kaitlinrees

Before I moved from Saigon to Hanoi several people, both Vietnamese and expat, warned me that Northerners were not friendly.  Coming from New York, a city not known for it’s warm and bubbly surfaces, this wasn’t intimidating; if anything it was intriguing.  So on my 72-hour bus journey from Saigon to Hanoi, I paid attention to changes in friendliness.  After ordering a coffee or asking for directions, I found myself pausing to absorb the reaction, the tone of response.  In Mui Ne, a restaurant graciously let me use the bathroom without buying anything.  In Nha Trang the employees at the bus tourist office changed my ticket so I could sit next to my friend.  Over coffee in Hoi An, store ownder let me pet his dog and he showed off his dog’s skills of sit and bark.  In Hue, where I spent one full day, I took a motorbike tour and was brought to beautiful and peaceful places of the guide’s hometown with detailed histories and personal stories.

Friendliness can be hard to measure of outside of one’s hometown.  Or maybe it is that people’s behavior becomes harder to interpret because interpretation skills are constantly called upon; they get tired, we get tired.  I know for myself, when I’m afraid of being naïve, I can easily fall victim to skepticism, the other side of the sword.  Whether it is better to risk the rosy lens or the shaded lens, I’m not sure.  To me, the people I met along the way in Mui Ne, Nha Trang, Hoi An and Hue were welcoming enough.  In fact, the rudeness I encountered was at my departure from Saigon in the bus booking office.  Without making excuses for her, it was early and I was giving some ‘tude back.  Regardless…

For Hanoi, an experience last night erased all question of a generalized coldness here.  On 72 Doi Can Street, nestled in between a bikini clad mannequin and a motorbike repair shop, is a Xoi stand.  The additions to the sticky rice included a Chinese style sausage, (Lap Soun), a Vietnamese style sausage (Gio Bo), shredded chicken or pork, (Rouc Ga or Heo) as well as a few other treats of the duck egg (Vit Lon) and Ngai Cuu.  I arrived on bicycle with a friend and the two people hanging out on the chairs got up to make space for us.

The woman who owns the stand appeared neutral while we sat down, her face not hardened but slightly reserved from experience.  The man sitting across the table, presumably her husband was looser in his language and posture.  While he didn’t assist in preparing or serving our food, he did buy a bag of man xanh (I had to google this) and offered it to us, taking only a few for himself.  His offer was emphatic such that I consented to the sour fruit before finishing my dinner.  This triggered a kind of motherly response in the woman, who stood and told me to eat it after my rice, which is exactly what my mother would have said.  There were jokes passed around the table during the meal, which were lost on me save the occasional translation from my friend.  In those brief moments of mutual understanding, both our eyes were lit up. The rice and sausage I ate were delicious, as was the smell of the shredded pork across from me.  Our meal was followed by some half pickled cucumbers and more of the sour cherry-like fruit.

The next morning while riding my bike past the stand, the woman and I caught eyes and her face shed her neutrality with a warm smile.

To me, the changes in demeanor along my way up North were as difficult to measure as the changes in the weather, which was consistently hot.  And in the limited time I’ve been in Hanoi, just a little over a week, I feel the familiarity and openness of the place.  It is hard to forget the comments before leaving, given how wrong they seem now.  I am sure that Vietnamese history; it’s division and painful reunification, affects northern and southern perceptions of one another.  The perception of difference, rather than any actual difference, can be deep and divisive.  This is not particular to Vietnam.  This is not particular to expats or locals.  There are countless places and people, especially those with complicated pasts that harbor negative ideas about what is different.

Objectivity is impossible; I don’t pretend to be its keeper. That being said, once we are aware of the places from which we come, have a sense of what is coloring our perception (rosy or grey?) the better equipped we are to fight off those biases.  And we must, if we want to have clear vision.

Here in Hanoi, after the 72 hour journey by bus, sweating. I have been here for almost one week and today I got my wheels, of the bicycle variety. The pedaling around has contributed to some of the sweating, but most of it is from the humidity. And stress of navigating the one-way streets and zero organization of traffic flow. There are lots of ways to compare Hanoi to Saigon and people have been asking about it a lot since arriving. Well, not really asking, more stating their opinions and then asking for confirmation. “The traffic is worse here, right?” “Hanoi is much more beautiful, right?” Rather than clearly articulate the differences between the two cities, I think what I most want to do is remark on the polarity of people’s views on the two cities. There seems to be a big divide between how people feel about each. It makes me wonder why people feel the pressure to pick a side. Maybe from the government’s presence here, the war, the bitter feelings about communism that people from the south place on northerners, the number of trees and lakes that makes northerners feel self righteous.

