A couple of bottles of Tiger Beer later, I ended up getting sidetracked into a discussion with the boyishly handsome American guy in the backward baseball cap. Andy, who was an expat photojournalist from San Francisco, had been living in Hanoi on and off for the past few years and had been doing extended assignments for editorial heavyweights like The New York Times, Newsweek, and the International Herald Tribune. His work had taken him all over Vietnam, where he’d reported on social issues and, with the help of a translator, explored corners of the country that even most locals never got to see. He’d snapped photos of Agent Orange orphans, documented the conditions suffered by peasants in rural hospitals, and recorded the gruesome work done at Vietnamese slaughterhouses (“kinda tough to stomach for a vegetarian,” he told me).
His face glowed in the digital display as he showed me picture after picture of scenes that he’d lain in wait to capture for hours, sometimes days. I found myself riveted—by his passion for his work, the abiding respect he had for the local people, his sense of quiet determination and purpose. This was one American who’d literally viewed Vietnam from thousands of different angles through the lens of his camera and had developed a deeper appreciation for it as a result. Andy admitted that even now, after years spent trekking all over the country, he still had a lot to learn about the culture, the language, the social interactions, and the people.
That made me pause. The girls and I had barely left the Old Quarter, and we’d already decided we’d seen enough of Hanoi to cross the border and leave early. Suddenly I realized what a mistake that could be.
Though we’d run into some bad luck here, we’d also made some pretty novice mistakes. We’d let exhaustion get the better of us. We’d taken cultural differences personally. And we’d been basing most of our assumptions about Vietnam on our limited experiences in the Old Quarter, a single square kilometer that probably revealed as much about Vietnam as Times Square does about the rest of America.
Even though we didn’t have much time left (even by Jen’s original Excel chart calculations), I hoped we could stick around Hanoi and give ourselves an opportunity to see another side of it. I figured that I might need to do a bit of a sales pitch to convince Holly and Jen, but to my surprise, they were both quick to agree that we should stay. While I’d been wrapped up in Andy (in his photographs and stories, I mean), Emanuel and his Scottish roommate Katie had given Jen and Hol a little perspective on our experiences during the last several days.
Katie confirmed that we weren’t imagining the edge of hostility and said that when she’d first moved to Hanoi, she’d encountered a seriously cold shoulder. “As odd as this sounds, ya really can’t take it personally. Young women, especially foreigners traveling with no husband or guy to speak of, they just aren’t given much respect here. In a lot of the cases, men would still rather negotiate with another man. That’s sad, but it’s a fact.”
“And if you look like a sloppy backpacker, you’ll definitely get treated like one,” added Emanuel. “The vendors here know the packers always try to haggle down prices below what stuff is actually worth, so they don’t even want to deal with them. Regular tourists, they just charge them some crazy price hoping that they don’t know any better.”
The best way to earn respect in Hanoi, our friends explained, was to avoid looking as if you’d just rolled out of bed in your sweats. Dress up a little, smile politely at the person you’re dealing with, and never, ever lose your cool. If you act as if the person is going to rip you off (and apparently, a lot of Westerners like us did), they’ll probably treat you with an equal amount of negativity or just act as if you’re not there at all.
And if you really want to get on equal footing with the locals, said Emanuel, rent a motorbike. “There’s no better way to see the city, and avoid being harassed by random guidebook touts and postcard sellers, than when you have your own set of wheels.”
He asked us to stick around town until at least the weekend, so he and his roommates could invite us to their house in the suburbs of West Lake, make us dinner, and show us another side of the city. “You’ll be the only Americans around for miles,” he assured. We promised him that we would come.
Early the next morning, we got up, put on the outfits that we typically saved for dressier occasions, styled our hair, and walked out into one of the warmest winter days we’d experienced since arriving in the city. We took a long walk south of Hoan Kiem Lake, leaving the Old Quarter for the first time, heading beyond the Opera House, past all recognizable landmarks, museums, and tourist attractions, bound for some distant, undetermined point. Block after block passed under our feet, and eventually the whine and rush of the traffic, a sound that filled my ears even at night, tapered to a low rumble. I could no longer pinpoint our exact position on the city map.
