Part Four | Harbors You’re Seeing For The First Time
By: Nia Outis
Tags: Work, Travel, Vietnam

Vietnam. Photo by Nia Outis.

Ch. 15 | I was teaching English in a city tucked up near the Chinese border.

I had arrived late at night after thirty hours in transit from L.A., including a three-hour layover in Seoul, then easy soaring above a wool pelt all the way to Hanoi; a five-hour wait in the latter city’s central bus station, for intake by the school rep; and a seven-hour comfy, cozy, jouncing ride 300 km northwest by sleeper bus—half-reclining bunk beds stretched three rows across the length of a neon-lit interior.

The ESL academy where I would work owned two buildings twenty minutes walking distance from each other: a center with classrooms, and a hostel. Both buildings housed salaried Vietnamese teachers and foreign-volunteer guest teachers, and backpackers (non-volunteers).

Only a few details matter much on a journey such as mine. Is the mattress hard? Are the showers hot? Please God, is the toilet Western? Here, the answer to these three questions was yes.

I lived at the center for starters. It was located on a noisy, polluted road. The cramped, messy women’s dorm, through whose open window an acrid smell seeped, afforded no privacy. Worse, its second-floor window glanced into the city’s most popular dog meat restaurant.

Within the week, I had moved to the hostel, which was located on a much quieter, residential street.

My only regret was relocating 25 minutes away by foot from an upscale coffee house perched atop one bank of Song Lo (the River Lo). The air quality was fresh and delicious there—a quick escape from traffic-clogged streets.

Lyrical Vietnamese pop music played in the background; behind the music, the soft rush of traffic and muted honking of horns. (Drivers there loved to honk, and must, because there wasn’t much sticking to invisible lanes or obeying the few red lights. People drove slowly and considerately and boy did they have good reflexes.)

Sipping strong coffee served with a complimentary cookie and small glass of sugar cane juice, I half sang to myself: “Heh-éllp me, I think I’m fah-áhl-ing in luh-uv again.”

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Each Vietnamese ESL teacher entered the classroom accompanied by a native English-speaking volunteer who helped with pronunciation, spelling, and so forth. This was apparently a nationwide government initiative.

The academy director assigned me classes from 2–4:30 PM in the public elementary schools.

The teachers and volunteers traveled to the public schools by moped, but moped was not for me. I tried it the first day. The young teacher drove and I rode pillion. Thin plastic helmets, yes, but kneepads no. I loved the cool air rushing past my knees but kept thinking shattered kneecaps.

In Vietnam, elders are accorded respect like nowhere else. After that first day, the considerate director assigned me the nearest elementary school in walking distance.

The kids were charming, curious, and bright. At the start of each lesson, they stood and sang “Hello, Teacher.” They were already writing well in tiếng Việt, and copying short English sentences from the blackboard, and their penmanship (using fountain pens) was beautiful. Between lessons, they poured into a schoolyard noisy and cheerful, with bright yellow, orange, and red floral banners strung across it.

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The city’s buildings combined Vietnamese, Chinese, and French-colonial styles.

The tube houses reached far back of the street as in Amsterdam. These tall and narrow old houses hid deep interiors: tiled floors, steep stairways, spacious rooms, and French doors leading onto balconies.

Many industrious families had turned their front room—behind which lay their living room, furnished with high-backed, varnished and sometimes inlaid, wooden throne-benches and chairs (they didn’t upholster as in the West)—into commercial space: ma-and-pa markets; shops selling kitchen goods, linens, clothing, shoes; kiosks serving street food. Along the main thoroughfares, these shop houses mixed with designated commercial establishments.

Many decorative house facades were painted colorfully, in pastels, but many of the buildings’ raw flanks were damp, moldy, uncared for. The A-line roofs mirrored the surrounding, steep green mountains.

My new home was located in one such, old-fashioned tube house.

My new dorm was less cramped—only eight bunk beds, two per rectangular-boxlike steel frame, and more space between the two rows. Each bunk featured a wide mattress, and pale green grommet curtains for privacy. When with a satisfying grating sound, you slid shut both perforated fabric panels along the curtain rod, you lived inside your own tiny room, high-ceilinged enough to sit up and get dressed in, wide enough to do yoga, equipped with interior clothing hooks at the foot of the bed frame and, near its head, a strong lamp and an electrical socket.

I would awake with the neighborhood’s roosters, several hours earlier than the building or the street, and huff up a flight of stairs to the rooftop showers.

Then downstairs to the kitchen to cook breakfast. The hostel supplied complimentary bread rolls and duck eggs, and sometimes I saved vegetables from dinner that could be stirred into an omelette.

The academy director’s husband brought me steamed rice, greens, and cabbage or mushrooms for lunch and dinner to spare me a 4x/day walk to and from the center, to which the other hostel residents raced by moped for meals prepared by a hired cook who sautéed the vegetables in lard and often served pork.