Weather and traffic, the supposed warning signs of a disinterested person or uninspired conversation, are actually impossible to not talk about when talking about Hanoi. The heat is too intense to think of much else, at least for a while. It’s summertime here, just starting, and for the next few months, the weather is likely to get hotter and more humid. I woke up at 6:00 am to go running yesterday and even then it was a quickly settling heat blanket. The day, when the sun is out like it was yesterday, is scorching. People run around hiding from it, covering every centimeter of skin showing.

And the traffic. Is insane. The traffic is insane. Not because there are more motorbikes than Saigon, but because there are literally no rules that people follow. It’s funny that I described Saigon’s streets as chaotic before; they are so sensible compared to Hanoi streets. The streets here are narrower, more one way, more pot holes, more terrifying. The sky here is really great, though, especially from my window. The sun set last night after the rainstorm was an incredible blaze of pinks, oranges, reds, purples. The entire sky seemed to be set on fire and just hang there, slowly morphing around the palate of color.

A little about the bus ride on the way up here. I decided to take the bus as a way to see the country and have some kind of physically challenging experience to write about. Maybe when you self-consciously do things with the intention of writing about them after, it makes it hard to write about after. I enjoyed the sleeping buses. They are quite comfortable once you get over the bar that sticks in your back. Personally, I was not in the best position to find comfort on the bus. I had just come off a roller skating accident in which an angsty Vietnamese teen tripped me at my birthday party and I bruised my tailbone. The bruise was worsened a few times with the bumpy backseat riding. The most memorable part of the bus rides was the few minutes after waking up each morning when the fog was sitting low over these brilliant green and yellow fields. It seems like we were always passing through a beautiful field when I woke up. The fog was visible peace, serene in its stillness. There is something to love and cherish in a quiet way about that early in the morning. It is too delicate a time to do anything but reflect. And the bus with its moving scenery and flashes of people living their lives is a wonderful place to think. I liked seeing people for only moments of their lives. There is something accurate in the way that when you stare out a window, the things you see are fleeting slices of people’s lives. Like in that flash is all you need to know. I am struggling now to remember one of the flashes of life I witnessed on the bus and a little boy on a bicycle is coming to mind. He is in his school uniform and the bike is too big for him. He has black sandals that are also too big for him. He is standing up to pedal and his backpack looks light and boxish. A bowlcut haircut sits atop a concentrating face, adult teeth with lots of space for company.

I spent the night in Hue because the bus was sold out of completely direct tickets. The day to tour Hue by myself was perfect. I paid $10 and got a personal motorbike tour of some of the highlights of the city, but not in an overwhelming way. The motorbike tour went to a Buddhist pagoda first and we arrived during one of the prayer hours. I sat down in the monastery, in the back, on the side, and listened to the chanting and watched the ways that the younger boys with the haircuts in training (not completely shaved heads but specific parts shaved off) have impressive attention and command of themselves despite my presence. I forget how accustomed to people staring at me I am until I got there and no one seemed to notice me. There was a funeral going on and I felt a bit strange walking around without any real reason to be there other than see what it was. I want to have more purpose than tourism to be at a place as sacred feeling as that.

The next stop of the tour was to a tomb of a king who was disappointed with himself his whole life. He built this ground for himself while he was alive as a way to create an alternate world because he felt like he let down the first one he lived in. He took on the suffering of his people but couldn’t do anything to stop it. He was a poet, an artist, and the grounds reflect that kind of fantastical quality of poetry. I sat and wrote a long stream of conscious poem while I was there, which included a lot about the hats people wear with their smart shoes.

We went up to a bunker that was first established by the French when they had control in Vietnam and then later used by Americans during their involvement. It overlooked the Perfume River and was the most beautiful view I’ve seen so far in Vietnam. It also strangely reminded me of the scenes of Forest Gump, with a loud motor of this boat sounding almost like machine gun fire.