People on the street, sitting on the curb, and standing inside shops watched us as we passed. They peeked out of doorways, over chessboards and stew pots, their looks more curious than anything else. Maybe they figured we were lost, tourist refugees from some foreign country, but everyone left us to our own devices. Whenever we smiled at people—schoolboys, fruit vendors, bicycle mechanics, old women tending grandchildren—some people looked surprised, but a lot of them smiled back.
Later that afternoon, we passed a small boutique with silk dresses, scarves, and purses displayed inside the window. Just beyond the glass, two salesgirls were laughing and chattering as they folded up squares of jewel-toned fabric and set them out on a table.
“Can we go inside?” Holly asked hopefully, already heading for the door.
Tiny bells chimed to signal that customers had arrived. The salesgirls looked up.
“Sin jow,” said Holly, “good afternoon” in Vietnamese. Emanuel had written down a few phrases phonetically spelled for us to supplement the ones in our guidebook, and we’d been trying to use them as much as possible.
“Xin chào,” responded the girl wearing a white puffer coat.
“Cay neigh gee-ah—” Holly said, trying to remember the rest of the phrase for “how much is this?” as she motioned toward one of the dresses she’d seen in the window.
“Cái này bao nhiêu tiên?” The girl in the puffer coat walked over to see which item Holly was pointing at. She began speaking in Vietnamese, and Holly shook her head to show she didn’t understand. The woman motioned for her to wait, then shouted something into a back room. A few seconds later, a young woman in a black blazer emerged.
“Hello. I am Lan. You—ah—need help with something?” she said slowly as she approached. Holly indicated that she’d like to try on the dress and showed her which one. The woman nodded, pulling a similar dress from a nearby rack and handing it to her.
“You Australian lady?” Lan asked. “U.K.? German girls?”
“Americans,” Jen answered.
“Oh, yes? American?” she responded, sounding more curious than anything else. The girl in the puffer coat asked Lan something, and she translated the question. “You—three-ah-sista?”
We smiled and looked at one another. Since Jen and I had similar coloring and were the same height, we were often confused for sisters (and sometimes even twins, depending what country we were visiting), but no one had ever thought all three of us were related. I loved the idea that we were all part of the same family, but we confirmed to the women that we were just friends.
“And are you?” Holly asked, looking around at the young women. “You are sisters?”
Lan translated, and the other two burst into laughter.
“No, we are friend. Good friend. Like you.”
I’d like to report that during our final few days in Hanoi the girls and I experienced one incredible life-altering event that forced us to see the error of our ways. We didn’t. Instead, it was an ongoing series of simple, positive interactions, like the ones with our magazines friends Ngoc and Tuan, Andy the photographer, the women at the dress shop, the people we’d meet during our walks, and even Emanuel and his quintet of expa
t roommates, that subtly adjusted our original negative impression of the country and helped us feel a little more at home in a place that had initially seemed so unwelcoming.
By the time we left the city, the three of us wondered if we’d return someday. And if, after all we’d experienced, maybe we’d gotten it wrong. Maybe Hanoi was our kind of town after all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jen
BANGKOK, THAILAND
FEBRUARY
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a girl on a mission, the one with a never-ending supply of grand plans. When I was ten, I became obsessed with the idea of boarding school, so I called an urgent family meeting to discuss my possible attendance. Though I loved my parents, I questioned whether my suburban hometown could afford enough adventure to sustain me through high school. As always, my mom and dad were sympathetic to my latest plight but claimed they’d miss me too much to send me away. Oh, the burden of being the sole offspring and family entertainer. But with other ambitions on the horizon, such as trips with my camping group, drama club tryouts, and sports leagues, I forged ahead.
