Dad's voice was shaky, choking with joy. “They're offering us refuge!”
We cheered. Mom sobbed.
Tai brought our boat alongside the black hull. The ocean was too rough for them to lower the gangplank. The waves were heaving our boat over fifteen vertical feet. A rope ladder tumbled over the rail of the ship. Tai brought us closer and the waves slammed our tiny boat against the freighter. The few spare tires on the side of the boat saved our wooden hull from breaking. Tai veered us away before the next blow. The men moved all the spare tires onto the same side and Tai made another pass at the ladder. A wave threw our boat against the
black metal hull, the tires flattened like sponge. The men were using poles and oars to soften the collision, trying to hold us off the metal hull. Oars snapped, bamboo poles splintered. The boat itself was coming apart and taking on water as though the pump was running in reverse. Tai yelled for everyone to hurry, women and children first.
The boat jumped all over the waves like an ice cube on a hot griddle, and only the men could grab hold of the ladder. Tai, Hanh, and Tieu, our strongest men, took turns carrying the women and children aboard. With a hand from one of the crew, Chi grabbed the ladder and climbed up on her own. Tai came back down and piggybacked me. He waited until the boat crested the next wave and lunged for the ladder. Waves splashed against the ship. I tasted saltwater. I was wet and blue with cold. The boat dropped, and suddenly we were dangling fifteen feet above the deck. Tai scrambled, fearing the next wave might bring the boat back up and squash us against the hull. Up and up we went, shimmying up the rope ladder.
It was his second trip so Tai was tired and slow climbing up. I was exhausted and weak. I couldn't hold on much longer. Somehow, I knew I wouldn't make it onto the ship. I felt my arms surrendering, my legs going limp around his waist. I couldn't keep myself from looking down. He was going up and I was slipping off his back. I tried hard to hang on, but my arms slipped from his wet neck. I looked down to see where I might fall. Maybe on the boat forty feet below. Maybe in the water between the boat and the ship, where I would be crushed. I was falling. Tai screamed over the howling wind, reaching back to grab me. The rope ladder twisted. I fell. A shoulder-wrenching jerk. I was hanging by one arm.
A sailor gripped my wrist. He was leaning way over the rail; someone else was holding him back from falling in with me. He held my eyes for what seemed an awfully long time as I dangled in the air. Then another arm reached down and they pulled me aboard. I sprawled on the deck of the giant ship shaking, very aware of how bad things might have turned out for me.
In minutes, we abandoned our fishing boat. The Indonesian sailors urged us inside but no one moved. We lingered at the rail to watch our life raft bobbing in the sea. Even from the deck, we could see it
sat very low in the water. In minutes there was only the top of the engine house showing, and the ocean swallowed it in the next wave. The weather deteriorated fast and even the big freighter was swaying. We prayed, thanking God, Buddha, and our dead ancestors for our deliverance.
The captain told Dad that our boat was almost out of the shipping lane. The weather had pushed us a hundred miles off course. Pointing at the dark horizon, the captain said that another half day and we would have been shipwrecked on the eastern reefs beyond the shipping lane.
Gift-Marriage
“Baaaannh Teeeeeett, ooooi! Baaaannh Teeeeeett, daaay!”
The banana-rice-cake vendor whinnies her wares as she waddles on her first morning round through the neighborhood. Night still shades the sky, and her calls echo down the alley like a lonely mother beckoning a willful son home.
I crawl out of my sleeping bag. My head feels thick, my stomach hurts. Too much liquor paired with chili peppers and fried anchovies at the bar last night. I feel dry, scooped out. My rush of emotional madness left powdery residue. I am glad to be leaving today.
