One day, an elderly Vietnamese man walked into the office of Người Việt Tây Bắc. He wanted to place a classified ad in the largest and oldest newspaper for Vietnamese immigrants in Washington.

Julie Pham, 33, remembers that day. She is the managing editor of Người Việt Tây Bắc, which literally translates to “Vietnamese People of the Northwest,” a Seattle-based biweekly that’s been in business for 25 years.

The man ran the ad only once. Pham remembers what it said: “Dear Mr. So-and-so, you left your luggage in my house for months now and I need you to remove it.”

Once the paper got into the hands of the Vietnamese community in Seattle, those who knew Mr. So-and-so kindly reminded him of his luggage.

“People are really hungry to feel connected,” Pham said. “I look around and I see that the need for news is growing. There are constant streams of immigration. And they turn to the newspaper to help them understand and acclimate to the world here.”

For Pham, her family’s newspaper stokes a sense of community for the third largest Asian population in the state. It also supported her and her brothers through college. Since Pham was 8 years old, her father, Kim, has been running Người Việt Tây Bắc, an offshoot of the national Người Việt newspaper headquartered in Orange County, Calif.

Pham is charming woman with a ready smile and a well-placed beauty mark. Her speech is thoughtful and her tone business-like. By her own description, she is a businesswoman first, a reporter second. Sitting down with her, it’s evident that economics are on her mind. She is conscious of the economy and the forcefulness of her words, as well as the profit margins of the newspaper. She says things like “capacity building,” “fruitful partnership” and “shoe-string budget.” Content must be “scalable,” business can be “slippery.”

Before all of this, when she was just two months old in 1979, her family decided to flee Vietnam. Pham’s parents tell her that she cried a lot during the escape, but other than the fact that they were hungry, thirsty and unsure of what was going to happen next, her parents never talked much about their experiences as boat people.

Her father delivered pizzas and her mother worked as a dental assistant for their first few years in Seattle. Her father eventually realized that he didn’t like working for other people and that he wanted to have his own business. With the influx of Vietnamese boat people in the Pacific Northwest, he had an idea.

“The Vietnamese community is the most linguistically isolated,” Pham said, “with the highest percentage of limited English proficiency. The newspaper links people with news of their homeland, of Vietnam, and also with local news, so they can understand their new homeland as well.”

Since 1986, Người Việt Tây Bắc has been serving that function, plying the community with everything from news of business openings to dentist recommendations to classified ads subtly asking for the removal of luggage.

The paper also helped shape Pham’s business acumen.

“I always say I got my real-life MBA by working at the newspaper,” Pham said.

Her educational pedigree doesn’t end there. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2001, Pham received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge in 2008, as a Gates scholar.

“I learned how American I was by being abroad,” Pham said. After moving to the UK for her doctorate degree, Pham spent time living in France, Germany and the country she left as an infant.

“When I lived in Vietnam, I was constantly getting stood up,” Pham said. “People would cancel last minute all the time and it was driving me crazy. I felt disrespected.”

Later Pham learned from a Vietnamese friend that they weren’t being rude, but that they just wanted her to think something came up at the last minute and they had no choice but to forgo meeting her.

In the UK, she noticed that Americans perceive distance differently than the British do. “When Americans ask how far it is from Seattle to Portland, I could say, ‘It’s a three-hour drive. It’s an hour flight.’ But in the rest of the world, they’ll actually tell you by distance. How many kilometers it is. And that means nothing to me.”

“It’s just different ideas of respect and time,” Pham said.

Pham is sympathetic to second-generation Vietnamese-Americans. In her own experience, she did not really start engaging with Vietnamese culture and understanding her parents on a deeper level until she learned Vietnamese after college. Hers is an American experience, more than it is an immigrant one. By anyone’s measure, Dr. Julie Pham has achieved something that is singly Western, though she acknowledges that it stems from her parents’ hard work and willingness to take risks.

“At the end of the day, ethnic media, they’re all businesspeople,” Pham said. “They’re all immigrant, refugee, minority entrepreneurs.”

Dan Q. Tham

Here is a look at our day in Seattle’s most famous market.