By the seventh grade, I was knee-deep in a promising soccer career and working toward a varsity position as a high school freshman. As a junior, I was devising an advanced placement curriculum to max my GPA. Throughout college it was an ongoing schedule shuffle to fit in soccer, sorority, my business major, and a long-distance boyfriend. Then with only a few suitcases and an air mattress to plop on Amanda’s floor, I was off to New York City to pursue a television career. Soon I was plotting a path from sales to marketing, then from network to cable, followed by a GMAT course. Just when I thought I’d hit a wall, the round-the-world trip came up and I was back in business with the grandest plan of all.
But suddenly here I was, Bangkok-bound on a Boeing 757 jet, and it hit me: for the first time in nearly two decades, my future was 100 percent open, with no clear-cut path to follow. Unless a husband and two kids were waiting for me back in the States, there was no next phase to glide into naturally. I didn’t have a clue where I’d be living or what I’d be doing a few months from now.
“So you’ll be going back to Manhattan when your big adventure is through, I suppose?” my Irish flightmate, Daniel, asked. In the few hours since we’d left London—my stopover city from the States, where I’d just spent two and a half weeks visiting my family—we’d swapped mini–life stories, so he knew all about Amanda, Holly, and our world travels.
“You know, I’m not really sure,” I replied slowly, visions of sleazy apartment brokers, a zero bank balance, no boyfriend, and no job zapping my brain like migraine waves.
“I was there once as a boy and loved it. And how exciting that you work in television.”
“Yeah. It was exciting. Maybe I’ll go back. I’m not sure, though,” I said. Old snapshots of Brian and me meeting for lunch in our shared office building or swapping stories about projects and industry contacts over takeout suddenly flashed before my eyes, tempting me to activate the emergency barf bag tucked in the seat pocket.
“Hey, no worries. You’ll figure everything out when you get home,” he said, which was another sad reminder that my parents had recently sold my childhood house in Maryland to retire to Florida. “So, no sense in fretting now. And how could ya, when the attendant is giving us all these extra bottles?” he added with a grin, toasting my wineglass with his fourth whiskey mini.
Try as I might to stash Daniel’s free-spirited attitude in my carry-on and transport it with me off the plane, our innocent Q & A session opened a Pandora’s box of dormant neuroses. As I sat all alone in my Big John’s Hostel dorm, my inner demons flew out in a fury. In less than four months our trip would be over, and then what? Where would I live? What would I do for work? How was I supposed to start my dating career at twenty-nine, when most of my friends were nearing the end of theirs? What if “The One” was a figment of my overly romantic imagination and I never got married and had babies?
I tried to tell myself that it was just my fatigue talking. Between the six-hour flight from Tampa to Gatwick, a bus transfer to Heathrow, a nine-hour layover, a twelve-hour flight to Thailand, customs, baggage claim, and the taxi ride to Big John’s, I’d been awake and on the move for who knows how long. I’d lost track of time somewhere over Europe. But if I could just get some sleep, things would surely look brighter in the morning. Unfortunately, the morning on this side of the world wasn’t due to appear for a while. It was barely 5 p.m., and I knew that the nearly deserted hostel would soon be flooded with backpackers returning from a day of sightseeing to pile onto hall couches and watch movies, hit the downstairs bar, or get ready for a night out.
So as much as I hated to wrench myself off my comfy platform bed, it made sense to push through for a few more hours and crash out with everyone else later. Besides, it’d probably be good for me to walk around and clear my head, maybe grab a bite to eat. Plus, I still needed to e-mail the girls to let them know I’d arrived safely and coordinate meeting up either with Amanda and her family the next day or with Holly in Koh Tao, where she was getting her scuba certification.