The hostel kitchen where I cooked breakfast and washed my dishes was also far from ideal. A plumbing problem had rendered the sink unusable. The local youngster managing the hostel cooked for paying guests in greasy, blackened frying pans and washed the dishes in the adjacent bathroom sink beside the shower and toilet.

I solved the issue by purchasing personal kitchen things that I stored beneath my bunk: an apron, a pot and frying pan, a wooden spoon and spatula, a bowl and chopsticks and mug, several plastic storage containers, a dish sponge, a dish cloth and hand towel, a roll of disposable cleaning towels, and a plastic tub that fit the kitchen-sink rim just below the faucet.

I boiled water in the kitchen kettle, and used that (not the bathroom’s hot tap water, as the young manager did) to wash and rinse my dishes. I poured the dirty soap suds down the loo.

I regretted not having brought a supply of peanut butter and canned sardines from L.A. to supplement the food provided by the director. Instead, I bought bananas and, in quantity, raw peanuts (to fry in olive oil and then store) and tofu (to fry in olive oil and sautéed onion and then freeze). I shopped for these at the wet market near the river.

Caged poultry, and live fish swimming in plastic tubs, were sold there, but by avoiding the central food market, at least I spared myself the sight of live pigs for sale and even, oh never mind, I won’t say it again.

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The city was small enough that people could walk or bicycle it, but almost no one did. They hopped on mopeds to go a distance of even five minutes through dusty streets.

Almost everyone wore masks against the raw exhaust spewing from mostly mopeds, some cars, some trucks, the occasional bus.

I would learn that mopeds are this poor but highly mobile country’s primary means of transportation. Open fires on urban or village streets, or in the countryside, whether to burn garbage, cook meals outdoors, or incinerate the symbolic paper houses and vehicles and money that, in mourning rituals, accompany the dead, added to the chronic assault on the air’s purity.

Within two weeks of arrival, my priceless capacity for taking deep breaths practically down to the navel had become compromised. I did as in Rome and bought a face mask. It looked like a single, padded bra cup with elastic ear loops.

And perhaps I told you about the sidewalks? No one used them as sidewalks! Private motorbikes and motorbikes for hire used them as parking spaces.

Front stoops, each with a short metal ladder centrally placed, led from homes to a swath of brick-colored, geometrically incised sidewalk tiles that would be pretty if not in disrepair; then a strip of thick concrete rectangles, many with rusted iron handles; then the roadway. Many of these concrete rectangles were cracked or broken, or having been dislodged, revealed gaping holes.

At first, I had wrongly surmised that people wiped their shoe soles against the ladder rungs. In fact, the ladder served for wheeling one’s moped or bicycle from the front room onto the sidewalk or vice versa.

All told, it was treacherous to navigate the sidewalks. The few pedestrians usually walked in the road amid vehicular traffic, and I followed suit. Vigilantly. This was not a city where one flânered; I did so only along the riverfront, and only after having safely negotiated streets and crosswalks on the way.

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Not all work-exchange hosts are friendly or honor the informal contract’s cultural-exchange aspect—in fact, strip away the rhetoric, and travel’s glamor, and volunteers can find themselves mere itinerant laborers in the global gig economy—but the academy director was exceptionally generous with regard to sharing her culture.

One day, she welcomed her Vietnamese teachers and international TAs to her ancestral village of smallholdings: cornfields, vegetable plots, and terraced rice paddies against a rugged, mountainous backdrop.

Farm women, wading deep in mud, at that season labored at stirring up the mud or flattening the surface with bamboo poles.

Water buffalo pasturing, chickens and ducks in the yards, dogs with hanging teats (from multiple litters) slouching along the unpaved streets, yapping fur-ball puppies—but about them, I was afraid to ask.

She ushered us across a short, gracefully arched stone bridge leading to a handsome stilt house. This enlarged and renovated farmhouse and the land had been in the family for generations, she said.

The honey-colored timber used to construct the farmhouse now was rare, she added; people weren’t allowed to fell those trees to build homes anymore.

The spacious, minimally furnished dwelling featured carved walls, a polished hardwood floor, and soaring, exposed thatch ceiling. Springlike air ventilated the whole of the interior through rectangular window piercings that rose from floor level and framed verdant countryside.

The hostess, a relative, invited us to sit on reed mats in lotus position in a circle, with various dishes placed on a round pewter tray at the hub. Being the eldest volunteer, I was invited to sit with the aunts (women in their early eighties). I ate only rice, eggs, and vegetables—and used my personal chopsticks in this, a meat-eating culture.

We drank fermented-fruit alcohol from shot glasses. Strong stuff that tingled going down! I only sipped and unlike the aunties, who knocked it back, never made it to the bottom of the first shot.

We ate bananas for dessert and drank tea. Then we chewed betel—I would do that only this once, I decided, for the experience. The eldest aunt took a leaf, sprinkled onto it a dash of powdered limestone, placed the betel nut atop the white powder, and tightly wrapped the leaf around it—then you chew, coating your teeth with plant fiber and releasing a red juice that stains.

