The Yellow Envelope

by Kim Dinan

  I thought back to our lunch break earlier in the day, when I’d overheard one of the people on our tour talking about his plans to install a heated closet that would dry his bike gear when he came in from a ride in the rain. I’d looked around the table in shock, thinking it must be a joke, because I could not image that installing a heated closet to dry clothing was a good and practical idea. But no one else had seemed fazed by it. I wanted to scream, there are people living in shacks without electricity and you want a heated closet to dry your BICYCLE GEAR? Instead, I’d excused myself from the table and sat in the bathroom stall for such a long time that Brian eventually came to check on me.

  At one time in the not-too-distant past I, too, would not have batted an eye at the idea of a heated closet for drying bicycle gear. But now it felt so ridiculously excessive to me. These days I was more comfortable at a teahouse in Nepal, sleeping in a simple room and eating simple meals, than I was in the upscale hotels we were staying at during our bicycle tour. And I felt more comfortable around other travelers, who asked not what I did for a living but where I had been and where I was going, than I did around people who were from my own country. During the course of our trip I’d learned to slip into new cultures, but my intolerance with a few of the members in our group made me afraid I was becoming uncomfortable with my own.

  Back down at the bungalows, Michele and Glenn were sipping fresh lime soda on the restaurant balcony. I’d still not found a chance to talk to them about how we’d used their yellow envelope money, and I hoped that this was my opportunity to bring it up. As I waited for an opening to broach the subject, Michele spoke up. “Hey,” she said, “I’ve been thinking. We’d like to donate some money to a local school or two. I talked to Hao about it, and he said that he could pick up some school supplies on the mainland tomorrow before we take off. Do you guys want to donate too?”

  I’d been hoping that we’d be able to give away yellow envelope money with Glenn and Michele. But because Brian and I had always given only when an opportunity presented itself, I figured we’d just wait and see if anything came up. It hadn’t occurred to me to arrange something with Hao.

  “Yeah,” Brian said. “Definitely. That’s a great idea.”

  “Because we are with a big group and on a tight schedule I figured that the odds of happening upon a situation befitting the yellow envelope might be slim. This way we can do something together.”

  “Speaking of,” I said, “as soon as we can find some time I want to show you guys a little slideshow I put together of the people we’ve given your yellow envelope money to. My computer is back on the bus so we can’t do it now, but I want to sit down and show it to you before our trip is over.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” said Michele. “I can’t wait to see it.”

  The next morning, we drove through rural villages linked by long stretches of rice fields. Livestock meandered slowly down the street as we weaved around old gray water buffalo. Plastic garbage lined the side of the road, as did pigs and monkeys and skinny dogs.

  Our behemoth of a bus stopped in front of a two-room schoolhouse on an isolated road. Its tiled roof was chipped and eroding, and the sandy front yard was pitted by the indentation of child-sized footprints. An awning hung over a skinny porch that connected the two rooms of the school.

  Hao stood at the front of the bus. “Excuse me everybody, I have an announcement! Michele and Glenn and Kim and Brian have made a donation to this school. I have bought school supplies with their donation, and now we will go into this school to give the children the supplies.” He clapped his hands. “Okay! They are not expecting us, so I will go talk to the teacher first.”

  Hao turned to walk off the bus.

  “Wait!” said Eddie. “What about us? Why weren’t we asked to donate?”

  The entire bus looked up at Hao. My cheeks burned pink with embarrassment. I hadn’t considered how we’d explain the donation to the rest of our group or how they might react to it, and I definitely hadn’t thought about asking anyone else to get involved. Sinking down in my seat, I waited for the moment to pass.

  Hao did not skip a beat. “That is very nice of you, Eddie, but there’s no need! This is already so much money. A little money buys a lot of school supplies here in Vietnam!”

  He stepped off the bus and walked across the sandy yard to the schoolhouse. Everyone on the bus turned toward the four of us.

  “What a good idea,” said Pat’s wife, Mary. I strained to hear Michele’s response, curious if she would tell them about the yellow envelope.

  “Thanks” was all she said.

  Eddie grumbled to his wife. “I wish I would have known about it. I really would have liked to contribute.”

