing a true wild vagrant and not a wanderer from the farm. Isn't that a bit puritan? Well why is cloning so different? Because it's unnatural? I'm sorry but everything was unnatural once.
Even so, when I hear "what you can do these days, you can take one individual and just CRISPR it into a different individual." I can't help but shudder. What does that shudder mean, though? It's a physiological reflex. The argument for cloning, as for captive breeding, is correct.
But actually that's only half the problem: in the conversation I'm actually in, what I say is: "Back then, it seemed that there was nothing at all we could do about snaring. Now, that's less certain."
"Why is that?" he asks
"Well, it seems as if it's possible now to do effective enforcement and there are some organizations that are doing it. I mean, last year, an old hunter that we'd been working with to set cameras, he told us: “no I'm not going back to the forest, I got caught and the fine was just huge.” And that's one side of it; there have been economic changes. The young people who might have been hunting? Now more often they go off to the cities to get jobs in factories or construction...”
I'd seen them, in fact, back then; little gangs of mountain people up above Hanoi, making their camps on the high floors of tower-block skeletons with their striped tarps and their kettles and their little hanging lights. I knew then that 'opportunity cost’ was the dodgy variable in my never-finished bioeconomic models, that capitalism could give as well as take away; it was just that we couldn't count on it happening fast enough. The 'environmental Kuznets curve': the middle class of a country grows, environmental destruction lessens, that's the idea... except of course...
"...so, depending what's going to happen to the world..." I say, and he nods in recognition of that uncertainty - we're on the same page, "…what you see here suggests snaring can actually be reduced. And it's scary because… well I'll never know how influential I really was but I like to think I had a significant role in shifting the conversation towards captive breeding. I've always been able to think: ‘maybe we will fail but at least that was the right decision’ and now I think: 'was it?'"
I nearly tell him about the dream but instead I get up and go to the loo.
When I get back, the conversation at the other table has moved on to another species: "If we get a breeding programme going..."
"..if you go to other provinces we could get.. twenty Hoàn Kiếm turtles. This is one of those species that could get down to 2/3 individuals but we can still recover."
I reminisce, on the way out, about being the guy who knew how to see the Hoàn Kiếm turtle, the Lady of the Lake. I didn't have time to pass on my secret before she died and her species, one of the rarest in the world, seemed utterly doomed. And then eDNA surveys, which long seemed hopeless, began to reveal more individuals in lakes about the country. I hear about the progress of these surveys and I find no place for my memories of sitting on the bench in the early morning mist to watch her breathe. I have become one of those maudlin old guys, in development and conservation, who were preoccupied with finding meanings in the stories of change they could tell, instead of passing on useful tips for success. Despite the warmth of the beer, I can feel I'm losing my small audience. We're on our way to the taxi anyway.
I get back to my hotel room and, to my amazement, I'm still not exhausted, the crash hasn't come. I've even promised to come back to the office tomorrow and I have no doubt I can make it; and talk sense when I'm there. I actually manage to join the end of the open call with Dougald Hine's School Called Home. I hear someone talking about how he got into politics to support the miners' strike and is now rather glad that the pits are, in fact, closed. I feel sympathy; perhaps a hint of justification. It's hard to know how things are going to turn out. For saola, cloning was once a mad distraction and captive breeding was reckless and un-tested. Now, together they are the best hope; unless of course that was wrong and we should have left them alone after all. Or perhaps it is right except for the imminent collapse of the global system that currently makes it possible to consider such fripperies as the de-extinction of exotic antelopes. Or perhaps there's an entire right-brain perspective where all these structured questions fall apart. Anyway it's hard. Nobody knows what to do.
Then, with the lights out, I begin speaking to myself: "Nonsense. You could feel how things were in there, all the species they were saving, you could feel the energy of it. Things were worse for the turtle than for the saola and now they'll save the turtle. She had a better champion, is the fact of it; one who wasn't mooning around over the meaning of what he was doing and whether he was a good person. One who had it way harder than you did but didn't give up on everything two-thirds of the way through because he (checks notes) got bored. Face it, you failed! You useless little shit."
And then I go to sleep. This emotional detachment is the bomb.
Wednesday 8th March (International Women’s Day)
The next day I sleep in a little, then head out to a place that "makes coffee sweeter than your ex." It's a retro recreation of the kind of streetside cafe that was plentiful only a decade ago. Vietnam moves fast. I get out my laptop but then find they want me in the office after all so I get in another taxi.
A girl in a hoodie is selling bittersweet bamboo shoots under the overpass that didn't used to exist.
There's a decent meeting with the three of them in the elephant room, I get some points straight and make promises. I pick around a very meaty International Women's Day lunch and talk to Q-, the communications consultant in the long pink dress. Turns out she asked me 'a stupid question' after another presentation almost a decade ago: "how many saola do we have in Vietnam?" I must have really snapped at her; I used to hate that question. I tell her now, calmly and clearly, why I can't answer questions from my gut or from my heart. So I speak from a place some way to the side. I tell her about what happened the last time I hitched my heart to a pre-packaged hope but I know it's not a story she can tell. And then I head off to meet A- in the old quarter for more coffee. I'm still going; I don't know how.
It's another productive discussion: I have just that much more clarity on the information I have to provide. I reassure him the chance is more than a million-to-one; exaggerating probabilities for effect being another of those bugbears from the old days that no longer gets me so riled. I say that I do think that a lot of Vietnamese conservationists have always been quietly against saola capture? “Why?" he asks, with a shock that I think is genuine. I deflect to what I think is a more productive topic of discussion but I want to say it’s because they always saw how fast the country would change. We'd been taught not to believe in economic development any more but they still believed in it, and they were - for the moment - right.
