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After the Tsunami, Childhood Dreams of the Sea Hold Wisdom
A Vietnamese-American writer used to think his recurring childhood
nightmare of giant waves was a metaphor for wartime Vietnam. Now he's
not so sure.
By Andrew Lam, Pacific News Service
Jan 4, 2005 - My sister Nancy was almost caught in it. She had been
diving near Phuket island two weeks before the tsunami hit the area and
wrote this e-mail from Laos: "I can't believe it. Remember our dream?
There are at least 70 divers who were swept away in the same area where
I was diving. I knew some of those people who worked there. It could
have been me."
Or me. As a journalist, I'm a well-traveled person by most people's
standards, spending easily two to three months a year abroad. Phuket and
Koh Phi Phi islands, each greatly affected by the tsunami, are familiar
Asian playgrounds for me and my sister.
Odd that we love the ocean so much as adults. When we were children
living in wartime Vietnam, my sister and I for some time shared a common
nightmare: That the sea would somehow rise and swallow everything we
knew and loved. The war raged on, but for a while we dreamt of tidal
waves.
Then the war ended and we became refugees. As adults we rationalized our
tidal wave nightmare as the war, and the war as the tidal wave. We
interpreted our childhood fear as metaphor for loss, a child's way of
thinking about the war.
Yet now, when I follow news of the tsunamis that hit South and Southeast
Asia, killing more than 150,000 people and leaving millions homeless, I
see that my childhood fear was not necessarily a metaphor at all. In the
aftermath of the tsunami, it has become prophetic.
I think that, deep down, children are naturally vulnerable and live
therefore closer to what Jung called the collective unconscious.
Children are closer to the pulses of nature than adults. Something in a
child's fear reflects the cold movements of the cosmos in the way that
the more rational adult mind cannot understand. Nature is not always
benevolent, and the adult sense of fairness and justice mean nothing in
the long, arduous stretch in the life of planet earth.
In a child's view, control of the universe is not within his power. The
world is a menace. Everything he loves and cherishes could be wiped away
by without warning by forces so overwhelming that nothing is safe in
their paths.
As adults my sister and I love the sea. We overcame our childhood fear
and looked at the white sandy beaches and turquoise seas of Southeast
Asia, especially, as the ideal vacation spots -- affordable and
beautiful and tourist friendly. In the global age, where borders are
porous and tourism reigns as the largest industry, we became part of the
privileged and growing traveling class. We assume the entire world is
reachable through our American passports and our credit cards. How
convenient, therefore, that Thailand's best weather is in December and
January -- it coincides with our vacation schedule.
But then the sea rose, and rose. And our sense of order, of how things
should be, and the sense that we are in control of our world was
rendered obsolete.
The tsunami literally turned things upside down, challenging one's sense
of symmetry: a wedding party in a resort turning into a mass funeral;
the rich and privileged begging for food and water; once-menacing
soldiers dropping their guns and digging for buried victims in Aceh,
Indonesia; cars floating in sea and boats riding on top of rooftops; and
luxury spas, the places of impeccable tranquility and elegance, turning
into muddy mass graves.
It is reported that one-third of the victims are children. How many
dreamt, I wonder, of the impending disaster? And how many adults now are
remembering their childhood fear of tidal waves?
In my childhood dreams I always survived large tidal waves. I learned to
fly or I grabbed onto a piece of wood. I rode the wave to safety. I even
rescued those who struggled in the waters. In reality, I watch the news
with a sense of helplessness and horror. In a world where nature is
unpredictable and often cruel, adults are rendered into helpless
children, too.
PNS editor Andrew Lam is a journalist and short
story writer.
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