On Not Becoming Vietnamese Roadkill
“Let’s move to Vietnam together,” Sam suggested over a bowl of oatmeal one morning.
“Yeah, okay,” I responded.
What can I say? I was in love. It leads to hasty decisions.
We arrived in Hanoi a month later on a sticky hot Wednesday afternoon, and after languishing for a week in a $10-a-day guesthouse, we found an apartment on a busy side street teeming with sizzling food stalls. It was incredibly romantic, if you relished the constant scraping of a metal wok, the pungent aroma of fish oil, and the inevitable drunken bottle-smashing brawl at three a.m.
Sam eagerly set about exploring the country with his infectious curiosity and ability to befriend everyone from giggling, cellphone-wielding teenage girls to the local town tailor, and I got accepted into a teaching program. While Sam discovered the joy of a custom-made shirt and a bowl of pho sprinkled with lime, chili, and cilantro, I managed, one evening, to choke down a chicken’s asshole — I didn’t want to offend my dinner hosts who’d undoubtedly saved the choicest pieces for me. About the only thing that still proved a challenge was crossing the street unsupervised.
One morning a few weeks into our new Vietnamese life, I realized I needed to do some shopping. There was only a can of beans in the cupboard, and I was sick of street food and accidental anus eating. I was excited by the prospect of going to a local market — nothing like a supermarket back home, where you pushed a cart through sanitized aisles and sorted through boxes of prepackaged foods under buzzing fluorescent lights. I wanted bright and colorful, hustling and bustling, vendors shouting, customers haggling, fruit and veggies tumbling off tables, beans and rice busting from their sacks. I wanted to have my own “tomato guy” and “bread guy,” and I envisioned myself carrying all my purchases in my own thatched shopping basket.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a basket, and Sam wasn’t home to walk with me. I wandered outside to look for Chop Chop. He usually loitered around my apartment, sleeping soundly atop his moto. I’d met Chop Chop our first week in Hanoi. He saw me exiting my apartment and followed after yelling, “Mam! Moto, moto! Chop chop!” When he smiled, his faux gold tooth glinted in the sun. I’d assumed Chop Chop was his name and started calling him that. He was actually just explaining how he could drive me places really fast. He quickly appointed himself my personal chauffeur. I paid him quadruple what a local would, which allowed him more leisure time to nap on his moto, and in return I didn’t die trying to walk somewhere. This seemed a more than fair arrangement. Sam, on the other hand, felt Chop Chop and I were enablers and that it wasn’t good for either of us in the long run.
It wasn’t good for me today, anyway, because Chop Chop wasn’t around, nor was his creepy minion who sometimes gave me a ride. “I love you,” the little perv had pulled me close and whispered into my breasts. I had no choice but to go alone, a terrifying thought.
I waited at the first intersection.
And I was still waiting fifteen minutes later. The constant flow of honking, sputtering traffic never receded. I longed for a button to push and a kindly flashing green man to aid my crossing. Instead I watched three motos transport a large in diameter, thirty-foot-long metal pipe. They rode in a synchronized train, each driver holding the pipe hoisted to his shoulder with one arm and driving with the other. It was impressive.
Sam and I had passed many a muggy evening sitting on tiny plastic stools at Bia Hoi Corner, sipping thirty-five cent lukewarm “beer” and watching the motos pass. The first one to see a family of five riding on a moto got to sucker punch the other in the shoulder and yell, “five on!” Larger livestock like pigs, goats, or dogs counted as family members if they were alive. Watching the motos was a favorite pastime of ours; however, my inability to navigate through them on a daily basis had become a point of contention between us.
“You’re a rock and they’re the river,” he’d preached the other day while we were walking into town.
“You just have to move slow and steady, and they’ll part around you like a river. Here, take my hand.” He reached out and started pulling me into the motorized current. I took a few tentative steps under the steady tugging of his hand. I am a rock. I am a rock, my head chanted. A few feet in, though, I realized I didn’t feel like a rock. I felt fleshy and breakable. I tried to bolt back, but Sam wouldn’t let go.
“Just keep walking,” he’d urged.
He continued to drag me across. I continued to resist. The motos didn’t know which way to sway. They teetered back and forth, unable to predict our course. By default they aimed straight for us.