I wait for the rice-cake woman on the stoop. Normally, I mimic her cry from any part of the house, and no matter how noisy the neighborhood is, she hears and waits for me in the alley. I buy a mug of tea and two rice cakesâVietnamese Twinkies wrapped in banana leaves. The gooey grains of glutinous rice, green and fragrant with the banana leaves, taste fat and fruit-sweet, like candied caviar. Embedded at the center, the ladyfinger banana has changed to a lavender hue haloing an ivory core. Hot tea in hand, I savor them, standing in the alley, back against the wall, watching the strip of sky navying over.
One by one the breakfast women weave through the alleys. The parade of food baskets ribbons the morning air with the varied aromas
from every region of Vietnam:
banh canh
(udon in chicken broth),
bun bo hue
(spicy beef and anchovy-paste noodle soup),
hu tieu
(Chinesestyle noodle soup),
banh beo
(rice dumpling with shrimp powder and fishsauce),
tau hu
(soft tofu with ginger syrup),
banh cuon
(rice crepes with Vietnamese sausage and fishsauce),
soi
(sweet rice with mung beans and coconut shavings),
banh mi thit
(ham-and-pickled-daikon sandwiches), and a host of other morning food. Vietnam is a country of food, a country of skinny people obsessed with eating.
As I prepare for the ride, methodically stowing gear in the panniers to balance the load, I realize how out of shape I am. I haven't been on the road for a month now. My days in Vietnam have been a series of food binges, libation excesses, and bouts of diarrhea. It has been nearly two months since I cranked out two eighty-mile days in a row. Saigon to Vung Tau, today's destination, is about seventy miles.
I sent a postcard to Huy and his boyfriend, Sean, from Japan, telling them I was heading to Vietnam. Sean mentioned this to his mother, who owned a modest beach house in Vung Tau. She lives in San Francisco and comes back two months out of the year. She graciously offered me the use of her house, though she regretted not being able to offer me her entire estate because the Communists had seized everything. She was only able to buy back a fraction of what she once owned.
I tell Grandaunt and Granduncle that I am going out to the beach house to recuperate. Saigon's smog and heat have given me a persistent hack. I cough up black phlegm and have recurring stomachaches, which medications stem but cannot dispel. The latter problem concerns me most because on the road I will be eating whatever is convenient, and diarrhea is a fiendish curse when you're in the saddleâas I discovered in Mexico.
The entire clan sends me off at dawn. Grandaunt and Granduncle, still in their pajamas, shuffle up and down the alley, boasting to the neighbors who come out to watch that their grandnephew is riding out to Vung Tau on a bicycle. One hundred twenty kilometers! What do you think of that? He comes from a long line of sportsmen. Anyone want to ride with him? Hahahahahaha. Next door, Mr. Tinh asks, why doesn't he simply ride a motorcycle, it's a lot less tiring. Granduncle exclaims,
Sport!
as though it is the clever answer to a
riddle. The neighbors ooh and ahh, all fairly impressed with my ride because physical exertion, manual activities, are not a part of their culture. Sports are seen on television, something they might have dabbled in as schoolchildren. In fact, as one grows older, it is more prestigious to engage in fewer manual activities, sports included. Who ever heard of a grown man “doing” a sport? A solo sport and no prize! Bafflement plainly on their faces.
While Granduncle embarrasses me, Grandaunt wags a finger in my face: “
Don't even think about sneaking off to bike to Hanoi. Don't you dare. Go and recuperate. Get better. We'll all take a vacation and come out there to visit you soon.”
“Yes, Grandaunt,”
I lie, bowing, nodding as I have been taught to do all my life. Never disagree with your elders to their faces. Don't make them lose face. Whatever you must do, do it behind their backs. If you're caught, take the punishment eagerly, earnestly, like a true repentant. If not, stow the deed among the others.
Viet and Khuong are decked out in their riding gear, jeans, windbreakers, and Los Angeles Lakers caps, raring to go. Grandaunt has decided her sons will take the day off to escort me out to Vung Tau because, she says, the road is dangerous and full of bandits. Cousin Nghia tags along for fun. The three of them pile on one 100cc motorcycle, Nghia sandwiched tightly between his uncle Viet and his uncle Khuong. Viet, the driver, takes both of my panniers. He sets the larger pair over the gas tank, balancing it against his belly. The smaller pair he bungees to the tiny book rack on the back of the motorbike. The little Honda sags dangerously under 450 pounds.