Anyway, A- heads up and I get out my laptop again and then I get a text. It’s a What'sApp message from my mother to a group called 'family'. There has not previously been any such group.
It turns out there has been a death.
That's it, then. I put my laptop back. I get up and leave the cafe and walk down to the lake.
Unlike in Vinh, I can be invisible here and I like it. It means I can watch the people and also, to my surprise, the animals. There's a Pallas' squirrel, dark with a gold throat, in a tree leaning over the water. To me Hanoi's 'squirrels' were always the rats that ran down the phone lines. It was impossible to imagine that real ones could survive; they'd be caught and eaten for sure, but here one is. In the green water, there are goldfish dimly moving. We used to mock the people who imagined that the goldfish they ceremonially released into the stinking water could possibly survive. Again, here they are. The striated heron lopes across to the island. This is exactly where I used to sit and see her in the early morning - the lady of the lake.
I remember an incident about 13 years ago on the road from the airport. I was in a taxi with two English professors, including my PhD supervisor in the front, when we hit a cow. It could easily have gone through the windscreen but in fact it somersaulted right over the roof, we hit it that hard. In fact, it got up and walked away. Maybe the shock or internal wounds killed it later. For myself, I just took out my phone and made the call I'd just been about to; I didn't have time to deal with any kind of 'wow you could have died' stuff, I had to keep going. And yet what I had to keep doing wasn't getting us out of danger, it was setting up our next meeting to talk about future collaborations under the project. It wasn't even a particularly important meeting but I was just that stressed. Adrenaline is adrenaline, I suppose. Coffee is coffee.
Old ladies in steel wheelchairs chatting with their feet up, young ladies in yellow ao dài having their photo taken before the lake, and two more in Korean traditional dress. An old dude in a beret and long beard, a tiny tot in a ruffed black dress in her worried mother's arms. Middle aged man with Seymour Skinner hair, in vest and loafer shorts, swinging his arms. A dad with his daughter in her green school jacket clinging to his arm as he points out something on a building above them. Avuncular xe om driver speaking soft syllables to a tired toddler whose mother rocks him. A head breaks the water but I know it’s not hers. She's gone.
I head north, following the girls in the huge pink Korean skirts, across Silver Street. A motorbike is laden with a sofa-sized stack of Pikachu hats and the floor is littered with sunflower husks. A line of tourists in red-seated cyclos with stern expressions. A little boy being dragged along by his mother stops to show me his collage from nursery; he really does! The rancour, the insistence that none of this human stuff matters, I wonder where that's got to; all of this clearly matters very much. I think of about another pandemic. It could already have started; so many things are already in motion. All of these dear people.
And at the same time, how quickly we would drop the saola if things got bad.
"All the feels." The phrase enters my head. I think it means cuddling up in front of Netflix and having a bit of a cry. But that's to get away from the real ‘feels’ isn't it? I have had so many stories about why I abandoned practices of presence but it seems so simple to me now: it was just too much. Not too much time or too much effort but too much emotion, that's all. Nothing worse than "all the feels" in real life.
I'm hungry. I've seen signs advertising vegetarian buffets but I can't actually Google them or get a taxi to one. I end up in stupid tourist restaurant eating tofu which is neither crispy or deep-fried and which costs ten times what it should. I used to live here, why am I doing this? But if I can’t work, and I can’t seem to, I don’t seem to be able to control what I’m doing. I am feeling things now, and noticing things, but I can’t choose things based on those feelings. I let my feet take me, as they so often have before, towards Trúc Bạch, though that way isn’t home any more.
I stop in yet another cafe but I just have ginger tea. This one has cats and books and also plaster statues you can paint at your table because all those are apparently things now. I set myself to write just one more work email and it’s amazing to me how hard it is, compared to before. Last night’s beers had much less effect. A little girl brings me a cat which climbs up on my table, glad to be free of her affection. A flea darts in and out of the fur around its eyes and I feel somehow encouraged by the sight; I don't know why. I have a lot of thoughts which seem important and write down notes like 'piscivorous Jesus' to remind me later on. The notes no longer remind me; I don’t know what they mean. I don't know how long it will be before my brain's working again. I get a taxi and go back to the London hotel. It is white. It is comfortable. I have to get up early. Everything seemed so easy until it didn't.
Now it’s Sunday evening. Took me all day, somehow, to write this. Yesterday I just watched TV in my hotel room. Tomorrow I have to get the report in and then Tuesday I have to go to the field.
Hanoi. A meeting
You know I love reading all this Nicholas but I also guiltily feel like a spectator, watching as you go through processing all these feels. I understand Mike’s comment above too, I just can’t cope being like that for very long. All this has made me analyze what I do in order to cope, what I do to carry on and I think it mostly boils down to trying my best not to think about it.
I watched the Qatsi trilogy when I was younger and that awareness of human progress and what it would eventually lead to plus all sorts of other late teen angst and too much thinking climaxed with getting put on meds. I managed to stop thinking and “get on with life” and be a good little capitalist productive worker until too much thinking again got me so worried that I quit everything and started “farming”.
Now I also do my best to not think about it too much but that has become incredibly hard since everyday I spend so much time in nature and I get to see the car crash happening in real time.
I don’t know what this comment was meant to lead to, just that I’ve gotten great comfort in some ways from reading your thoughts but that angsty teen in the background is starting to grumble about being heard again.
The weight of this way of working would be beyond my capacity. Enjoyed reading this, though.