Once the layers of travel grime were scrubbed off my body and rinsed down the communal shower drain, I changed into my standard Southeast Asia uniform (tank top, diaphanous skirt, and flip-flops) and headed outside to hit my favorite shopping pavilion up the street. Unlike Khao San Road, the infamous backpackers’ ghetto where Leonardo DiCaprio acquires the map to The Beach and where most of Bangkok’s budget accommodations are still found, Big John’s was nestled in the upscale Sukhumvit neighborhood—a formerly seedy area that had been recently revitalized with modern offices, trendy restaurants, dance clubs, art galleries, and bridal boutiques, and sprinkled with intermittent noodle stalls, lemongrass-scented spas, and tuk-tuk stands.
Settling in a lounge chair on the al fresco patio of Au Bon Pain, which, along with Starbucks, was the preferred haunt of local artists and designers, I nursed an iced latte under a striped umbrella and watched the community’s daily grind slow to a smooth churn. Well-heeled wives greeted their sharply dressed businessmen husbands for dinner, teens in the latest punk/mod attire browsed record store aisles, schoolkids nibbled on sweet banana skewers, and expats loaded groceries into parked BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes.
While the implications of Daniel’s in-flight survey still pressed on the back of my mind, sitting in this serene pocket of the city, I felt much more relaxed and couldn’t help but relish the quirkiness of my existence. Less than forty-eight hours earlier, I had been lying on my parent’s sofa watching old movies, and now here I was in another country halfway around the world, chilling alongside a crowd of Thai hipsters.
“Excuse me, do you know if this is the right way to the Skytrain?” asked a slender blonde who stood a few feet away on the sidewalk, motioning down the street.
“Oh, um, yeah, it is,” I said, realizing she was talking to me. “Just keep going until you get all the way to the end of the road and turn right. You’ll see the tracks above you and a set of stairs up to the entrance.”
“Ah, brilliant. You’re a lifesaver. Thank you,” the girl said.
Although Bangkok was an incredibly user-friendly city, the similarly named and numbered sois (streets) could be really confusing. It’d taken Amanda, Holly, and me a few wrong turns to get the city down, but at this point, even as directionally challenged as I was, I could navigate the public transportation system to most major landmarks.
Once I was caffeinated enough to stay awake for a while longer, I headed back to Big John’s, where a typical hostel scene was already in progress: new arrivals crowded the lobby, tossing out questions about prices and facilities, regulars lounged with books or took advantage of the free Internet connection, a handful of guys was engrossed in a rugby match on TV, and the local staff delivered bottles of Chang Beer and Australian-style pies (think meat, not fruit) to tables of backpackers, then dashed back to the desk to distribute keys and promote packaged tours.
Without Amanda and Holly there as social buffers, I suddenly felt exposed and self-conscious, as if it were my first day at a new school and everyone was staring at me thinking “Aww, look at that nerd, she doesn’t have any friends to sit with.” Since all the lobby computers were currently occupied, I found a seat at an empty table and immediately snagged a menu, studying the dinner section as if it contained the secret to eternal bliss. During the torturously long wait for my meal, I tried to project the image of a mysterious loner. Yes, I lounged in golden wheat fields contemplating the tragic beauty of the universe. Yes, I poured my poetic angst into leather-bound journals while sipping bourbon in smoky speakeasies.
But after a few odd looks from the waitress, I assumed I looked more crazy than cool, so I gave up. Even after I had eaten a plate of pad Thai one noodle at a time, strolled to the reception to inquire about the cost of laundry, and scribbled a slew of useless travel to-do lists in my notebook, no one looked any closer to abandoning their keyboards, and I was running out of ways to appear busy.
Jesus, Jen, get a grip. You could run upstairs and grab a book, buy a cookie or maybe even…
“Is anyone sitting here?” asked a muscular guy with a slightly affected American accent. Whew! Saved.
“Nope, it’s all yours,” I replied in my most nonchalant tone.
“Cool. Thanks,” he said, plopping down next to me and pulling an expensive-looking camera from around his neck. “Holy shit, I’m sweating. I should really go change my shirt. Hey, you know, supposedly there’s a restaurant down the street with a garden and lots of fans and…”
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