  For a moment I considered explaining to Eddie and the rest of the group the nature of Michele and Glenn’s gift, in order to clear up any misunderstandings about why we’d decided to donate. But to complicate matters, the money I’d given to Hao had not come from Michele and Glenn but from Jaimie and Will, the couple who had unexpectedly emailed me back in Nepal and asked to contribute to the yellow envelope fund. The whole thing felt too convoluted to explain, so instead I stared out the window and waited for Hao to return.

  Our arrival had drawn the attention of the villagers. Women and children who were not in school, though they probably should have been, wandered over and gathered in a crowd under the awning, watching Hao sort through the supplies.

  Hao led us inside the first classroom and fourteen kindergarteners stared up at us with dark, wide eyes. They looked so tiny behind their wooden desks and squirmed and giggled in their chairs at the gigantic, spandex-clad foreigners that had just interrupted their school day. We gathered in front of them, near the blackboard, unsure of what to do next. After Hao made an announcement, a little girl, her hair pulled back into a dark ponytail, rose from her desk and sang us a song.

  Hao had purchased colored clay, pencils, paper, pens, scissors, glue sticks, rulers, and a dozen other school supplies. I had assumed that we would give the supplies to the teacher and let him figure out what to do with them, but Hao told us to pass the supplies out to the children directly.

  Some of our group began doling out the supplies, and a few others migrated to the back corner of the classroom. Feeling uncomfortable, I joined them there. Distributing the supplies this way felt like an awfully big production and something tugged at me on the inside like a snagged thread.

  From my vantage, I watched as one of the men in our group named Brad snapped photos and dramatically handed out supplies, extending a pencil or a ruler to a child and then making sure he snapped a photo midtransaction. Then he’d pose with the kids by picking them up or sitting close to them at their desks. I felt myself recoil. They leaned away from him, their body language suggesting that they were uncomfortable, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  Leave the kids alone! I wanted to scream, before rounding everyone up and corralling them back on the bus to leave the teacher to determine the best use of the supplies. Our presence felt invasive to me. It had been a mistake to make this donation.

  Hao approached me and handed me a stack of notebooks. “Give them to the kids,” he said, and nudged me encouragingly toward the center of the room. Reluctantly, I took the notebooks from his hand and walked from desk to desk, handing one to each child. They seemed amused, maybe confused, but they smiled and acted genuinely pleased with their new supplies. As I made my way around the classroom, I began to relax a little.

  Outside of the schoolhouse a group of women and children huddled around Hao as he passed out the remaining supplies. As he got to the end of the pile they began to swarm him, grabbing for anything, and he had to scream and fight his way out from the mob.

  We climbed back on the bus, and it lurched on toward our starting-off point for the day. The schoolhouse disappeared behind us in a cloud of dust kicked up by the wheels of our bus. The wh
ole interaction with the kids in the classroom felt forced and contrived to me. Most of our group had been respectful, and most of the kids had seemed genuinely amused by our presence, but whatever Brad had done back there felt incredibly self-serving. And I didn’t know what to think about the women and children that mobbed Hao. They’d probably needed the supplies more than the kids that were in school—it didn’t feel fair. As I sat back in the seat and closed my eyes, I wished we had not come.

  Later that evening, after we’d checked into our hotel room, Brian and I found Michele and Glenn in the bar. When I asked Michele what she thought about Brad interacting with the kids, I was surprised when she told me that she’d seen him in a totally different light. She said she thought Brad embraced life wholeheartedly and that visiting the school had been no exception. In fact, when she watched Brad taking pictures with the kids, she wished that she could fully jump into any situation and wring all of the joy out of it in the same way he could. Michele had watched Brad, and I had watched the kids, and we came away with two very different interpretations of the same experience. Was I allowing some of the difficult personalities and my own discomfort over being pampered to taint the way I experienced our ride through Vietnam? Michele saw the best in everyone, including me, and the least I could do to honor all she’d done for me was to do the same. From here on out, I told myself, I’d try to see our tour mates through Michele’s eyes.

