Vietnam

            by Emma Bloom

 

            It was already dark when we arrived at the train station and the lights inside drenched the small waiting room in a sickly yellow glow.  Every seat was taken and entire extended families sat cross-legged on their chairs, surrounded by suitcases and grocery bags.  As we stepped through the doorway, the smell of too-ripe, mysterious fruits overtook us.  “Mommy, I don’t like it here.  It smells,” my sister whimpered. 

            “Stop whining, Hannah,” my mom scanned the room, looking for someone who might speak English and then glanced down at her watch.  “Ted, how much time do we have until our train?” 

            “Not long,” my dad answered, also craning his neck to look for signs that might lead us in the right direction.  My parents nudged Hannah and me forward and we maneuvered our suitcases toward a door leading to the outside.  A woman standing guard there asked in an accent only slightly tinged with Vietnamese if she could see our tickets.

            “Right this way,” she said, after handing them back.  We followed her brisk stride outside and down a platform, then across a set of tracks.  “Wait here, please,” she said, before hurrying off again.  A train moved slowly down the tracks in front of us, its interior dark and its windows cracked.  We could see the people inside, slumped tiredly in their seats.  It was much quieter than most of the Vietnam we’d seen so far and the air had a feeling of somberness and magnitude of mission.  As the dark mass trundled past us in silhouette against the only slightly lighter night sky, I was reminded of the movie Children of Men and its depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. 

            “Daddy, are we riding one of those trains?” Hannah asked, eyes wide.  Personally, although I doubted it, I almost wished we were.  They looked exciting and exotic and dingy and dangerous, and much more of an adventure than my parents would be willing to partake in with Hannah and me in tote, even for the sake of saving a few bucks.

            My suspicions were confirmed when the woman returned and led us across several more tracks to where another train stood waiting.  From inside the windows of this train came the warm light of lamps, illuminating beds with pillows.  I sighed with a mixture of disappointment and relief.  We hoisted our suitcases aboard and quickly found a compartment, a room so tiny that only one person could be out of their bed at a time.  For awhile we lay on our bunks fully-clothed, Hannah and I giddy and giggling from the excitement of our first real train ride and the restlessness of having to get in bed so early.  As at last the train began to move, we stared out the window at the wooden shacks topped with corrugated tin roofs sitting only feet from the tracks and the hoards of teenage couples gathered on the sidewalks of every bridge, motor scooters parked beside them.  Much sooner than I expected, however, I fell asleep to the rhythm of the rocking and the deep low rumble of wheels on track. 

            I woke at every stop, anticipating our departure, but when my dad’s alarm finally sounded at five the next morning, it was the most arduous task to sit up, rub the sleep from my eyes and climb down from the bed.  We had slept in our clothing, having had nowhere to change and we hadn’t had the opportunity to brush our teeth before sleep the night before, but my exhaustion overwhelmed all feelings of disgust. 

            My eyebrows furrowed and mouth turned down as we stepped off the train.  This had been the segment of our three week long vacation I was most looking forward to, not only for the sleeper train, but for the fog and cool temperatures my parents had promised me once we reached the mountains.  Granted I hadn’t broken a sweat on my first step outside, as I usually did.  This time, it was maybe the second.  But still, the air already felt like a warm day at home and it was only five in the morning.  This might be cool by Vietnamese standards, but it wasn’t by mine, a girl raised in the fog of Berkeley.  After some thought, I decided against mentioning my disappointment to my family.  They were bustling down the platform already far ahead of me, and anyway I knew that after a night all packed together in a room the size of a closet and the amount of sleep we had gotten, anyone was likely to erupt at any time.  I figured they were all thinking the same thing because as I jogged to catch up with them, my parents and sister were  silent as well.

            We followed the crowd to the station.  In my fatigued daze, it was easier than usual to ignore the hoards of men swarming us, tapping our shoulders.  “Taxi?” they asked, “taxi?” 

            My dad glared at them; to him any stranger is a potential thief trying to cheat him out of a dollar or two.  “Come on Betty, they’re probably cheaper outside,” he said loudly, turning to my mom.  Let it never be said that Ted neglected to save fifty cents when he had the opportunity.

            After what felt like hours to my drooping eyelids and aching shoulders (I was carrying everything I’d need for this portion of the trip in a large backpack), my dad finally selected a satisfactory cab and driver.  As I stumbled into the car, my leg caught on something.  I stared down at the white-turning-pink scrape across my shin.  Could this trip get anymore disappointing?

            As we drove up the winding roads into the mountains, however, my spirits lifted with the altitude.  It was much easier than I’d have predicted to stay awake, probably because the road was unpaved and rocky, with the occasional missing chunk.  We drove past terraced rice paddies like layer cakes of the lushest, most vibrant green I had ever seen and everything was softened by a fine mist.  I pressed my face against the window, feeling like I had stepped out of a stuffy room into fresh air and I couldn’t get enough. 

            As we wove higher through the hills, we began to pass people, standing or walking by the side of the road.  They held by rope calm and giant water buffalo, and wore layers of red and black tied with rope, something that looked like legwarmers, and elaborate red headdresses.  My family travels a lot, but everywhere we had gone before, even the more exotic places had displayed a strong western influence, especially in their clothing.  Here, the people still lived much as they always had, wearing their traditional native clothing and speaking their traditional native languages.

            I had begun to realize the lack of contact that Vietnam had with United States culture about a week earlier, at a tourist destination called the Marble Mountains.  These were-you guessed it-mountains made from marble.  Giant caves had been carved from the stone (whether they were natural or man made I’m not sure) and inside were Chinese carvings and Buddhist alters with incense.  The floors of the caves were also littered with cigarette butts and empty water bottles, but still the Marble Mountains were beautiful and people traveled from all over Vietnam to see the Buddhist caves and the incredible ocean views.   One such group of travelers latched onto Hannah and me.  Literally latched.  The middle aged women pinched our cheeks and grabbed our arms and made us pose for picture after picture with them.  “You are American?” they asked. 

