How to Hemorrhage Friends
“[There is] something so obvious it hardly needs pointing out about the epic loneliness of a society in which people live across the country from their families, don’t know their neighbors, fuck strangers, and see their friends mostly online.” — Time Kreider, from I Wrote This Book Because I Love You
I had a falling out with a friend online recently, a friend who I should probably stop using the word “friend” to describe. I’ll use the word friend for the purpose of this reflection and will then stop, so if we ever meet in real life you may be assured Vu Nguyen is no longer my friend.
It was 2011 when I moved to Saigon. The original plan was to go there for an education training program that would put a gold star on my resume and then move on to Spain, either Valencia or Barcelona, as if either plan were just as plausible. I’d never been to Spain, or Europe. My last Spanish class was in 2002 (although I did get a B). If I’d followed that plan I would definitely still be as broke as I was back in 2011, likely living in a spare room at my mom’s house many miles away from Spain on the other side of the Atlantic.
Saigon, at first, terrified me. Motorbikes flow through the streets like salmon and there are as many posts online about “How” to cross the street as there are videos of the traffic itself. After joining the circus on a bike of my own I saw being in the midst of the traffic was more like being an organelle in a seething animal. In the summer it rains every day at noon and then again at 5, or, as I liked to think, on my lunch break and on my ride home. The gutters are stuffed with trash and the spice and the juices of the city flood up from them and out into the streets. I’ll most likely die of a liver fluke or some other monster that swam into me through an open wound on one of those rides.
I hated Saigon. It’s through the irony of this and the Stockholm syndrome of living there that you start to love it. It’s a love that has to be earned — no darling Barcelona that wows you from the start — and it’s in the effort of learning to love a place that the place becomes your own. Wash a hot bowl of soup down with a cold beer and watch the rain come down in hot, fat splats outside and you wonder how anyone can stand to live anywhere else.
Of course, the city can be a bitch. God forbid you ever find yourself in jail, although public hospitals can be just as demoralizing. When my friend Gareth, while running a stoplight, was hit by a taxi and his toe was ripped off in the rear wheel of his bike, the cops dug the toe out and sent it home with him so he could keep it to use as evidence for his impending legal battle. The battle ended anticlimactically, with all parties promising to be more careful in the future, but his ongoing trips to the hospital and the debate with insurance over what was covered and what was not left him looking more defeated than I’d ever seen him. One weekend, a doctor inexplicably assigned him to a bed in a room with three old women, one of whom screamed for hours on end. He stayed that night and booked it out of there in the morning, later getting a bill in the mail. Hospital clerks called him at a rate bordering on harassment, their tone increasingly threatening.
Likewise, I had a coworker — a beautiful South African woman with that soft Afrikaans lilt in her voice — report a stolen bike only to receive sexts from the police, bad English like I wan fuck u sent at odd hours of the night. They had her address, and once knocked on her door asking for more money so they could “Continue the investigation” into her stolen bike.
Where do you go when institutions designed to help you are broken? We looked out for each other. Beautiful coworker stayed with friends or had friends around her until the cops found someone new to go after.
Gareth didn’t want to throw his toe away, squeamish at the idea of it being eaten by a dog. He also didn’t want to go back to the hospital. The toe had come home in a glass jar, peeking out of the paper towel it was wrapped in with what I thought to be a healthy, ghoulish glow. It lived in our freezer for a few months like that. After thawing and re-freezing at some point, however, it looked more like a banana that’d been left too long in the sun, like something that would either melt or explode if the jar were opened. We had a small funeral and put it to rest.
Gareth talked about getting a commemorative This little piggy went to market tattoo, but I’m not sure he ever did. He married a Danish friend and they moved to Denmark. We all moved on eventually.
Vu is Vietnamese and grew up in Saigon, but studied in the US for awhile. He later went to a university in Europe. He’s a smart guy. I won’t deny that. I hadn’t talked to him since I moved away from Saigon in 2015, but noticed his posts on social media grew increasingly conspiratorial after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. Often, he would just post a picture of Bill Gates and Epstein standing next to each other and smiling, Epstein and Obama shaking hands at a party (I never saw him post a photo of Trump and Epstein, of which there are many). He’d also post cryptic shit, like, If you knew a fraction of what I know your head would explode. I know this makes him sound like an asshole, and he is, but he wasn’t always this way.
Part of Vu’s family owns a government publishing house in southern Vietnam, a state-run arm of the Communist party that decides what gets published and what does not. Books that are deemed readable may have entire chapters removed by the censors if they suggest anything that might be considered a threat to the state. While this sounds totalitarian and horrible, remember: Vietnam is more of a grift economy than anything like true Communism. I could wipe my ass with the flag and wear it like a cape while drunk and speeding the wrong way down a one-way street and then bribe my way out of going to jail for less than 20 dollars.