From the bunker we took a long and peaceful ride through the countryside to a village. The village had a funny museum that taught about how rice was made, which is obviously not intended for anyone who actually lives in the village. There were four women who energetically put on this kind of performance for me. They pantomimed cutting rice down, drying it out, separating the brown from the white. They pretended to be mothers rocking babies to sleep, one pretended to be a bull while another pretended to be the rice farmer riding it. I bought a bracelet from the “gift shop” which was just a big glass box with some trinkets in it, as a way of thanking them for their effort to entertain me.

We went to lunch and had delicious rice rolls with peanut sauce and chili sauce combined, lots of mint and some other fresh herbs I didn’t recognize. The food was presented in a really attractive way and had small serving sizes, which are things my mother read on the internet and asked me to verify.

I went to one more pagoda with lots of Japanese tourists and smelled some amazing flowers. The pagoda housed the car of the monk who burned himself alive in protest of Diem’s oppression of Buddhism. Very heavy, unexpected emotion.

The tour finished with me deciding to not go inside the Citadel because I was getting tired of walking around and thinking about old stones. The building was cool enough from the outside as well.

I got on the night bus after a coffee and had a nice reading and writing stream of consciousness for the hours before I fell asleep, all on my own.

The streets of Saigon are not the narrowest I’ve seen, but certainly the most hectic.  As a former inhabitant of another hectic city, I am familiar with crowds and navigating personal space in public.  I know of the shoulder-to-shoulder subway morning commuters and video game like swerving around people while running down 6^th avenue.  However, even with all the yellow taxicabs, honking horns, neon lights, spilled trashcans and stoop-lingering, cat-callers I encountered in New York, the bustle of Saigon is different.

Despite heavy street traffic in New York, it’s organized by widely accepted and understood stop and go lights.  People generally drive only in one direction on one-way streets.  One knows when to cross the streets by the little man with legs (a flashing symbol not a real person) who signals it’s okay.  Crossing the streets in Saigon is a more physically and mentally exhausting feat.  There are no clear rules for when and how to do it.  At the outset, it appears that one must thrust one’s body into incoming traffic and then trust that her presence is noticeable and respected enough to be slowed down for.

Even after two months and several self-satisfying maneuvers, I don’t doubt that my tiredness at the end of the day is at least in part due to the efforts of simply walking around.  Not noticing it anymore doesn’t mean that my body is not absorbing that stress in some ways.

This is not to say that it has to be an unpleasant experience.  Depending on your mood, the street can be a symphony of sounds and movement at rush hour, or hell.  If you don’t see it as hell, you could see an uninterrupted flow of energy, a melting of individuals into one mass, an organized chaos beautiful in the way that it seems like it is constantly going to explode in series of collisions, but rarely does.  It is bewildering to observe from a low sitting plastic chair, sipping on a watermelon smoothie, taking it all in like a piece of performance art.

If I call it performance art, I should think about those “artists.”  When I am participating in the flow of mid day traffic on my bicycle wheels, I have occasionally felt like an artist, which is to say, felt blissful.  I am still new enough to find it amazing that I do not get run over by other bikes, that I can swerve so easily in between buses, around pot holes and away from head on collisions.   In New York I was often too nervous to ride my bike around.  This city is different, maybe I am too, but it is not scary at all.  In fact, riding my bike is something that I really look forward to.  I have gotten in the habit of singing songs, usually highly emotional ones, while riding.  Engines and horns drown my voice and no one notices; it’s like shower singing but in public.

There is also something meditative in the participation of street flow.  Because it is chaotic, because the stimuli are constant and semi-aggressive, one must retreat inward for sanity.  I have had moments when I need to tune out so much that I end up reaching this Zen like state.  I have never been surfing, but this is how I imagine it.

I don’t know if I’m the authority to be writing on this, being new and also being very much on the periphery of artists in the city.  But, I have heard people complain about the lack of authentic artistic expression in Saigon.  It may just not be visible to the public, which is acceptable because those who want it will seek it and find it.  But for those less enthusiastic art seekers, who need their hands held a bit, I think there are fewer opportunities.  I’m not sure if I can venture into a why.  I know little about the truth of communism and it’s effects, the realities of government censorship, the consequence of free expression, fear of a loss of tradition, fear.

