The strangest part about doing very new things, I think, is that, at a certain point, they become very normal. In other words, this is a note about trying to describe the short story ‘The Year of Spaghetti’ in Vietnamese.
If you haven’t read Murakami’s ‘The Year of Spaghetti,’ you don’t need to do so right now, because you can pretty much get the gist of things by its Google archive description: short story about a man who fixes himself spaghetti every day for a year and refuses to help out the ex-girlfriend of a friend when she calls. It’s true, that’s about all that happens, but it’s a trip, nonetheless. Anyway, this isn’t about the story per se.
For some 6 months now, I’ve been going to Vietnamese class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in a small, quaint alley about halfway between my apartment and office. Every other week day, I nod at the stoic parking attendant and neither of us asks any questions, then I walk up the stairs with some combination of beverages in my hands. My teacher asks me a similar set of rudimentary questions to warm up (what have I eaten? How many cups of coffee did I have today?) then we get into the lesson.
It’s going pretty well, but some days can be, admittedly, a somewhat painful process of ultra-limited communication. A lot of times I simply can’t say what I want to say and realize the futility of the words ‘because',’ ‘can,’ and ‘so’ when the nouns you’re searching for won’t appear. It is what it is, though, and I haven’t given up just yet. Of course, if you had told me a few years ago that I’d be spending my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in a small alley studying Vietnamese, I would’ve asked, “why?”. The answer is still not crystal clear, but at worst it keeps me busy and at best I’ll make enough progress to put it to real use someday, whatever that means.
Going ahead with it, though, has instilled in me a renewed belief in the power of routine, regardless of the discipline. Put your head down, don’t ask so many questions and you might end up with something useful before you can back out. (I should’ve applied this principle to many facets of life beforehand, but better late than never.) Still, I’ve got this bad habit of doing my homework right before class, which usually leaves me sweaty and frantic, my 1.5 paragraph assignment missing far too many tones.
Taking a step back, I couldn’t help but laugh at one October afternoon’s struggle. I was trying to convey, in the simplest terms, what happens in this story about a man who makes spaghetti every day for the entirety of the year 1971. It sounds kind of absurd—first, because its surface-level plot is incredibly easy to describe and, secondly, because I couldn’t do it. Every time I think about this story now, I have a vision of being hunched over a desk with 4 tabs of Google translate open, fending off approaching lines of questioning that ask, “Hey, why are you doing this, again?”. It goes without saying that I hope learning a new language in adulthood brings me more than a memory of a year of routine, but even if that’s all it is, it’s probably still worth it. 2020 A.D.