Video by Dan Q. Tham

Giuseppe Tony Tran in New Orleans, Lousiana

On the fortieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, Vietnamese immigrants and their children gathered alongside Vietnam War veterans to reflect on the dramatic events that forever changed both of their destinies—the siege of South Vietnam’s capital, the evacuation of American soldiers returning home from intractable defeat, the Southeast Asian boat people fleeing communist takeover. In the Vietnamese diaspora, it’s referred to as Ngày Mất Nước, the day we lost our country.

But in New Orleans, the Vietnamese community commemorated forty years since April 30, 1975 a little differently.

“Everywhere else, they were mourning,” said Giuseppe Anthony Tran. “Here, we celebrated forty years of success.”

To hear Tran describe his experiences during those forty years is to witness breathtaking resilience, moxie, and a shining humor wholly unexpected given the circumstances. The combination has worked out quite nicely for the Vietnamese man with an Italian name. It’s kept him alive. It’s taken him from one delta to another, from fields of jasmine rice to fields of Jazzmen rice, a local variety of the aromatic grain that’s advertised as music for your mouth. “It tastes better than jasmine,” Tran said with a laugh.

He was born in the Year of the Dragon, 1964, to a family of rice farmers in Hà Tiên, a beach town at the southernmost tip of Vietnam.

During his childhood, an unexploded shell jutted out from the ground right in front of his house. Every day, the little boy, then known as Toan (Vietnamese for “safe, secure”), would touch the shell with wonder.

Tran didn’t know it would explode one day. “The war became something that was familiar to the people. To the point that we weren’t scared as much.” The soundtrack of “the bombing and the guns and everything” accompanied Tran’s entire childhood spent in wartime, until April 30, 1975, when a tenuous peace was reached.

At the age of 16, like a Vietnamese Huckleberry Finn, Tran decided to flee the country on a raft with eleven other young Vietnamese—total strangers, most of them teenagers. “My mom saved a lot to put me on board,” Tran said, “I would say equivalent to 400 dollars. That’s a lot in Vietnam in the 80s! We were poor as any other citizen.”

He was the youngest of seven siblings, just two years shy of military age. He would either leave the country now, or never have the chance again. “Living under the communists, you get the feeling that you don’t have another day to live,” he said. “Everything is controlled. That’s why I told my parents, I don’t see any future here.”

He left on the night of April 30, 1981, while the communists were celebrating six years since the end of the war.

“Officials and police and everyone in office were getting drunk and having a party. I used that moment to escape on a raft,” Tran said. He didn’t know whether he would ever see his mother again.

The plan was for the tiny, 25-foot raft to transport more than a hundred people to a bigger boat. Docking at the mouth of the Mekong River, a vital channel the color of caramel, they waited for the bigger boat to come and take the passengers away from Vietnam. But no boat ever showed up. As night gathered, so did a crowd of eager escapees. Finally, the twelve pulled anchor and left on the raft.

Tran saw many people pull up in smaller vessels to get onto theirs. “If we waited another second, we would have been overloaded with people,” Tran said. “The minute we started the engine, it made so much damn noise. Like a lawn mower. Officials heard it and started firing at us. On that night, the 30th, we left with eight big holes in the raft. We had to plug the holes with our shirts.”

Tran prayed that the raft would float in one direction: away.

It was everyone’s first time at sea. No one knew how to properly maneuver the raft. There was no compass, no map.

By night, they faced heavy storms. By day, the sun fried their skin into “rice paper,” Tran recalled.

Once in a while, they would see a boat in the distance, but the engine wasn’t strong enough to take them there in time.

Four times, Tran said, Thai pirates came, seeking women and valuables. A little girl, eleven or twelve years old as Tran remembers, was on board the raft. When the pirates first came, Tran knew they would be after her.

“To protect her, I took a big can of engine oil and dumped it on her,” Tran said. “She looked really filthy and so when the pirates looked at her, they said, ‘Just forget it.’”

He started fantasizing about land. “After a day or two on the vast ocean, you don’t see anything but the blue sky and the water. And the waves were so huge, you didn’t think you were going to survive,” he said. A devout Roman Catholic, Tran began reciting the last rites each night before sleeping.