Perhaps, though, the navigation of the crowded streets, the morphing of an individual into a mass of metal, exhaust, beeping, there is a release, there is poetry and music.  Something is real, something is palpable. Whether a participator or observer of the street, I think something big is happening.  The unlikely space that one somehow miraculously fills without mishap, the acts of self-possession and assurance, and the inward focus; here is the art of Saigon.

As a foreigner, I have experienced the simultaneous feelings anonymity and publicity; perhaps they even underlie what brought me here.

Anonymity is seductive because it allows us to exist in a world where we can be anyone because we are no one. In forming new relationships, especially ones far removed from former lives, we extract new parts of our identity from them. It’s not an erasing of what was written, but an adding to the blank pages created by plane rides and new cities.  People who move half way across the world cannot deny it.

But being anonymous in a foreign country where your appearance is objectively different is coupled with being a kind of public spectacle. What allows for the open landscape of self also results in what can feel like the constant eyes of others. What it means to be an ‘other,’ the volume of the feeling and how sensitive we are to it differs for everyone. At times it manifests in discomfort. At times some surely take delight in the increased attention. And often it is something that is hardly felt at all; stretches of time that one slips soundlessly inside the walls of another culture.

In the first months of living in a new place, or more specifically I’ll say the first months of my life as a white woman living in Southeast Asia, the staring can certainly feel intrusive. However, I think that it’s a vital piece of cohabitation and communication.

The deconstruction and reconstruction of what it means to communicate are all around us. Young people’s apparent inability to make plans and spell properly, form complete sentences or even thoughts, feel that anticipation of opening a hand written letter, can all be lamented by older generations. Similarly for adults, hyperlink culture makes it nearly impossible to read an entire piece of writing without jumping to another reference, webisodes fit nicely with our decreasing attention spans, unlimited texts and chats during work fill our need for constant stimulation. Modern ways of sending and receiving information can be scary, to me.  However, living in a foreign country puts a new lens on the alternative ways of communication.

There is a lot to say about the power of skype, international texting and g-chatting, (bumping?!). But as a person who still believes that one of the most intimate of all relationships is the pen pal, I have always struggled a great deal with these things.  I still feel like a bit of an outsider to instant messaging, wall posting, checking in, poking, liking and disliking, and decoding l8tr.  So, it has been just as hard for me to participate in the chaotic and exciting reorganization of language and communication from abroad.  However, in the recent move from New York to Saigon, my brain has been forced to come up against the limits of traditional communication.

I’m thinking more about connectedness and the Internet, but also about connectedness and faces.  I don’t know Vietnamese.  This has twisted how I think about language and expression in a great way.  As a newcomer with virtually no Vietnamese language exposure, aside from the Banh Mi and Pho of NYC, I am constantly somewhere on the spectrum of feeling slightly misunderstood to completely incomprehensible. Once I remove myself enough from the frustration that this entails, there is an incredible study in nonverbal communication to be had.

In eyes, steady or shifting, their extensions of the brows, in hands and their fluidness or rigidity of movement, in the corners of the mouth, the positioning of the lips, the spine and how straight it sits. People tell you so much. The idea of nonverbal communication is not earth shattering.  But put in the context of the direction that other forms of communication are going, maybe it could be.  In studying the physical cues of others, you are studying spirits, in a way. When words are not an option, we are forced to search for something else, something deeper yet right there on the surface.

John Ashberry wrote in his Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, “your eyes proclaim that everything is surface. The surface is what’s there.” This surface he calls a “visible core,” and it’s an apt description of what one must look for on the other side of language gaps.  Nonverbal communication is not for the meek; it requires a close attention and receptivity to those around you, which is exhausting. It requires an afternoon nap for some or serious journal entry writing for others. When you don’t recognize the faces around you, there is even more demanded by but also returned in that moment of recognition. Once you find that point of recognition, like the amused mouth of an old friend, a shoulder slump of your worried grandmother, the searching eyes of a former lover, you start to see how spirits of people exist in knowable ways.  It can be as instantaneous as a text message, as detailed as a long letter.

This is taken from my journal and dated February 23, 2011.

