The Way Home

Jason and I have just walked out the gates after a trying day.  I peer down to the end of our one way street and bounce on my toes.

“C’mon c’mon c’com,” I mutter.  Almost immediately, three taxis round the corner.  Jason and I both stretch a hand out into the air.  The first once flashes his brights and continues.  The second one shakes his head at us and keeps driving.  

“Why not?!” I yell at his open window.  

“Maybe you should hide behind a post or something,” I say to Jason.  “Sometimes they just don’t want to pick up white people.”

He laughs, and continues to hang his arm out into the air.  

“What are you doing?  There are no taxis coming.  Who are you even trying to hail right now?”

He fist pumps a few times and drops his arm.

“I’m sorry,” I say.  “I’m cranky right now.  I just want to get home and have a beer.”

“Oh there’s one,” he says in that special voice one uses only to talk to dogs or babies.  I talk to inanimate objects all the time in this voice in front of him, so I guess it’s rubbing off.

“But it’s a sedan!” I complain.  There are four ways to get taxied in Hanoi: motorbike, hatchback, sedan, or van, and they are priced from lowest to highest in that order.  A hatchback starts at about forty cents.  A sedan starts at sixty cents.  “What the hell, lets get it!”  

I feel a flutter in my chest the moment the car starts to veer toward the curb.  Success!  He doesn’t quite pull up to the curb, so the endless stream of motorbikes behind him continue to flow around him in both directions.  A family on a bike goes past, and I dart into the backseat.  Horns honk to let us know they’re there.  Jason is right behind me.  I tell the driver my home address in Vietnamese.  We proceed into the slow going traffic.  

I can feel the drivers eyes on me in the rearview mirror.  I get stared at a lot over here, so I fix my gaze on the mirror and stare right back.

“Where you come from?” he asks.

“Where do you think?” I say.

“I think you come from France,” he replies.

“Canada,” I say.  Sometimes I like to lie.

“Oh Canada number one,” he says as he smiles and nods.  “I think you come from France because many French people in Hanoi are speaking good Vietnamese.”

“Oh, thank you very much,” I reply.  Out of the corner of my peripheral vision, I see movement.  I flip around in my seat.  In the space behind the backseat, there is an entire scene of horses set to pasture.  The horses bob with the movement of the car, just the same as bobble head dolls.  This is fantastic.  I immediately dig into my purse for my iPhone and start snapping pictures.  My battery is in the red, and I am grateful to have it’s use.

“That is totally crazy,” Jason says.

“Wiiiiild Horses,” I start singing.

We come around a corner, and traffic is at a standstill.  Ten minutes go by, and we have crept about a block.

“You want to go home, I think maybe faster you walk,” the taxi driver says.

“Uuuugh,” I whine.  If I wanted to walk home from work I would have walked home from work.  It’s a twenty minute jaunt through the thick exhaust fumes of five o’clock traffic.

“He’s probably right,” Jason says.  “We can walk home faster than traffic.”

I take a second to enjoy a few last moments of not moving my body.  I have my laptop in my backpack, as well as a bagful of vegetables my dear translator brought for me from her countryside home.  We pay the man.  I take a deep breath and open my door.

In the next moment I hear what seems like an explosion.  I literally don’t know what just happened.  In the seconds it takes for reality to set in, I can only ponder the sound of metal on metal, but I have no understanding of why or where.  Then my taxi driver is screaming at a woman laying on the sidewalk with her motorbike on top of her.

“Oh shit.”  I don’t know if I say it or I think it, but I have just clothes-lined a woman with the right rear door of the horse taxi.  She is not happy.  She is screaming at the taxi man.  At this point, I take a moment.  I take a moment longer than I should, because I don’t really know what to do.  The human thing to do is to jump out and make sure she is all right.  But they are already screaming at each other.  I’ve just contributed to an accident in Vietnam.  I have no idea as to the protocols.  I don’t know if I am going to get my ass beat down if I get out of this car.  But I get out of the car.  It might be twenty seconds past appropriate, but we are out, and the taxi speeds off as well as anyone can speed off in bumper to bumper traffic.  The horses in the back window bob, “goodbye.”

Here’s the thing: the taxi man let me out two feet from the curb.  We had been sitting at a standstill for at least four minutes.  Never once had a bike passed us on the right.  I would have noticed it and therefore been more aware.  But he literally let us out curbside.  The ability for the Vietnamese to fit through tiny spaces in traffic borders on ninja skills.

Jason picks up the bike.  I pull the woman to her feet.  “I’m very sorry,” I say to her in Vietnamese.  “Do you feel pain?”  How lucky for me that I am able to use the most common phrase I hear all day at work.  She shakes her head.  I can see that she understands that we are foreigners, and won’t be able to communicate.

“Can you get it started?” I ask Jason.  He brings it back to neutral from fourth gear.  FOURTH GEAR.  I clothes-lined her in fourth gear.  She is a trooper!  He kicks it with everything he’s got.

“It’s flooded,” he says.  “And the front brake is broken.”

I look at her, and tell her in the only way I can in her language, “Too much petrol.  Fifteen minutes.”

She stares down at her high heeled shoes.  One has a pretty bow; the other does not.  I look down at the cement and scoop up her other bow.  “Nothing a little glue can’t fix!” I say in English as I hand it to her.  I don’t really know what to do.  I pull out my purse and start fingering my dong.  I pull out four hundred thousand, about twenty bucks, just to have in my hand.  I dig deeper for my iPhone.  It is going to die at any second.  I call my translator.

“Hwa, I just made an accident in the street,” I say.  I explain the situation to her, and as she is questioning me as to whether or not I’m alright, I hand the phone to the girl.  She looks to be about 25.  They get into it.  After four minutes, I’m thinking my phone is definitely going to die.  And then where will I be?  I try to gently reach for the phone, but this chick is not having it.   When she is satisfied, she hands the phone back to me.

“What’s up?” I ask.  

Hwa says, “You caused a lot of damage, and she wants to ask you for a million dong.  But I say that you are very new in Hanoi, and maybe you do not know the way of traffic.”

“But it wasn’t all my fault!” I exclaim.

“I know this, and I ask her to be fair.  So please give her five hundred thousand and she will be alright with it.”

“Okay Hwa.  Thanks,” I say.

I dig into my bag for another hundred.  I then hand her the twenty five bucks, and tell her again that I am very sorry.  I pat her on the back, tell her to wait ten minutes more, and Jason and I make our escape down the sidewalk.  

“Five hundred thousand, huh?” he says.  “I’m not really sure it was worth that much.”

“I don’t care,” I say.  I don’t know why she decided to pass on the right with no room, and I know it’s really not all my fault, but I gotta pay.  It’s for the karma.”

I am walking as fast as my legs can carry me, and Jason is trailing behind.  Who knows what the police would have done had they been involved.

“C’mon Jason; lets run,” I say, sprinting ahead into the madness of Hanoi.