Finally, early on the morning of May 5, 1981, their fifth day at sea, Tran saw a seagull in the open sky. He knew from his childhood spent by the sea that when you see birds, land is near. “I have never experienced that happiness when you see birds on the ocean. It was so wonderful.”

Eventually, they landed at the border between Malaysia and Thailand. Although it was a poor village in the province of Narathiwat, it was not Vietnam.

For a month and a half, the twelve combed the beaches, caught any game they could find, begged villagers for food, and climbed fruit trees that Tran said were “high as hell, man! They took hours to climb.”

Once word spread that a group of Vietnamese refugees had arrived in the village, the government of Thailand took them in, placing the group in the Songkhla Refugee Camp. At this point, Tran had no shirt, no shoes, and no money.

UNICEF sheltered the tens of thousands of refugees at Songhkla and supplied them with barely enough food and water. Tran started craving meat and certain comfort foods.

“When you’re hungry, you come up with all sorts of crazy ideas. I dreamed that one day I would fry an egg as big as a blanket,” Tran said. “I would cover myself up and eat at the same time.”

Tran volunteered to work for the UNICEF office. One day when he was cleaning up, he found a magazine.

“I was so happy,” Tran said. “So I grabbed it. Actually I stole it.” In his hands, Tran held an older edition of a Vietnamese magazine from New Orleans.

Tran took the magazine back to his tent to show his friends. As he flipped through the pages, he happened upon the name of his older brother, Tuong, an ordained priest, who had fled Vietnam for the U.S. in 1975. Tran hadn’t heard from him in more than six years. As he held the magazine in his hands, Tran learned that his brother, Tuong Cao Tran, was the editor of Dân Chúa, which he had started in the late ‘70s to connect Vietnamese Catholics living in the U.S.

Not believing his luck (“Recognizing my own brother’s name in the magazine was like hitting a jackpot,” Tran said), he wanted to send his brother a letter, but he had no money for paper, stamps, or a telegram. “So I asked a priest for a small sheet of paper. I wrote, ‘Please help me’ and an address and that’s it.” The priest mailed the letter for him.

Within two months, Tran received a letter from his brother with a $20 bill enclosed. He learned that Tuong had served and helped settle the very first Vietnamese refugees to arrive in Louisiana. Tuong also assured Tran that he would contact their mother to let her know that her youngest son made it to safety.

“It was so huge,” Tran said. “My life started from there.” Wielding the American money with pride, Tran bought “a whole lot” of eggs. That night, for dinner, Tran fried all of the eggs but could eat only a quarter of them. “I couldn’t take it anymore, you know?” Tran laughed. “I choked on the eggs.”

After two years of statelessness, Tran immediately started making plans with his older brother to come to the United States. Tuong, however, was a priest, and wasn’t allowed to take in another person. He asked an Italian-American couple he knew through Catholic Charities to co-sponsor Tran.

Francisco Giovanni and his wife, Evelyn, who resided in Chicago, took Tran in, named him Giuseppe Anthony and put him through high school and college. “That’s why I’m in love with Italy,” Tran said. “I’m an Italian-Vietnamese living in America!”

“Coming to America was like a leap into heaven,” Tran said. Every day, in his new country, Tran took the bus to the library and borrowed an armload of books to read, even though he understood little at first. “Education is something that my parents and godparents wanted for me,” Tran said.

At first, learning English for Tran was the “most troublesome.” One day during his first winter, Tran took a walk around downtown Chicago. As he approached a pedestrian crossing, he couldn’t understand the “DON’T WALK” sign on the crosswalk signal. So he hopped on a bus and immediately asked to be dropped off as soon as the bus crossed the road. Looking back on that episode, Tran guessed that the bus driver probably “cursed me for such a stupid action.”

But he was determined. After Tran graduated from Brother Martin High School in 1984, he joined St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana, and earned degrees in philosophy and psychology. He moved on to Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and trained for the priesthood, which he would leave in order to focus on bringing his family over to the U.S. from Vietnam.

Tran eventually settled in Village de l’Est in New Orleans, a neighborhood known for its Vietnamese community. The river in the “Village of the East” is crowded with lily pads. The soupy air circulates languidly around the signs in Vietnamese for restaurants and grocery stores, attorneys and dentists, Catholic churches and Buddhist temples. Many of the men living there are fishermen or shrimpers by trade. In Village de l’Est, there’s the distinct feeling of quê hương. Homeland.