My room feels like a true sanctuary today. I feel fortunate to have a quiet and cool place to retreat at the end of these days in particular. The hectic streets and nonstop noise are so much more bearable with the promise of escape up here. I don’t mind at all that I am on the 4th floor and that going to the bathroom and the kitchen are a bit of a chore. The elevated feeling, removed from one kind of life I lead on the ground is worth it.

I uploaded a video I took this afternoon of a piece of trash on the side of the street. As I sat drinking an avocado smoothie (low sitting lawn chair, end of work day bustle) I felt myself watching this strange blur of energy pass. I wanted to capture the movement and the organized chaos of the traffic so I turned on my camera to try and record the thing I was feeling. It’s a delicate tightrope walk: experiencing a thing and then stepping out of it (taking a photo, writing a note) while still insisting on being present for it. I noticed a piece of trash in the view of my camera so I zoomed.   I guess it’s an instance of how “art” can introduce new layer of said experience. Anyway, as far as pieces of trash go, it’s interesting to watch (for me, for now).

I’m not sure what it means but I think it embodies something of the dizziness and dislocation of a place. I remember when I first moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn, I took a walk by the Gowanus Canal and then wrote a poem about the trash, everyone’s splayed everywhere, me holding mine. It appears that garbage is one of my passions. In this video from the sidewalk today, the piece of trash is the only thing not moving. It’s the fixed point, the only point, on which you can stand to observe the movement. It suggests coherence in the uninterrupted movement of the traffic; when you focus on the trash you can see that though the traffic thins and then thickens, it is never broken. I like thinking about the focus being something that is discarded and out of its proper place.  It’s literally as insignificant as you can get and yet it is the thread that unites the moving images. Or, said another way: the only thing that is constant is the remnant of something that once had value but no longer does. The static individual thing merely points to the force of the collective moving mass. If I can stretch it this far, I’d like to connect to the thing I read in Howard’s End this afternoon about place. The older sister says:

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people              one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I          quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

While I think it’s the opposite, as someone who has just moved halfway across the world from all the people I care about, I wonder. I wonder also about how this idea connects to the thing I read in an old Poetry magazine this afternoon about the entangled and nonsequeter variety of contemporary poetry. Tony Hoagland wrote, “the use of the disrupted poetic forms results in a style but resists shape. Thus the individual poems very often lack individual dramatic identity.”  It’s a movement of words, a blur and dizzying dislocation that is felt, rather than any single poem having an identity.

I suppose I really like it here. I like the combination of an insane city (completely indifferent to the individual) and solitude (intensely attuned to the individual). I like the way I’m allowed to participate in the flow of movement or I can sit on the sidewalk and observe it. Sometimes we lean into it, sometimes we lean away from it.

Here is a story about the nice woman I met on my way to the Post Office.

Some muffled words floated through air thick with motorbike horns on Nguyen Trai street.  The woman behind me and I were the only two people foreign enough to walk in the humidity.  Her attempts at conversation were aided by some fallen telephone wires over which we had to maneuver together.  I had just spent an hour ‘discovering’ a found park and was rethinking my bleak morning conclusions that we all just fighting a constant battle against a world that wants chaos.  It occurred to me that randomness and disorder could be beautiful, as this middle-aged woman in spandex stumbled with me over the jumble of black spaghetti on the sidewalk.

She asked me about my friendship bracelet and she confused me for French, two agreeable topics of conversation.  She had me guess where she was from, I guessed the Philippines and she beamed impressed.  I took the bate and complimented her snakeskin sandals.  In the next few minutes we shared English teaching stories and more compliments on nail polish.  Lisa taught in a school but was curiously on holiday, out for a walk and would be happy to guide me to the Post Office.  She had a youthful sweetness and I liked how willing I was to let the flow of the day carry me around.  I felt poised for pleasant surprises.

On the way to the post office, we chatted about America, about teaching, and she mentioned how pretty I was.  Before we parted she said that she would like to meet me for coffee to talk more about New York City, as her daughter, who was my age, was hoping to study nursing there.  My plans for the post office were to sit under the high ceilings and let my mind wonder-wander in my diary.  I didn’t want to be rushed by our meeting and figured Lisa would inspire some new wonderings, so I volunteered to just have a cup of coffee right then, before retreating into my brain.