“I’m a bad rock!” I screamed, ripping my hand from Sam’s and leaping back toward the relative safety of the nonexistent sidewalk. Sam had continued crossing as if he were The Chosen One, deflecting death with his steady gait and utter lack of concern.
“Chicken shit!” he’d yelled from the other side.
It turned out beginning a new life in a new country with your new boyfriend wasn’t as uncomplicated as it had seemed that morning over oatmeal. Sam was faring better. In the same sure way that he charged into oncoming traffic, he’d leapt into our relationship. We’d been together only a week when he told me he loved me. Six months after that we were on a plane to Hanoi. He believed that whatever roads life laid before us, we’d make it to the other side unscathed. Meanwhile, I didn’t want to become roadkill. I’d moved all the way to Vietnam to stand on the sidewalk of our relationship.
The three-man pipe-moving motos were long gone, and I was still on the wrong side of the street when a teetering stack of illegally photocopied books approached me. Behind the stack was a small twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy I knew all too well. He found me everywhere.
“Lady, you buy book,” he said. And so it began.
“I don’t want to buy a book.”
“Lady, funny book.” He was relentless. “Look pig on moto.” He displayed the grainy cover for me to see. It was indeed a pig on a moto.
“What’s so funny? I see pigs on motos everyday. Look around, kid.”
I’d already bought two of this kid’s books. The first was missing twenty pages in the middle, and the second gave me a nasty paper cut. Granted, that wasn’t his fault, but his presence was making my finger throb.
I was still working out my plan of escape when I felt a delicate hand grab hold of mine. I looked down to my side and saw an old, slightly hunched lady holding my hand. She looked up and smiled through her wrinkles with a charming tooth-stained grin. Even at 5’3” I felt very tall in this country. Was I so helpless that an elderly Vietnamese woman had to assist me? She motioned for us to cross. Apparently, I was. Or maybe, just maybe, this woman was some sort of spirit guide. She had clearly crossed a few roads in her life. Maybe she was here to teach me that sometimes you just had to suck it up and risk a moto to the heart if you ever wanted to get anywhere worthwhile. Or perhaps it was just a fucking road I needed to cross to get to the market, so let’s get on with things.
I took a deep breath and gave her frail hand a gentle squeeze. Without looking or hesitating she pulled me off the curb.
“Hey, lady. You buy book!” Book Boy would not be ditched. He tagged along to the other side of me with his tower of books blocking our line of vision to the left. So there I was, amidst a sea of high-speed motorists, acting out some sort of relationship metaphor with a probably half-blind and possibly deaf senior citizen, and a persistent kid with little regard for copyright laws. I wondered if Sam would eat the can of beans for dinner, since my death felt imminent.
Of course I’d heard the old cliché that before you die your life flashes before your eyes. Mine wasn’t doing this exactly, but I did get to thinking about Sam and our relationship. We’d been fighting a lot, growing distant. We blamed it on Vietnam — or at least I did — but really, I had never fully committed to us, just as I couldn’t commit to crossing this damn street. I always kept one foot firmly planted on the sidewalk, just in case. But Hanoi didn’t have sidewalks, and neither did love. Armed with this realization, I charged onward — though still convinced it could all end badly.
Yet, miraculously, my life wasn’t ending, which might have had something to do with the fact that the motos were actually going around us. Maybe three rocks were better than one. Together we were more like a boulder. We were definitely moving at the pace of a boulder, since the old lady couldn’t hobble very fast, and the kid had to keep squatting down to pick up fallen books.
The motos zipped past, their wind fluffing my arm hair, beeping horns filling my ears in surround sound, and gasoline fumes hanging thick and heavy in my nostrils. We kept crossing, and the motos continued to artfully weave and dance around us. It was like choreography; you just had to trust your step. And perhaps be holding the hand of your newly adopted Vietnamese granny.
Before I knew it, I’d done it. I was on the other side of the road. Some people heal the sick. Others pen award-winning novels, advance technology, or lead nations. I crossed a road. I wanted to hug my granny in victory, but in true spirit-guide fashion, she had vanished into the crowd, never to be seen again. Book Boy was still there though, so I bought the one with the pig on the moto. I’d give it to Sam, my version of a love story.
This essay first appeared in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World