The immigrant population liked the area, because it so resembled the country they had left: the tight-knit community and the sub-tropical climate, the landforms and the faces, the familiar food and the language spoken.

“The unity is there,” Tran said. “It’s lovely.” He’s been to other Vietnamese communities in Texas and California, but nothing compared to Village de l’Est.

In 2000, Tony Tran went back to Vietnam for the first time in almost twenty years. His mission was to bring his mother back to Louisiana.

On the flight into Tan Son Nhat Airport, Tran noticed the yellow rooftops of Saigon. They looked rusty. The airport’s runway was overgrown with weeds. He found no attachment to the country of his birth.

“When the plane landed, my heart was pounding,” Tran said. “I didn’t know what was gonna happen next.”

He found out that every step to get to his mother was a paying process—bribe an official here, placate an officer there with cold, hard cash. Tran paid a couple authorities $200 each to accompany him on his mission. “They followed me like the FBI,” he said.

He had learned that his family now lived in Biên Hòa, just outside of Saigon. He walked into his mother’s house and surprised her. “It was quite an experience,” Tran recalled. “I’m glad that she didn’t faint!”

At the end of his one-week visit, Tran told his mother that he would do everything in his power to bring her over to the United States. And he did. In 2007, Tran went back to Vietnam again to bring back his father’s remains in a tiny basket that fit into his carry-on luggage.

At the time of the interview, his mother was 94 years old and lived in New Orleans’ West Bank and his father was buried there as well.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.

For the Vietnamese community that had gone through so many experiences of exodus and relocation—from north to south Vietnam, from Vietnam to refugee camps, from those camps to America—Katrina was yet another experience of moving from one place to another.

“The city was shut down,” Tran recalled. “This was not something that happened in Vietnam or in the refugee camps. It happened in New Orleans, in the United States of America.”

It took Tran 28 hours to reach Dallas, Texas from New Orleans. It’s a trip that normally takes eight hours.

As Tran told it, two weeks after the storm, the displaced Vietnamese “came right back and fixed their homes. We shoveled out the mud and picked up. Cleaned up. Came back strong.”

Tran served as the parish coordinator of the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. He was a community leader and the assistant to Rev. Dominic Nghiem. His wife, whom he met in 1994 at the library, was a nurse. Together, they had two boys—Mark, a student at Loyola University, and Tri On (Vietnamese for “grateful”), a sophomore in high school.

As for his companions who fled Vietnam with him in 1981, Tran told me one lives in Norway, another in the Netherlands, and the rest live in the United States. The little girl is now a married woman living in California. She called Tran in 1992 and asked him if he remembered her.

There’s a plot of vacant land across the street from the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church in Village de l’Est. Tran said the church has just broken ground there to build a cultural center and recreational park on the 28 acres. If all goes according to plan, it will be completed by 2017 and serve as a gathering place for the more than 10,000 Vietnamese living in New Orleans.

Over a meal of Vietnamese food at Ba Mien Restaurant, Tran said, “With my life, I feel I had more than I wished for. Looking back on the journey, everything was a blessing all along.”

On Thanksgiving Day in 2011, Tran found out he had spleen cancer.

“Kind of ridiculous, huh?” he said.

For the first eight months, he underwent “all sorts of treatment, testing, radiation, chemo, medical examinations,” he said, “now I’m on pills.”

Tran said the cancer caused a terrible growth on his skin. “It felt like leprosy. I was so worried,” he said. His doctor told him she had never seen anything like it.

Despite, or maybe because of, his experiences, from war to escape, cancer to Katrina, Tran insisted to me that there is nothing to be afraid of, that there are all sorts of reasons to be happy.

“I try not to take everything seriously,” he said. “It’s a life-changing experience. I’m taking it easy with everything, while I still have another day to live. So what the heck, this is just a little cancer, huh?”

Video and text by Dan Q. Tham

When the doctors couldn’t completely remove the large and painful cyst on her son Kent’s lower back, Chung Kim Do, who insists that we call her Miss Kim, took matters into her own hands.

