Kiss of the Death Devil

You're drifting down a lazy river, trailing one hand in the smooth, glassy water, vaguely aware of a roaring sound off in the distance somewhere. You round a bend and suddenly you're crashing through a maelstrom of rocks, standing waves higher than your head, and rushing, gushing, foaming white water. No, I haven't been rafting this month in the hinterlands of Vietnam. I'm describing how my life has changed since I returned from Dau Vien village at the beginning of February.

My evening classes at Language Link have resumed, of course. And I now have two private students, Toni and Duong, who come to my apartment three times a week in the afternoon. Of course, afternoon is when I edit the news at VOV radio, so there's been some shuffling and scrambling to accommodate everybody.

The editing at VOV has spun off another job for me at a place called Thang Long Audio and Video. One of the translators at VOV creates Manglish subtitles for Vietnamese feature films and documentaries being readied at Thang Long for international distribution. My job is to edit the Manglish subtitles into something approaching English and then—get this—record the subtitles as English 'voiceovers'. I started by doing a documentary on the annual buffalo-stabbing festival of ethnic minority people in the central highlands and followed that with a short documentary about a sacred mountain near Ha Long Bay called Yen Tu, where an ancient Vietnamese king gave up his throne to become a Buddhist monk. 'Narrator voiceovers' sound fairly normal since the documentaries have no dialogue. Last week, though, I did a feature film called 'Kiss of the Death Devil' where my voiceovers were of the more annoying kind—the kind where, instead of actors' voices actually being 'dubbed' by other actors, one person reads the translation of every bit of dialogue in more or less a monotone over each actor's voice. So, for example, you hear yours truly say 'Please, dear husband, save our child' over the voice of a woman crying desperately in Vietnamese, and then, in more or less the same tone of voice you hear me say 'You fool…Why should a Death Devil sacrifice himself for the life of a human?'

This week I edited subtitles and did voiceovers for 'The Punch', a serious drama about a Vietnamese boxer whose life is disrupted by political strife and war. It might sound like fun work, but every profession has its downside. First, there's the serious labor involved in racking your brain to find a more natural way to say 'No one loves cange and stocks but also can't let him influence into the general uprising' or 'Why was it fired branchy?' And then, synching your reading with the on-screen action can be difficult for a number of very good reasons. For one thing, you have to watch the film on a monitor while reading the subtitles from a printed script on the table in front of you, because the subtitles haven't been mixed with the video yet. When one actor speaks off-screen, or speaks with his back to the camera, or when several actors speak at the same time, or when an actor inserts several long pauses into his speech, synching can go awry. A few times I finished reading a subtitle about 20 seconds before the guy on the screen finished talking. The guys at Thang Long don't seem to care much. Almost never were they willing to do a second take. And although they chided me once for rustling my pages, they seemed oblivious to workmen downstairs knocking down a brick wall with sledge hammers and making so much noise I could barely hear the sound track in my head phones.

I'm still studying Vietnamese 2 nights a week with Thu, meeting my CELTA colleagues once a week for lunch, chatting with some combination of Miss Nga, Thai Thu, Hong Ha, or Bich Van every day, corresponding by email with (and correcting the emails of) a growing number of students, taking lots of photographs, editing some articles for Mr. Dai's promotional magazine, trying to keep up with world news on CNN, and reading Don Quixote. It's surprising how much you can accomplish when you have no significant other to erode your productivity with things like nagging you to repair that leaky faucet, arguing about where wet towels should be hung, discussing which restaurant you should go to for dinner, or hugging and kissing you.

By the way, I found out why there are no geckos on the wall of my apartment. There are no geckos because my spider ate them. From time to time, I've caught a movement out of the corner of my eye which I thought might be a shy gecko darting behind the sofa. There is certainly plenty of opportunity for geckos to come and go when my terrace doors are standing open. But to date there have been no confirmed gecko sightings. Then, a few nights ago, I saw crawling up the wall in the sitting room a form too large to be a cockroach (they seldom exceed three inches in length here) and too small to be a rat (they're seldom smaller than a shoe). It turned out to be a spider reminiscent of a tarantula without his fur. It was about the size of my hand. If your hand is bigger than mine, the spider might have been the size of your hand. I thought right away about killing it so I might sleep better at night, but I had no shotgun or flame-thrower and I didn't want to take a chance on simply wounding it, so I called for backup and for the next hour stayed well clear of it (I remembered the jumping spiders at the World Hotel). They say you should never turn your back on a dangerous predator, but I did at one point, and when I turned back it had disappeared. Now I sleep with a heavy book on my night stand (Don Quixote).