We made our way to an escalator in a giant nearby mall, past some hip Vietnamese teenagers, and to the KFC.  I ordered a coffee, she insisted on paying, which made me impulsively order an ice cream cone.  Amidst frying chicken and electronic chattering from the arcade outside, we unwrapped another gift of connection over our status as independent single women in the world.  I saw myself being unemotional about my recent breakup and heard honesty and confidence in my happiness with being alone.  I felt the kind of weightlessness that only strangers can offer when they draw things out of you that you hope are there but can never be sure.  We parted with Lisa extending an invitation to come to her house for a home cooked meal.

You can probably guess where the story is heading.  People are more compelled to tell these kinds of stories when the pleasant beginning takes an unfortunate turn and ends with ‘and that’s why I always carry a pocket knife.’  I wonder what would happen if I let my story stay here.  I met a woman on the street who made me feel good about myself.

Nevertheless, the other side of the coin is concealed and needs its turn facing up.  If we can say our whole story with the knowledge that it may not always serve us the way we hoped it would, then we get to keep telling it.  So, continuing…

I called Lisa after the post office and regretted that I could not come for lunch because I had to move into my new apartment that evening.  I suggested another day this week would be nice to meet and she promptly decided the following day at ten.  She took initiative and then called when she said she would; the old courtship trick that when executed with even the slightest bit of tact on someone the slightest bit open to it, works every time.

I met her at the Ben Tanh Market, by the horse statue.  I was 15 minutes late and in my first glimpse of her, she was already waving.  The cab ride to her house was much longer than I anticipated, which is probably now the first conscious register of something not right.  As always, the signs become clearer after deception.  The second conscious question mark hovering between us was Lisa’s battery of questions about the price of everything on my body, earrings, shoes, purse, sunglasses.

Her house was on the quiet end of some more busy streets and I did not have to take off my shoes.  I met her brother and her cousin and her daughter.  I studiously logged the details to share at my upcoming lunch date that afternoon.  I saw a TED Talk about how people’s ‘storytelling selves’ more frequently choose their courses of action rather than their ‘experiencing selves’.  Apparently, a moment ends every three seconds while we can have our narratives forever, so they win.  Therefore, the missing tooth, the crazy uncle, and the inedible soup were all acknowledged then used as tokens to keep going.

Lisa had a photogenic daughter named Joy who prepared the bad soup with a soggy omelet. They asked me questions about myself during lunch and I thanked them like punctuation marks to my answers.  The meal was as quick as my shallow compliments on the food.   Over the forkfuls of polite conversation, I asked Joy about nursing and her dreams of New York.  I was eager to connect, and probably missed their sideways glances and other signs of deceit.  It is amazing what mild desperation and awkwardness can do to dull one’s perception.

After the food, we retired to the couch, Joy and I, while Lisa cleaned up.  It’s clear now that Joy’s job was to make me feel understood.  And that’s what she did.  While the crazy uncle named Jo Jo went upstairs, Joy and I took the necessary steps to forming a friendship: we talked about our families and we shared things that made us feel vulnerable.  Our conversation felt real, or at least for me, and for a few minutes I saw us changing each other’s lives.

Then Uncle Jo Jo called for us from upstairs.  Now, before the meal, Jo Jo had shared with me a few vulnerable things about his life as well.  He worked in hotels as a black jack dealer.  He did not get paid much so he had a “business partner” who would come play at his table and share the winnings.  He repeated the phrase 50/50 but said it “fiddy fiddy,” which, with the insane look in his eyes, was amusing to me.  When he suggested that we could be such business partners one day, I enjoyed the image I got of me at the black jack table in a seedy Southeast Asian hotel, probably smoking a cigarette, probably with an interesting hat, taking down hundreds of dollars.  So when he called us up to his room, I took this funny image with me.

He had in his room a table clothed card table, a deck, and the rules for blackjack neatly laid out.  Joy and I exchanged wonderfully knowing glances during Jo Jo’s instruction.  It occurred to me that the way that people cheat at cards should be more complicated than anything I could pick up in a few minutes, no matter how immaculate the directions are.  Ignored flag number three, is it?

After a few practice rounds, Jo Jo took out $300 from his wallet and gave me $200 and Joy $100.  He said it was for a “dry run” to test how well I could read his cues and wager accordingly.  As he rushed out of the room, he added that I should not let on that it was his money.  Where he was going and to whom was I going to let anything on was unclear.