Miss Kim, 58, is a single immigrant mother from Vietnam who raised six children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is skeptical of Western medicine and, despite all the love that she has for her new homeland, Miss Kim refuses to administer Tylenol when she can call upon the healing properties of ginger and other herbs.

Every night, for five nights, Miss Kim snuck into her son Kent’s room, rolled him over and lifted up his shirt. She spat on the cyst and gently rubbed her saliva into the lesion as her son slept. A business week later, the cyst was gone.

Kent looks a little embarrassed when his mother tells us the tale. Her hair is neatly pressed up in a mini-bouffant and her girlish bangs are swept to one side. Dressed in a pinstriped business suit and adorned with jeweled earrings, Miss Kim clearly took the lessons she learned at beauty school to heart. Her laugh is an inaudible, joyous eruption and her kind eyes moisten with sadness or pride, depending on the story she’s telling.

A particularly wet-eyed story was the one about how she got here.

“I don’t understand,” Miss Kim said, looking upward. “God blessed me.”

She was born in 1953 in a small hamlet called Pleiku, where my mother was also raised. I visited Pleiku once. As I sputtered along on a motorcycle with my father, I remember seeing a severed dog head for sale in the market. When we drove back through the main drag, the dog head was gone.

My mother has fonder memories of the place.

She was Miss Kim’s best friend in grade school. My mother remembers walking home from school with Chung every day. The road was lined with shady trees and vendors selling frozen yogurt. Miss Kim’s family was poor and only got poorer with the end of Vietnam War because of their affiliation with the losing South Vietnamese government. In their schoolgirl days, my mother recalls buying afterschool treats for the two of them. Crispy pâté chaud, sweet mung bean soup, pouches of sour frozen yogurt.

Miss Kim still remembers my mother’s kindness. Separated by more than 1,300 miles, they often talk on the phone.

Though my mother finished high school, Miss Kim dropped out after the ninth grade to help sell trinkets and candy at her family’s store. She eventually married a Chinese man, something she was reluctant to do but agreed upon for the sake of financial stability. Together, they had six children.

It was after her husband died in a motorcycle accident that Miss Kim wanted to leave Vietnam. “Bring me anywhere but here,” she said. “I wanted my children to have a good future. I had dreams. I dreamed my children would have a good education.”

Someone from a Catholic ministry saw Miss Kim, a single mother raising six children, and agreed to help her get to the United States via the Philippines. In 1994, she arrived in Baton Rouge, unable to speak English.

She immediately started working in a factory where she skinned raw fish and shelled crabs. After five months laboring in the factory, Miss Kim knew she had no future there. She decided to go to beauty school. With her newly minted license, she opened her own business, a nail salon, which has been in operation ever since.

“The customers so love me,” Miss Kim tells us with a laugh.

In 2003, with the help of her son Ben who had just graduated from pharmacy school, Miss Kim purchased the house they currently live in, an immaculate and spacious home to all her children and in-laws.

Next year, Miss Kim plans on converting her nail salon into a beauty school, so she can teach others the trade.

“If I was still in Vietnam, I’d be poor,” Miss Kim said. “I appreciate America very, very, very much.”

After Matthew Shepard’s bloodied and frozen body was found tied to a buck fence on October 7, 1998, the city of Laramie, Wyo., changed the names of the streets.

On a wintry day, at the intersection of Pilot Peak and Snowy View Roads, the sky and the snow-covered ground appeared to have no boundary in the Equality State. The desolation of the place 13 years after the murder could be felt despite the houses in the distance.

At 21, Matthew Shepard, 5’2” and 102 lbs, met two Laramie men who were pretending to be gay at a local bar. Planning to rob Shepard, Aaron McKinney, 22, and Russell Henderson, 21, held their victim at gunpoint and took his wallet containing $20. After driving Shepard away from Laramie and tying him to a fence in an isolated area, the two men continued to beat him and finally left him to die.

18 hours later, a cyclist found Shepard’s body. The police officer who responded to the 911 call testified, “Though his face was caked in blood, his face was clean where streaks of tears had washed the blood away.”

Due to the efforts of resistant residents, there is no marker or memorial in Laramie to commemorate Shepard’s murder.