By the time we leave, the sun peeks orange through the screen of trees lining the road. Already, the roads are congested. Within two miles, I sweat with nervous exhaustion in the toxic air, negotiating the dangerous traffic. A group of students gather around me. Soon, I lead a motorcade of fifteen motorbikes. They bump one another, jockeying for a position closer to me. I smile at them. They beam back. Emboldened, they shout questions over the din of traffic.
“Halloo! Where rrrre you phrrom?”
“Good morningsss. Where do you go?”
“My name is Trung. May I talk wip you?”
“Welcome to Viet Nam. You come drink
café
with me? I ⦠in ⦠invite.”
I tell them I'm Vietnamese American. They shriek, “
Viet-kieu!”
It sounds like a disease. The news travels down the procession and the excitement subsides. Half of the group peels away, losing interest since I am not a real foreigner. The others continue to tag along to talk, quite impressed with my trip, which I relay as they ride several miles out of their way to escort me to the city limit. I feel safe inside a buffer zone two riders deep.
On Highway 1, a concrete divider keeps the chaos going in one direction from colliding head-on with the chaos going in the other direction. Though the road is wide enough for three lanes in each direction, there are no lane markings, no shoulders, not even oil tracks, just one big long river of asphalt boiling with Brownian motion. If there are laws concerning what types of vehicle or creature are allowed on the national highway, the traffic cops aren't enforcing them, too busy extorting bribesâunofficial fines, they call themâfrom truck and bus drivers who prove more lucrative prey than single travelers. Besides the pedestrians who walk along the edge of the road and occasionally attempt mad sprints across the highway, the road teems with cattle-drawn carts, horse-drawn wagons, load ponies, wheelbarrows, herders with cattle, cyclos, bicyclists, and everything motorized. Dust cloaks everything. The air, a metallic blue fog, makes the road murky, twilight-like. With the tropical humidity, it doesn't so much settle as it condenses on the skin like a poisonous mist. The engines roar, the animals bleat, the horns, the curses, and the screams boil into a fantastic cacophony. Set back from the road under the shade of a few scraggly trees, the spectator cafés dot the length of the highway on both sides, their sooty lawn chairs all facing the traffic.
I draft behind Viet's motorcycle, struggling to keep up, but I am out of shape. We turn off the highway onto a smaller road going out toward the coast. The shanties continue to bank the road. There is no break in the land or the crowd. Remnants of a tropical forest, trees rise above the lumpy plain, scattered like stubble on a drunkard's face. At a shed with a concrete slab floor, we slurp down vile bowls of beef noodle soup. I eat with one hand and swat flies with the other. Viet, the
scientist, comes up with a bright idea and beckons our waiter, a shirtless ten-year-old boy, to bring us the electric fan. Sure enough, it banishes the flies, but blows the road dust right into our faces and soup. No one else seems to mind, so I buckle up and slurp my noodles, determined not to be “Viet-kieu crybaby.” Maybe when grit and grime infuse every cell of my body, I will truly be Vietnamese again.
The terrain is flat all the way out to the coast. Rice paddies and fruit groves stretch away to the hills on either side of the road. Saigoners, mostly laughing young couples and students, buzz past us, also heading out to the beach for the weekend. People wave at me, shouting greetings exuberantly, beckoning me to come and eat at their cafés.
Five hours later, we arrive in Vung Tau, a sleepy tourist town geared for the foreign oil workers and executives. Viet leads us down to the tourist beach for a quick swim. We rent sun chaises. A mob of vendors descend on us, plucking at our sleeves and thrusting bowls of clams and snails in our hands. Teenage girls shove baskets of fruit, warm cans of sodas, and Evian bottles at us. Sellers outnumber prospective buyers five to one.