  Chapter 19

  We biked on through the dense jungle, past waterfalls and mountain peaks dripping in a mystical fog. Banana leaves reached out to us like ghostly arms as we cycled by. The whole world glowed intensely green.

  We stopped for the night at another luxury hotel, everything prebooked and pristine for our arrival. Our room had a king-sized bed fluffed with overstuffed pillows and a showerhead as big as a dinner plate that dispensed a stream of piping hot water. Stripping off my stinking spandex, I let the water pound my shoulders and lower back. I had not felt so sore, or so pampered, in a very long time.

  After showering and dressing, I joined the rest of our group in the lobby before dinner. Michele, Glenn, and Brian were sitting around a small table, and I took the open seat that faced out over the opulent foyer and toward the front desk where Katherine was engaged in a heated conversation with both Hao and the hotel manager.

  “What’s going on over there?” I asked.

  “She’s mad because the water pressure in her shower wasn’t strong enough.”

  I couldn’t help it—I rolled my eyes. Over the past few days, I’d heard Katherine complain about a fascinating array of topics: the food was too spicy or not spicy enough, the street was too dusty, our guide biked too fast.

  “If all she wanted was good water pressure she should have just stayed home,” I grumbled, remembering those I met in India and Nepal that had to haul water for miles and bathe from buckets.

  “There’s one in every group,” Michele said, letting me know that our opinions about Katherine were the same.

  The next morning, I flipped on the light, brushed my teeth, and stepped back into my skintight biking outfit. Sitting down on the bed, I dug through my day pack for a pen. When I found one I wrote “Thank you,” on the little pad of paper on the bedside table and tucked a tip beneath the note.

  It wasn’t much, but I remembered the year that Brian and I graduated college and took placements as AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers working at an environmental nonprofit in the poorest county in Ohio. We received a meager monthly stipend but lived in poverty, just like the people we served.

  My job was to drive around in a gigantic yellow box truck we called “the bird” and pick up donations, mostly furniture, and haul it all back to the nonprofit where we resold it to the community. No donation was turned away: claw foot bathtubs and hideaway beds were some of the most despised items we picked up because they were heavy and impossible to move. But Brian and I and the other volunteers moved them somehow anyway.

  It was tiresome work, and at the end of an eight-hour workday I’d made thirty-six dollars before taxes. Little expenses, like a copay at the doctor’s office or a flat tire, were devastating.

  One particularly bad day, it was the beginning of summer, humid, and I was working long hours over the weekend. I carried a donated mattress from the second-story bedroom in an apartment complex. I was tired and sweaty and pissed off to be working on a Saturday. The girl whose mattress I manhandled saw the AmeriCorps logo on my T-shirt and asked about it, so I explained that I was a volunteer. “I’m paid,” I told her, “but just barely.” I loaded her mattress into the back of the truck and slammed down the rolling door.

  When I turned around she held two ten-dollar bills in her outstretched hand. “Thanks for your help,” she said. “Will you share this with the other volunteer?”

  Giving her a quick nod, I’d whispered, “Thank you,” and shoved the bills into my back pocket. Then I’d climbed into the driver’s seat and fixed my eyes on the road ahead, hoping that the other volunteer could not see my tears. It wasn’t the money that had made me cry but the gesture.

  My year in AmeriCorps had taught me that sometimes the monetary worth of a dollar was only a part of its overall value. Our yellow envelope donations were not changing the world, but I hoped that by doing something intentional and kind, no matter how small, they might change the energy that the recipient released into it. It’d been over a decade since that girl had given me that tip. I didn’t remember her face, but I still remembered her kindness.

  • • •

  Over the next week we biked to the site of the My Lai Massacre, a quiet, solemn place, through Hoi An with its paper lanterns and onto Hue’s forbidden city and gilded tombs. We biked over a bridge shaped like a dragon, and we crested many mountain passes. We biked and biked, and I felt as I felt in India and in Nepal: the only real way to see a country was to see it slowly, on two feet or on three wheels or less.