Our last night on this amazing Twain adventure. I encountered some fire spinners at the top of the hill at Gas Works Park in Seattle. It’s hard to derive symbolism from these images, so I didn’t even try.

Lastly, here is an article the Seattle Times published about our odyssey the next day.

Thanks for following us these past three months. I won’t ever forget this.

Video by Dan Q. Tham

After visiting the Lower Ninth Ward and seeing for ourselves the devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused in the area, we stopped at the Bayou Bienvenue, hoping to find a vantage point from which to film the area. What we found instead was the adorable scene of a grandfather and his grandson fishing in the bayou. Having gone eight days without a single catch, the grandfather attributed the drum fish he finally caught to the presence of the video camera. A couple days later, Team Twain would prepare drum fish, 19th Century-style, at the Hermann-Grima House in New Orlean’s French Quarter.

Video by Dan Q. Tham

We met Trevor Thomas in a futuristic office on Massachusetts Avenue. Blue neon lights cast a ghastly hue on the employees at Media Matters, a Web-based progressive research and information center. The employees’ eyes were focused on the television and computer screens at their desks. “We monitor television, radio, blogs and newspapers to be able to push back on what we perceive as misinformation,” Thomas, director of external affairs, explained. I noticed most of the screens were turned to FOX News.

Thomas is a gay man from Marne, Mich., a small, unincorporated town. He was recently the director of communications for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, an organization that worked to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

At Media Matters, Thomas has noticed an “uptick in misinformation” when it comes to reporting on lesbian, gay and transgender issues, particularly around bullying and homosexuality as a choice. He understands that especially in small towns like Marne where he grew up, the media play an important role in shaping the opinions of “everyday Americans in their living rooms.”

“If there’s bad facts out there, we do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t become mainstream media,” Thomas said. In this video clip, Thomas talks about how his small-town roots help him stay grounded.

Dan Q. Tham

Eugene Robinson spoke to us in his office at the Washington Post, where he’s a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist. On one of many book-lined shelves in his office, there’s a piece of paper stuffed among coffee mugs, his nameplate and a trophy. It’s a bit of mail he received from a reader: a picture of a stern-looking old lady giving the finger. We weren’t sure what to make of it, and Robinson wasn’t either—there was no note inside the envelope.

In any case, Robinson knew exactly how to summarize his latest book, Disintegrated: The Splintering of Black America, about what he calls a “new taxonomy of black America.” Whereas a few generations ago there were “black leaders” and a “black agenda,” today the black community is split. Robinson identified four groups:

1. The Transcendents, or upper-class blacks with money and power, who are revered by everyone, regardless of race (think Oprah and Obama).

2. The Mainstream, or black Americans who have established themselves in the middle class.

3. The Emergent, which comprises immigrants from Africa and the Carribean, as well as biracial Americans.

4. The Abandoned, made up of blacks who haven’t gained access to the middle class, and have been deeply affected by the failing education system and the decline of the inner city. Robinson said he looks at the Abandoned as in need of a Marshall Plan, and we have to concentrate our resources to help them.

Alyssa

Video by Dan

New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon felt like a sacred and salacious holiday. With the weather in complicity, we sinned over hot chocolate and beignets at Café du Monde and I quickly learned that breathing is ill-advised during the consumption of these French doughnuts. One accidental exhalation through the nostrils and a plume of white powder flies through the air like pollen and lands on your travel companions with an understated grace. The line to the famous Café du Monde was long, and rightly so. For less than three bucks, you get three warm and decadent beignets, basically deep-fried dough topped with powdered sugar. Despite the length of the line, there was enough going on in the French Quarter to keep your senses occupied. A man coated in silver belting renditions of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” Artists lining the Place d’Armes and shoo the prying eyes of my video camera away from their work. Fortunetellers, shoe-shiners, Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, a devil and nun duo (“She’s mad because she don’t get ‘nun’,” Satan would say with a grin to onlookers)—they all assembled like jesters in the court of New Orleans’ oldest and most hallowed ground. The cream-colored St. Louis Cathedral oversees the processions like an unimpressed regent. On this day, it felt like Hurricane Katrina was biblical history.