Despite ground-down, blackened teeth, the elderly aunts were beautiful. Their smiles were good-natured and warm. Each wore a thick gold bracelet and delicate gold earrings. The one whose pale-pink silk blouse I admired had only stopped working the land three years ago, she said (holding up three fingers while the director translated). Now she was enjoying the great-grandchildren.

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The 15-day Tet (Lunar New Year) school vacation had arrived. This was serendipitous; I had not timed my visit to coincide with it.

The breezes were balmy. I walked to and from the river and crossed the bridge to Ho Chi Minh Square, or would sit out on my dorm-room balcony. I would look up from reading to admire the next door neighbors’ balcony garden, listen to their caged songbirds, and sweet-talk their cat, or my gaze would follow the flickering, swirling flight paths of mating white and yellow butterflies.

The director again took her salaried staff and TAs to her ancestral village, this time to a modest home, for a festive meal in the company of her extended, multigenerational family.

A local TV station filmed the event, to be broadcast just before Tet’s start. I was wearing the school’s bright red logo tee shirt and was more or less coerced to participate in a segment in which, for the camera, several of us ladled pork stew onto serving plates. The idea was that villagers were sharing culinary customs with international volunteers.

Of course I didn’t eat the stew, but nevertheless felt that I had compromised myself. After that part of the filming ended, I scooted past an enormous, cooked boar’s head and trotters displayed on a round, pewter platter on the floor, and down the back ladder stairs to scrub my hands in cleanser under an outdoor tap above a bucket.

Another day, the director took me with her to a friend’s village to pick up several chickens. The prosperous farmwife warmly welcomed us, inviting us to drink tea on her patio and to admire her flowering peach trees and kitchen garden.

Then we followed her into a fenced yard where chickens pecked and puppies gamboled.

(A volunteer once told me that during the civil war, starving people ate anything that moved. And also, there were those who kept dogs as pets, hiding them indoors or behind gates to protect them from the trade.)

The farmwife expertly snatched up three chickens one after another, folded the wings in order to streamline each bird and fit it through a round hole in an oblong, bamboo cage, then knotted the hole closed using a length of bamboo string. The chickens did not appear agitated, and after she had placed a plastic canvas bag over the cage, became silent.

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As holiday eve approached, public excitement mounted. The municipality planted red flags along all streets and boulevards. Gift baskets filled with cookies, candy, wine, and cigarettes appeared in shopfronts. Vendors of traditional, potted peach and orange trees appeared on major street corners. Drivers toting flowering peach trees on the back of their mopeds sped by.

On the day of holiday eve, the boulevard bordered on one side by the Bookstore (which sold everything—textbooks and school supplies, pots and pans and utensils, coffee and condiments, sunscreen and mosquito repellant, hats and sunglasses), and on the other by the entrance to the wet market, hosted a street fair hawking flowers, tinsel and tasseled prayers for decorating the potted trees, gift baskets, fruit, and so much more. It was jammed with moped and pedestrian traffic squeezing past each other as people made their final purchases.

The next day, we few remaining volunteers accompanied the director to the pagoda where the townspeople had gathered to pray to the Buddha and the ancestors. The day after, we again accompanied her to her ancestral village, visited the homes of relative after relative after relative, and ate and ate and ate.

On the third day, I popped into her bathroom to wash my hands before dinner with the family. On the floor beside the toilet bowl rested the oblong cage, now holding only two chickens, who had poked their heads and outstretched necks through the mesh and were unconcernedly nipping cooked rice from a kitchen plate. Innocents.

“I’m really sorry, you guys,” I whispered.

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My having been introduced to the pagoda, it become my urban oasis. It yielded much of beauty—red lacquerwork, Chinese lettering, gilding, the intricately incised, carved, or sculpted stone and wood of staircases and balustrades and doors and columns and rafters and rooftops, and of the tens of Buddhas, and of always another dragon or phoenix or turtle; much of awe—the grand stone staircase leading from the courtyard to the prayer complex, the main prayer hall’s lofty wooden ceiling; much that charmed—altars piled high with flowers and fruit and cake and tinned or packaged cookies, pyramids of bottled water and canned soft drinks and beer, a simple plate of boiled eggs.

The many silver-haired nuns, and several monks, clad in dark-brown linen pajama suits, seamlessly accepted the regular presence of us few Westerners at their morning services, in which rhythmic prayers uttered in a language mysterious to our ears were accompanied by the beating of a hollow, rounded, varnished wooden temple block and punctuated by the ringing of chimes and gongs.

Once settled into lotus, I engaged in mindful mishmash—Hebrew prayers followed by meditation on certain resonant Buddhist concepts. Really, at this stage in life, whatever works.

I witnessed (ignorant of the ceremonial purpose) but one instance of sartorial flamboyance—a monk garbed in a saffron yellow satin robe whose wide, pink collar-and-lapels became two loose and flowing satin ribbons.

The chanting changed in pitch; I opened my eyes. The monk performed a sacred, hypnotic dance in place, golden robe swirling, rose-pink ribbons floating, hands and long fingers delicately gesturing in time with the vocal and percussive rhythms that rose and fell about him.