  One day, as we biked down a red dirt road outside of Quy Nhon near a rural village surrounded by emerald-green rice paddies, we passed a concrete building with tarps strung up in all directions. In the middle stretched an arched entryway decorated with bunches of fake yellow flowers and a sign in the shape of two conjoining hearts.

  Though it was only 10:00 a.m., music pulsed from beneath the makeshift tent and down the road toward us. As we biked nearer, a cluster of immaculately clad women waved us over. Hao hit his brakes and dropped his bike. “Come on,” he screamed over the thump of the music. “We will go to a Vietnamese wedding!”

  The tent was stuffed with people. Old men sat around tables sipping beer, and a man in a suit crooned into a microphone on a stage at the front of the room. Strung above him hung a big vinyl banner with a larger-than-life sized photo of an impossibly young and grinning bride and groom that read HAPPY WEDDING.

  We squeezed into the crowd, dressed in spandex, as usual, and a few in our group walked like wobbly toddlers in clip-on bicycle shoes. Our helmets were still strapped to our heads. Someone handed us beers as we were ushered toward the stage. “They want us to sing,” Hao shouted above the noise.

  “Sing what?” someone shouted back.

  A chant of “Hotel California” rose from the crowd.

  Hao distributed microphones. The speakers pumped out a steady beat of rhythmic background thumping. I looked out over the wedding reception at fifty smiling faces.

  “How about ‘Jingle Bells?’” Hao suggested.

  We leaned into microphones and began to sing “Dashing through the snow…” The bride and groom stood in front of the stage, arms hooked around each other’s waists, and smiled so wide their brains could have rolled out of their mouths. Behind them, the audience clapped and whooped as we bounced onstage.

  In the middle of the third verse someone hooked their arm around mine and dragged me back outside again to take photos with the bride and groom. We stood on either side of them like a lycr
a-clad wedding party and gave the thumbs-up sign as the camera flashed. We were hopped-up from our performance and smiling like fools. Even Katherine appeared to be caught up in the moment. Hao took up a collection for the newlyweds, and I pushed all of the yellow envelope cash we had into the palm of his hand. We climbed back on our bicycles and waved good-bye.

  On the second-to-last afternoon of our tour we biked deep into the countryside along dirt mounds that separated garden plots. We stopped for the night in Mai Châu, a rural village where the Thai people, a Vietnamese ethnic minority, lived. We followed Hao down dirt roads, past wooden houses built on stilts, until we came to our homestay for the night. Hao had done his best to warn us of the “rustic” sleeping conditions, and I dreamed up all manner of complaints from Katherine, but when we arrived she claimed her spot on the floor under a mosquito net and tucked her bag away without a peep.

  When the sun sank we gathered at an outdoor table, a huge feast spread before us. We passed around bowls of rice, tofu, egg rolls, nuts, lettuce, sausage, and a number of other things, and fumbled with our chopsticks.

  “Where’s Eddie?” Katherine asked Renee.

  “He’s sick.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Renee looked up with a twinkle in her eye. “He’ll manage.”

  Afterward, a local dance troupe arrived to lead us in a traditional Thai dance. The dance required just a bit of foot tapping and hopping, and I fumbled through it, still no better at dancing than I was in Ecuador but unencumbered by both my body and my thoughts in a new way, able to just let go.

  As I stomped my steps into the dirt I knew that the dancing was a tourist production concocted for our sake, but it still felt beautiful and joyful, and I laughed, throwing my head back toward the moonless night as my body carried me around the yard. I hooked arms with one of the Thai dancers, and she giggled at me as I tried my best to copy the movements of her body. So much of Vietnam still felt out of reach to me, and I’d been feeling frustrated by that, fearing that I’d leave our tour knowing little more about the country than when I’d arrived. It bugged me because I’d become the sort of traveler that wanted to dig deeper into the places I visited. But as I kicked my feet into the dirt, arms intertwined with the dancer, it occurred to me that in that moment our lives were literally linked together. There were over seven billion people in the world, and we had found each other. The fact that I came face-to-face with her, or anyone, when there were so many more whom I would never know, was a miracle of odds. I’d been seeking a connection with the people of the world, including Brian, and myself, and though it did not always look like I expected it to look, I’d found it nonetheless.