We continued through the Quarter and I would stop every fifteen feet or so to film the ironwork or a hobo or an electric violin performance or the neon-lit goings-on of a divey jazz club. Loren was looking for a 2010 book by Andrew Beahrs called “Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens” to find a recipe for one of Twain’s lavish meals in New Orleans. When he was living in New Orleans as a trencherman, Mark Twain ate baked sheepshead and fried croakers. Don’t worry; I didn’t really know what those names meant either. We later found out that croakers are basically bait fish and sheepshead is a very, very bony Gulf fish “that could be elevated by the right hand.” Despite the unsavory imagery the fish names bring up, we were anxious to dine as Clemens had dined, to experience 19th Century New Orleans through our stomachs.

Loren left us to our own devices on Bourbon Street and headed off for the public library to find this book, while Alyssa and I visited Marie Laveau’s Voodoo Shop. I’ve seen Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog.” I know the huge role voodoo and witchcraft play in the history of this city. We spent a surprisingly long time in the voodoo shop, charmed into a state of hypnosis by the shrunken heads and Wiccan shrines and noxious odors coming from incense sticks that would help with everything from fertility to the viability of your business. We left the shop with two grotesque New Orleans voodoo dolls, crafted by “a local practitioner,” promising protection. From what?

Before meeting up with Loren for lunch at Napoleon House, Bonaparte’s intended New Orleans abode, the two of us wandered to the banks of the Mississippi, Twain’s first and greatest love. Between the hideous steamboat calliope music barraging our ears, the brown and brackish waters of the river, weary after traversing the country, and the unending streams of tourists gawking at the Hare Krishna parade on Decatur Street, I thought back to our simple days in Hannibal, Missouri, when the water was clearer and the only sounds were those of flora and fauna and of our boat cutting through the water. We’ve come a long way. Allegro III, our dirty steed, has already gone about 7,000 miles. Today marks the beginning of our eighth week on the road. Holy crap! as they say in Utah.

At Napoleon’s, Alyssa downed a shot of Bourbon (on tape) for medicinal purposes and I had a wonderful tuna salad stuffed inside an avocado. I also relieved myself in the trough/urinal in the men’s room at Napoleon’s that brought me back to Berghain in Berlin and everywhere in India. I am happy that the common thread of my extensive and lucky travels these past five months is trough-urinals.

After lunch, you will not believe that we ended up running into the culinary historian of the Hermann-Grima House and piquing her interest in our project and in preparing the sheepshead and croakers. Elizabeth Pearce offered us a deal: she would prepare the Twain feast for us on Tuesday if we took part in a photoshoot for her New Orleans cocktail tour, during which she told us the fascinating story of New Orleans through the ingredients of the local concoction Sazerac. It was a tough decision and it took a lot of sacrifice, but we agreed to the torture of learning about this incredible city while wielding specialty cocktails. This was, far and away, the worst day we’ve had so far on the Twain trip. I hope a day like this doesn’t happen ever again.

Dan Q. Tham

Mark Silk heads the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He is the author of Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America and other books about religion in the United States. As Mark Twain grew older he became increasingly skeptical about human beings and their institutions. “There is no sadder thing than a young pessimist,” Twain wrote, “except an old optimist.” In this Dan Tham video Silk discusses Twain’s skepticism about religion.

Video by Dan

Not every day on the road is as idyllic as this image. Even we sometimes suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I woke up with the light in my eyes, because I have been sleeping with at least one lamp on every night since the start of this trip (Embarrassing Admission #1). Vestigial childhood anxiety about the dark has made a ruthless comeback after a couple decades of tactical repression. Being on the road and being untethered to the places we visit and the people we meet has made me much more vulnerable to the demons of my past.

But before I noticed the light, I noticed the headache. It was a searing, splitting, shrieking number that conjured Medieval images of tiny demons hammering a man’s head with picks and scythes. I wanted to cry, but doing so worsened the pain, so I writhed on the motel bed, a mute sufferer.

I dialed Alyssa’s number, woke her up, requested pain medication and hobbled next door, arms outstretched, eager for Advil.

“Do you want two or three?” Alyssa the Apothecary asked.

“Three…” I muttered, wincing.

“You don’t look so good,” Alyssa said.

“I know.” I thanked her and downed the pills with a swig of water.