            “Yes,” we said.  They smiled as if sharing a private joke among themselves and then asked my name.  When I told them, they burst out laughing and shoved us between them for yet more photographs.

            Since then, we had met many more people who had met few Americans before.  They compared our skin tones to their own, hoping to be as pale as we are, shook their heads with pity when my mom informed them she didn’t have a son, and called my dad “Happy Buddha,” for his stomach, the likes of which they had never seen.  This actually tended to make him a slightly offended Buddha.  Still, although these people had had little contact with Americans, they were very familiar with Europeans and Australians, so I didn’t consider them far removed from my own world.

            As we made our way up into the mountains, however, we began to pass more and more hills people.  “Wait, Mom?” I confirmed in disbelief, “they’re not just dressing like this for the tourists?  This is how they actually dress?”

            “Yeah,” she said.  “There are a bunch of different tribes up here and each still wears its people’s traditional style of clothing.”

            Finally, we arrived in Sapa, the small town in which we were supposed to stay.  I stepped out of the car, careful not to bang my legs this time, and took a deep breath. 

            After breakfast and a short nap at our hotel, we slipped on our ludicrous green plastic ponchos to hike down to a nearby village.  We started off through the drizzle down the dirt road, fending off offers for motor scooter rides.  As we walked, one woman, then another, then three more together joined us.  They tried at first, it seemed half-heartedly, to sell us the trinkets they pulled from somewhere inside their many layers of clothing: bracelets and small instruments and tiny dolls.  But soon they gave up trying to the persistent shaking of our heads and seemed content to just walk with us.  I glanced at my mom, eyebrows raised.  They’ve realized they can’t sell us anything.  Why are they still here?  She shrugged slightly, her eyes mirroring the confusion I felt. 

            “What are your names?” the girls asked us.  “How old are you?”  Hannah and I answered and then laughed as our parents blushed and stammered the answer to their second question. 

            “You are seventeen?” one of the women asked me.   She carried a baby on her back and one of her eyes was blue and filmy.  She pointed to herself, “I am eighteen.”  She carried a baby on her back.  I stood with my parents facing a girl only a year older than me with her baby.  We were the same age, different generations.  I felt confused for a moment, then embarrassed.  She must think I’m so immature. 

            We resumed walking and the girls came up to me one at a time, introducing themselves.  Each told us her name in turn and each name, I began to realize, was the same.  For awhile I thought I had just been meeting one girl over and over again.  “My name is Zao,” she kept saying, but soon it struck me that she looked different each time, and anyway that would be ridiculous.  The women walked ahead to catch up with my mom, who they seemed to like most and Hannah pulled me aside. 

            “Emma,” she asked, looking bewildered.  “Do they all have the same name?”  I shrugged; it was a mystery to me.

            While we picked our way past goats and pigs, down the stone steps leading to the village on the mountainside, the natives, utterly comfortable on the path, continued to point out sites and teach us about their culture.  “Our tribe is the Black Hmong people.  The dye we use on our clothes stains our skin,” Zao #1 explained, holding out her blue hands for us to examine.  They told us that although each tribe had its own language, the kids were taught Vietnamese in school so that one group could communicate with the others.  Zao #2 asked where in Vietnam we had been traveling and as we listed off the cities, she nodded attentively. 

            “Have you been to Hue?” my mom asked her.

            “Me?  Oh, no.  No, I’ve never even been to Lao Cai,” Zao #2 said, referring to the tiny town in which the train station was located, only about an hour away.   

            We walked on behind them in silence and I thought about just how lucky I was to have gained access to this world.  Moving to the front of my family, I took a mental snapshot.  All that I could see were natives in their traditional clothing, farm animals, huts, and hills and hills of a living, pulsating green.  The view bore absolutely no relation to anything I had ever seen before.  The world, which until then had seemed so small, each piece deeply affecting all others, suddenly grew, and just as suddenly, my jadedness shrank.  There was no way to fully know the world while tiny villages sat isolated on hillsides.  As long as they remained, there would always be new adventures to have and sites to see. 

I must have visibly smiled at the excitement of a fresh and waiting world, because one of the women smiled back and began again to talk to me.  For the rest of the hour-long walk down the mountain, we chatted amicably, laughing when my parents stumbled and comparing notes on our lives.  It was hard to travel beyond the most superficial details because we had so little common basis, but still, by the time we reached the village we had become friendly and comfortable. 

Before we departed to head back up the hill on the backs of the motor scooters we had previously turned down, we bought from the women several flimsy metal bracelets.  Smiling, they tied on our wrists gifts, another type of bracelet, similar to the embroidery string “friendship” bracelets little girls make at summer camp.

             When we climbed off our bikes, I beamed from a mix of the adrenalines of the ride and of making friends with people so different from ourselves.  “Wasn’t that so cool?” I asked my dad.  “I can’t believe we made friends with Black Hmong!”

“Friends?” he laughed.  “Emma, I hate to break it to you, but they just wanted our money.”

“But the friendship bracelets…”

“Those were our sucker gifts.  They felt sorry for us having paid so much for those other bracelets worth five cents.  I still can’t believe I let your mother get away with giving them so much for those.”

I turned to my mom, who was also chuckling.  “Sorry, hon,” she said.

“Oh.  I guess you guys are right,” I said.

That night, I practically fell into bed, still exhausted from the train ride and hike, but after a few moments I sat back up, switching the light back on.

“What are you doing?” my sister asked.

“Nothing,” I said, yanking the bracelet off my wrist and letting it fall to the floor beside me.