Clusters of Russians scatter along the two miles of sandy beach. They started vacationing in Vietnam soon after the country's reunification. Many are part of the Russian oil interest headquartered in this resort town. They sprawl on the sand with their entire clans, children and grandparents. They are big, obese, in fact, great with food, and either pale-skinned (recent arrivals) or baked as red as steamed lobsters, buttery with suntan oil. Gangs of vendors squat around them, looking like scrawny mutts waiting for table scraps.
“You help me. You buy crab? Fresh. Very good.”
“No. No. No buy. You go. We no buy.”
“Coca-Cola? Evian? Chocolate?”
“No. We want sit alone. No buy!”
“Banana? Oranges?”
The two groups despise each other, one taking the other hostage. A two-yard neutral zone separates the warring factions. There are so many vendors that the Russians have difficulty getting to the luscious warm water. The unwilling foreign buyers resent the intrusive, persistent native sellers, shooing them away like strays to no avail. The
merchants, having nowhere else to go, nothing better to do, no one else to whom they could sell food and drink at five or ten times the going price, wait patiently, socializing among themselves. They only have to wait. The aromas of their garlic mussels broiling over coal eventually overcome even the most trenchant babushka.
Clink, clink, clink. The entire cliff face sounds like a giant wall of a clock-repair shop, boasting a thousand broken timepieces knocking out of tune, out of time. A thousand clinks a minute, metal on stone. Clink, clink, clink, beckons the cliff. As the road to the back side of the peninsula dips out of the sun, into the cool shade of the cliff, I come to a stop, my eyes fumbling with the change of light. “Oy! Oy!” Someone calling hello. The stonecutters stand up high on the raw face of the cliff, their plastic-sandaled feet finding purchase on shingles and shards of irregular, brittle rocks. These waifs are serrating the very bone of the earth, clawing, eating their way ragged into the gray, red, ivory rock. They are everywhere, like termites. Little men in shorts and baseball caps, women in dusty pajamas and conical straw hats cling to the cliff, their holds invisible from where I stand. They look disposable, little spiders ready to be plucked by a breeze. They are scaling the vertical jags, agile and fearless with neither safety harnesses nor guidelines. Their passage releases drizzles of dust and pebbles. They fracture the stone face of the hill in coffin-sized slabs, sending them down to explode at the bottom. An army of cart pushers and basket carriers scrambles over the rubble to bring the crumbs to safety for measuring and shaping. Then they load the processed bits of the mountain onto waiting Russian trucks. All this to make room for a tourist seaside boulevard.
On the other side of the peninsula is a strip of settlements, mostly fisherfolk homes and two dilapidated motels. There are no street numbers so I ask around until I find the house. Viet and his musketeers bid me goodbye and roar back to Saigon. Mr. Ba, the housekeeper, and his wife greet me at the door and, after many bows, show me to the master studio accessed through the servant quarters where they live. The one-room studio sits apart from the front building, on a lip of land, its balcony jutting out over the water. Waves lap the rock embankment
three feet below. The roof is flat and tiled with terra-cotta. A thatched awning turns the roof into a veranda. Two coconut palms shade the side of the house. Mr. Ba scats up the ladder as easily as a boy and cuts me a fresh coconut for my welcoming drink.
I've been saving it for you,
he says as he hacks open the coconut with a machete in that casual, loose-limbed, flailing manner Vietnamese wield a machete. Mrs. Ba cooks a dinner with clams and fish we bought from the boy next door, who casts his net every day from the breakwater behind his house.
I sit up late on the balcony exchanging stories with Mr. and Mrs. Ba. The couple describe the terrible, hungry years following the fall of Saigon. Shaking with decades-old emotions, Mr. Ba tells me of how he had to serve the French, then the Japanese, then the Americans, a lifetime of servitude without rewards.