Then the Nepalese man showed up: suited, briefcased, just stopping by for a friendly game of cards.  I shook his soft manicured hand as he said, “No hard feelings about win or lose.  Maybe the winner buys us drink later.”

Not all at once but more than slowly, I grew conscious of the space I was in.  The space was somewhere between trust and mistrust, between safety and danger, amusement and fear.  I checked in and found myself beginning to edge toward one end of the spectrum, but still somewhat in the balance.

I stayed.  I showed off my newly acquired card smarts: look at the dealer’s next card, hide my eyes, lie a little.  Ever the diligent student, I did alright.  I didn’t count how much money I won off of the man who insisted on continually shaking my hand after every round he lost.  I didn’t really care about it; what I did care about was how I was doing for Jo Jo.  There must be a human need for approval, even in the midst of a swindle that just doesn’t altogether go away.

Then the Nepalese man wagered more than Joy and I, and the “loan” from the “banker” could back up.  After a few winks and nods from Jo Jo, I pretended to check my purse for more cash.  My lack of any cash made the smiling Nepalese man smile harder.  Jo Jo suddenly had the idea that I could show him my credit card, so that he knew I was good for it.  Now from a fortunate connection with an ex boyfriend banker, I have a nice looking debit card that sports the name of a bank usually reserved for people with lots of money.  The man had just thrown down $40,000 in cash on the table and I wanted him to realize his wad of cash was not going to intimidate me.  I would be lying to say that there wasn’t a slight bit of satisfaction in seeing his eyes take in my card, which for all intents and purposes, is a lie.

The fire of deceit was spreading.  He reached across the table, just to examine it, and that was the move that tipped the balance.

I put it away and said I had to leave to meet my friend, and because it was thankfully true, had a conviction in my voice that might not have otherwise been there.   They reassured me that this was the last hand.  Then some slow moving addition to calculate the finances of the game.  The opening of the last hand was built up in such that even if I didn’t have the suspicion of being swindled, I’d still want to leave out of annoyance.  When the Nepalese man stated he first wanted all the money present on the table, i.e. he wanted me to put my credit card on the table, I got up and left.

Interestingly enough I told Joy quite honestly that I would email her about nursing programs.  Uncle Jo Jo tried stopping me, but not wholeheartedly.  He gave me a concerned ‘we’re on the same team’ look, but fumbled over why I had to stay.  I took his momentary weakness and used it to grow enough confidence to evade all of Lisa’s sweet requests downstairs for me to stay and sit with her on the couch.

I was on a motorbike within moments with a pounding heart.  In sorting out which parts of the story I want to tell, I realize there is something of value besides the warning about fake blackjack dealers.  Lisa momentarily confirmed something that I try to believe about people; that everyone’s life is just as complicated as everyone eles’ and we can connect through this fact.  Even looking back on it now, after being nearly robbed of my identity and credit cards, I think that Lisa liked me, and I think that I liked her.  She lied and that is wrong.  I know that I was naive to say yes to our budding friendship as long as I did, but I don’t think I want to be the kind of person who says no out of fear.  In the book I was reading at the time, a character says, “people who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”  I met a Joy I will not meet again.

Day three and much improved, though it would be hard to not improve from the low of the day before.  I went to the Post Office and spent some quality time with my diary, thinking about consciousness and space.  E.M Forester in Howard’s End this morning said that people live in the spaces between Truth and Love.  He was referring to a character’s desire to be with her husband because she loves him, but conflicted because he did engage in an inner life at all.  I remember referring to the grieving process as being in the space between Knowledge and Sentiment, between what you know and what you feel.  At South Brooklyn, a phrase that kept popping up was Vision vs. Reality.  There is nothing but liminal in this world.  In Saigon, that liminal space is a bit smaller because there are so many motorbikes.  Finding my footing in this new space is going to be a daily exercise.

On my way to the post office, I met a woman in the street who was eager to chat and she brought me out of my head, thankfully.  In other news, the post office is a beautiful building with high arched French Colonial ceilings. It more closely resembles a train station than a post office.  There is a great white noise of fans and computer chirping and the occasional scream of tape being ripped.

I took a photo of the woman who borrowed my pen for a long time.  We talked to each other in our separate languages and smiled a lot.