MIDWAY THROUGH MY FIRST BOWL of pho, surrounded by the soothing tinkle of the piano bar at the Hotel Sofitel in Hanoi, I realized why I was so scared on my first day in Vietnam: It was the cyclos.
Not the tricycle taxis tourists take, but the motor-cyclos, the working cyclos, the gas-belching bikes that hurtle from home to work to temple, often with a family of four sandwiched atop, or a huge basket of lilies, a mountain of green papayas, a pane of glass. Stepping out of a taxi across from the hotel, I was nearly mowed down by an old man balancing a load of goldfish in plastic bags. I gaped and reached for the door handle, but the taxi was gone. The goldfish? They were long gone too. There was nothing to do but move and hope the cyclos would spare me.
They did. As I learned over the next few days, to cross the street in Hanoi, you must take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across. And that was a good thing, because the cyclos were like a bad Zen parable: Everywhere I was, there they were, a madness of mosquitos, whirring and buzzing and nipping at me without mercy. The symbol of Vietnam, I knew, was a stork balanced atop a turtle. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out which one we tourists were.
My friend Martha, who had returned from Hanoi just before I left, had warned me what to expect. “I’ve been back two weeks and I just stopped shaking,” she said. My daughter, accompanying me on my trip, was equally grim; she had already told me about the hilarious YouTube videos of tourists getting sideswiped as they tried to navigate the Old Quarter.
But once I was in Hanoi, with every crossing, I became stronger. Dodging bikes and darting between cars, I found a physical confidence I’d forgotten in twelve-hour days at my desk. I learned that the only thing to do in the maelstrom was to move, and if you did, the cyclos, like a school of fish, would simply flow right around you. “God don’t let me die, don’t let me die,” I’d chant as I crossed the street. Claire would roll her eyes, but we always made it.
In Vietnam I rediscovered the joy of prayer. Not the self-centered pleas I make in the middle of the night in my real life—please, God, let me finish that project or pay this bill—but the kind of meditation and contemplation inspired by being thrown into a deeply religious country. In Hanoi, there seemed to be a temple at the end of every street; in every shop, no matter how humble or trendy, was a shrine with joss sticks and hard-boiled eggs, fake money and flowers. At the famed Temple of Literature, I watched for an hour as people approached the shrine of Confucius and prostrated themselves, bowing again and again, oblivious to the tourists filming them.
Days later, entering a temple near my hotel, I instinctively genuflected and made the sign of the cross, for apart from the framed photo of Ho Chi Minh and the gilt statue of Confucius flanked by towers of Heineken and Diet Coke, it felt just like Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the incense and votive candles flickering in the dark quiet.
Claire, ever alert for displays of cultural disrespect, reached out to grab me. “Don’t do that!” she hissed. But the woman in charge of watching the shrine just nodded at me and smiled.
A few days later, we were heading out of Hanoi for Ha Long Bay, one of the natural wonders of the world and a place many Vietnamese consider sacred, though it’s in the midst of a hotel boom that promises to turn it into another South Beach. The trip took four hours by van, and everywhere we saw evidence of how quickly Vietnam is moving toward its future. Alongside the highway and in the villages, we saw tractors and backhoes, gravel, sand, tile, and bags upon bags of concrete, waiting to be used. There were new roads and community centers and dams. In one rice paddy, concrete pilings rose up from the velvet green, two and three stories tall, like a huge stork. I could imagine how it would change everything around it.
Equally evident was old Vietnam, the turtle: Streaks of black mold rising up the walls of an abandoned concrete house. The wind blowing through empty bedrooms. Buddhist shrines in the rice paddies. Oxen drifting lazily into the road. Pink and yellow and blue bags of garbage piled up by the side of the road, oddly beautiful.
Suddenly our van slowed: A motorbike had collided with a gravel truck, and a dozen more motorbikes had stopped to investigate. The local police were on the scene. Women in straw hats gathered in the street, squatting on their haunches and pulling children close.
Our van crept by. Through a gap in the crowd I saw candles, a straw mat, a woman crying. Then there was the body of the boy, laid out tenderly and covered with a burlap rice bag. Here in this place, this accidental temple, the cyclos had stopped. People had gathered to do what tradition requires, to speak the prayer that prepares a soul to ride on to the next world. The motorbike lay where it had fallen, unimportant now, cherry-red handlebars askew.
It was an accident, it was not unusual, it was a life, it was a death. I went to Catholic school; in my heart, I could hear the kyrie. As our van picked up speed and pulled away, I bowed my head. I knew just what to do.
Beatrice Motamedi is a former Stegner Fellow in poetry and Knight Fellow in journalism, both at Stanford University. She often writes about immigration, past, present, and future. Her memoir on growing up Persian was a “notable” in Best American Essays 2022.
Photo by Patrick McGregor on Unsplash
