Inspired by the R. Crumb comic in which we watch a beautiful countryside deteriorate into a teeming, polluted city, I’ve always answered the age-old question, “To what period of time would you travel, if you could?” with “the pre-Industrial Revolution countryside, right before the first steam engine tore through it.” Maybe I have Thomas Hardy Wessex fantasies on the verge of paradigm shift, but wouldn’t I love to stand in that field for a moment.  It would be so quiet.

We can experience most things as (we imagine) they were once experienced or will be experienced in historically recreated spaces like Fort Snelling in Minnesota, the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin or the numerous ramen museums in Japan to conceptualizations such as Future World at Epcot Center.

But the one thing we cannot experience is dead silence without even the slightest buzz from power supplies, whether afar in a field or blocks away or in the adjacent room. It is too late for us to have this kind of silence and even if we can experience in our minds this kind of silence as it populates 19th century British novels or certain cartoon panels, our imagining is tainted by the reality of the white noise we’ve grown accustomed to accept as silence. Even that Internet hoax (or was it not?) of undiscovered Amazon tribes at the Brazil-Peru border shocked (no pun intended) the world with its sheer absurdity. How is this possible when even the crudest industrialism has infiltrated nearly every far reach of this planet?

In the summer of 2010, I was in the mountains of Lao Cai, near China’s border, for an overnight trip.  My 79-year-old aunt lives there with my cousin and her husband and  their three kids, where they share a one-room house with no indoor plumbing.  The kitchen is a separate building in which food is cooked over hot coals resting in strategically placed holes in the ground.  The toilet is a hole in the ground with a flimsy sheet of tarp tied to sticks to shield the excreter from the elements.  My cousin showed me the road up to their home that the government had paved over at their request: the Department of Transportation spread out a pile of rocks on a dirt road so as to create some friction for tires in the rainy season.  And yet, my cousin’s 16-year-old daughter Van did not make eye contact with anyone or anything but the text messages on her phone.  And even more, when we all sat down to drink the potent home-brewed rice wine and to eat the multi-course dinner which was seriously local food (rice fresh from their patties, pork from the pig I’d earlier photographed in the pen, fish my cousin’s husband caught in their pond that morning), we couldn’t help but glance every now and then at the Netherlands-Slovakia score on their flat-screen satellite TV.

I went in with silly Western ideas of purity and serious country living and I came out realizing that a teenage girl living at the foot of Fa Si Pan is no different than a teenage girl living at the foot of the Rockies. And even more, silence exists nowhere.  After dinner was karaoke and more drinks.  I fell asleep on the wood-mat bed to dubbed World Cup coverage and Van punching the buttons on her mobile.

After some consideration, I came to the conclusion that the only solution to experiencing pure silence is time travel, to return to a space in time that such silence is possible.

I began to realize that it will be difficult to accomplish as a 27-year-old, Vietnamese-American woman.  Through the spectrum of recorded time, only a small chunk of it boasts periods in which women and people of color and women of color have rights and assorted freedoms.  This means no matter the locale in which I would land, I would be greeted not with silence but outcry and panic.  And, even if I were to time travel to some point in Vietnam’s tumultuous past, it’d still be problematic.  There’s no way I could land anywhere and go unnoticed for one reason or another or all of the above.  For example, in a taxi in Hanoi on the way to Van Mui, the cabbie noted my “interesting” accent and asked which part of Vietnam I called home. “Chicago,” I said.  ”Illinois. The US.”  ”Oh – why do you live there – did you marry an American?” the cabbie asked.

To be honest, there are times when being a Vietnamese-American woman can really be quite difficult, in “my culture” and out of it too.  Blah x3.   The point is this: no matter what, all time travelers, regardless of race, sex, class, weight, etc. will experience serious problems and obstacles. Attempts of assimilation — that is, falling in love with a person in a different time zone, so to speak (like that movie Kate & Leopold) — will not help us fit in or belong. If nothing else can draw us together in this divisive world of union-busting and tea-partying and whatnot, we have one commonality: none of us, with all of our countless identifiers, can land anywhere in the past and actually fit in.  The problems of time travel do not belong only to Asian American women, women of color, people of color.  These problems cross boundaries they belong to every adult and child living in the past, present or future.  We belong here now!

And besides, if you believe everything’s relative and/or a Form is just a Form and/or time is just a construction, then true silence exists here and now and we can and are simultaneously experiencing it.

old meigs field, chicago.

saigon, rainy season.

organ grinder, prague.

wolf, woods.

bathouse

antarctica

blobfish, australia

bus, taipei

hao, nha trang

hac, hanoi

forest park, city of cemeteries, & the final resting place of 4 Haymarket rioters