They didn’t help. We were due in an hour at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds to meet Sami Safiullah, a high school friend and student at Vanderbilt. Sami was going to take us to Eid ul-Adha, a Muslim festival commemorating the sacrifice of Abraham. I had grand plans of filming the prostrations and the sermon and capturing an interview with Sami afterward, discussing what it’s like to be a Muslim in Nashville. I grabbed the video equipment and walked out of the motel room, the migraine beating like so many Taiko drums, and encountered the ethereal sight of Alyssa, who, after being trained by a couple YouTube videos, was wrapped up in a green hijab. I thought to myself, Well, if Alyssa has the sticktoitiveness to see what Eid is all about, surely I could deal with this headache.

I ended up vomiting in the Fairgrounds parking lot and hugging Sami (it’s been more than a year since I last saw him) over the putrid content of my breakfast. It was then that Loren and Alyssa decided it would be best if I went to the hospital.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember when you’re putting in a thousand miles a week and meeting incredible people with moving stories to tell on a daily basis that you are indeed mortal and subject to the whims of illness and bad luck just like everyone else is.

In the emergency room of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, I dozed off for hours at a time in a hideous greenish hospital gown. Nurse Nikeisha Michaeux stuck my arms three times with needles, looking for a vein that wasn’t flat. As the IV drip seeped its saline contents into my body and as I looked over at my travel companions—Loren, ever the workaholic, busy on his laptop and Alyssa, propped against the wall, sleeping and reading in equal measure—I felt incredibly blessed. There’s something about being carted around in a wheelchair, getting a lumbar puncture and a CAT scan and hearing the reassuring beep of the EKG machine that left me feeling especially spunky.

Here I was! Living the dream of every American romantic, a dream fabled in countless travelogues and backed by millions of ad dollars on the Travel Channel. This hospital visit wasn’t an inconvenient setback at all. Indeed it was all part of the package. It was a fine-print clause in the job description for vagabonds. This was so Americana.

What made it all worth it was getting an email from my father.

Dan,

You should watch the CPR video,it will be helpful.

(Embarrassing Admissions #2, 3, 4, 5)

Though the period represented by Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum in Sturbridge, Mass., is slightly earlier than when Samuel Clemens worked as a printer, the Village’s printer, 62-year-old William Contino, demonstrates what it was like to be a mid-nineteenth-century printer. Not only did Contino give us a printing demonstration, but we also got a bit of an etymology lesson, as well as vehement displays of nostalgia for a century he did not personally live in.

Video by Dan

The video interview we obtained with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, symbolizes an issue for journalists, especially journalists traveling across country day after day, week after week, in a van. E-mail requests for interviews are not always answered. So when we arrive in a town or city for a day or two, before moving on to the next town or city, we can either accept no answer to our request for an interview as a “No” or visit the person’s office with the hope of scheduling an interview. Not having heard from Professor Gates, we visited his office on a Monday morning and explained our desire for an interview to a Dubois Institute receptionist who seemed intrigued by our Twain trip project. She said we were in luck. Professor Gates had his weekly visiting hour from 1 to 2 p.m. that day. We departed for a quick lunch, returning before 1 p.m. We were second in line, behind an African-American Harvard student from Atlanta. We chatted with him until Prof. Jones arrived around 1:15. When our time came, Prof. Gates invited us into his office, learned the purpose of our visit and politely told us he wanted to speak first to all of his waiting students. He encouraged us to leave our video equipment in his office until our turn came. When we returned to his office to interview him he explained his desire to control who video interviewed him—he has many requests—and questioned the ethics of how we wound up in his office (his visiting hours, he said, were intended only for his students). He said he planned to reprimand the receptionist who informed us of his visiting hour. He then answered our three questions, the first of which is captured on Dan Tham’s video.

Video by Dan

Dan Tham’s videos capture two of the Mario Picciones I know from my 26 years, 1969 to 1995, of putting out the Southbridge (Mass.) Evening News. As the owner for decades of Mario’s, a local restaurant, Mario produces excellent Italian cooking and trains numerous people to become chefs. As caring, concerned citizen he offers his honest assessment of the state of his home town.

Loren Ghiglione

Video by Dan