Vu — in an awesome moment when he was a much younger man, working a low-level position at the publishing house — made it his goal to get George Orwell’s 1984 into the bookshops of Saigon. What I love about this ambition is its ballsiness: A twenty-something kid who just started working at a company owned by his family punching up and trying to push a favorite book through the censors. In doing so, he was going against much more than his bosses. He was going against the censorship put in place by the pricks and war criminals who took charge after the death of Ho Chi Minh (Ho Chi Minh himself would be shocked at the inequality that exists, as well as the government’s use of him as a cartoonish dictator from beyond the grave). In retrospect, this could’ve been an early warning sign about Vu, about his arrogance.
In the end, after years of back and forth, he pushed hard enough, and it was published. The head censor or whoever’s final word on the decision was Nobody is going to read it anyway. He told me this story over drinks at one of the bars on Bui Vien street, just the two of us in one of those five-minute windows of conversation you get at gatherings when a larger social event is going on all around you. I love these moments. But if friendship is a mountain that takes years to build, you can also drop off the side of a cliff with it after one bad exchange.
Our bad exchange happened on Facebook in 2021, maybe eight years after him telling me the story about his push to publish 1984. Vu’s posts moved on to — or branched out from? — the Epstein stuff to comments about “elites” who work at “central banks,” cannibals who eat babies and baby adrenochrome glands. Social media is a haven for this kind of stuff, I know. I’d just never seen it up close before. Nobody was commenting on any of his posts so one night, after a few drinks, home alone, I did. Vu’s response was to call me a limp-wristed liberal who doesn’t really know anything that’s really going on, that I was yucking it up in China (China!) while he was doing “real” research. He ended by telling me to “Go back to watching Netflix,” adding a jab that Obama gave Netflix preferential tax treatment, which may or may not be true (and if it is, why so nefarious?).
He then wrote a post using the terms Plandemic and Kung Flu in the same sentence. I called him out on it again. To an outsider, Vu’s Facebook thread for about a month or so would’ve looked like Vu’s Post + My Comment + His Angry Response on repeat. It was like poking a bruise and kind of fun in the same way poking a bruise is. I’d comment, go to sleep, and wake up to a slew of vitriol that was hard to believe was coming from a guy who once drank beer with me and told me about his years-long mission to publish an uncensored version of 1984.
I work in the international school system and, while teachers should normally avoid online conflicts, my students this year are all bright, young, wonderful Chinese kids who want to study abroad. The formative years leading up to them sitting in my AP Literature and Composition class are insanely hard for them. Their scores on standardized tests must be higher. The price of tuition for international students can be 10X more than it is for citizens. They start all manner of clubs and charities to round out their applications while enduring social hardships at home, labeled “Traitors” on Chinese social media and nagged by warnings of mass-shootings and American gang violence by their families. And yet they still do it and 99% end up graduating from a western university. They’re kind of my heroes. The idea that someone in my social media sphere was promoting the same sort of speech that some asshole might yell at one of them from a car window in America enraged me.
Vu’s response: “Tough shit.” It’s not my right to police his speech. I told him to “Go jack off with his friends on 4Chan” which, admittedly, are fightin’ words. He then posted the following. For those of you unfamiliar with video game language an NPC is a “non-player character,” brainless 2D characters whose only role is to interact with and help out the hero.
This is his response to my request telling him to stop spreading hate…
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- NPC can’t think for himself.
- Because NPC has no independent thought, NPC feels personally threatened whenever someone presents evidence contrary to his programming. If you cause a glitch in NPC’s programming, he will be hostile to you.
- NPC is programmed to think he knows it all, and everybody he disagrees with and doesn’t like reads 4chan (he got it from CNN but he himself doesn’t even know it. That’s how pathetic the NPC is.)
- NPC doesn’t know that there are bitchute, brighteon, odysee, lbry, dlive, twitch, vimeo, minds, gab, pocketnet, pixelplanet, and a hundred other alternative platforms to get news from. NPC doesn’t know nobody uses 4chan anymore.
- NPC spends all his free time on Instagram, Facebook, Google, Youtube, Netflix and only get news from most trusted sources such Yahoo, Guardian, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, New York Times, Fox News, WashingtonPost, NPR, The Atlantic Post, The Economist, Huffpost, USA news Today, Politico, Salon, Vice News, The Young Turks, and Snopes.
- NPC is a loser and an evolutionary dead-end.
- Don’t be like NPC.
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I still follow Vu.
He recently posted a video about the Lab Leak theory for Covid-19, a theory that was never out of the realm of possibility but is gaining more traction now that we’re not all busy hooking each other up to respirators and developing vaccines. The one line from the video that struck me as speaking to the Vu’s of the world, however, was the anchorman saying, “You know that feeling you get when everyone’s been telling you you’re wrong and you turn out to be right?”
I imagine them glomming onto that, fantasizing about that I told you so! moment. Vu may be a Cassandra, a speaker of truth who is disbelieved. The spiderweb of theories he’s strung together to explain the world may be accurate in some areas, but what’s become most apparent is that it must be lonely at the top. He posts almost every day and nobody comments.
I imagine him living alone in an underground bunker and yelling at stuff.
I wonder if he misses me.
