A Honda Dream

Although I’d been living in Hanoi for a number of months, winter crept in and I remained disjointed and unmoored in a new city. Over the course of the season, my concerns were waylaid by a bigger story that consumed the lives and livelihoods of my friends back in China. I took a few trips at the end of January, but on return to Hanoi in early February, it was clear that covid-19 was going to become a reality for all of us. The granularity these days feels like an overcorrection for the smudge that was December through March.

You tried tele-therapy and houseplants, extra sun. You ran every day for a week, then none the next. The alcohol was distressingly inexpensive. You sent soggy voice messages to a best friend every time the loneliness came like a cramp, hoping for a dose of her Motrin (take one (1) FaceTime twice (2) daily with food). You went to a weekday screening of The Lighthouse alone, even though work ran long and the projector was already flickering when you arrived. No one stayed for the advertised post-film discussion. Turn to page fifteen line forty-five of a warm brown notebook and read, “something is sitting on my brain making me feel very nauseated and incapable.” It’s like this for a long time, longer than you’d ever known. Until one day it feels like someone laughing at your joke and your breath catching good, clean air. Homemade pesto in a familiar kitchen, two to a motorbike jetting to the secret bar. A phone that vibrates in your time zone. You’re a regular at a sidewalk xôi joint; she heaps on the deep-fried egg and pork floss, kicks someone out of your chair. A wedding in mid-winter; you should have seen your face when the invitation landed on your desk. A wardrobe exorcism on a Friday evening meets uneasy sips of whiskey on a Saturday morning as the bride bows to her new parents. That afternoon you felt fortified, assimilated, calcium-rich. A Honda Dream pledged to you in September groans as the kickstand releases and you find yourself alone with a gas-poor semi-automatic. Fear, the fear revving on an empty street, fear, the fear, fear revving on a busy street, fear, fear, FEAR REVVING AT AN INTERSECTION, the release of a ponytail under a full-face helmet, all 100 ccs of rubber burning over Long Biên bridge, a 19th century cantilever bearing your shuddering weight at midnight. Like the last sprint of the cross-country season, you should have known how good this would feel. January grinds down into a paste that you wrap into a banana leaf to celebrate the new year. Canvas sacks bulging with pomelos arrive at the office by trolley, fruit outnumbering employees 3:1. You had hoped to visit your cat in China over the holiday. You re-routed to Cambodia and left your mask at home. Your 4 am jaunt to Angkor Wat was decidedly more populated than the hour would suggest and droves of tourists from around the continent jostled elbows and exchanged microscopic droplets as the sun rose over sandstone spires. Oh, you were definitely cooking with gas, you just didn’t know you were in the kitchen. What was it Humphrey Bogart said? We’ll always have the vestiges of the Khmer empire? From Siem Reap you caught a nine-hour sleeper bus. What a considerate driver, he got you to your destination in six. It’s unclear whether you slept for ninety minutes or entered a fugue state. That machine had you bouncing around on a shared bunk bed like a marble in a glass jar. You waved at particles of light and sound as they hurtled past you. Back in Hanoi and most of your friends had been let go, the schools had been told to close. The streets were looking thin and the elderly had retreated indoors. Young people stalked the city with masks on. On the last weekend of January, your fingers curled around a set of handlebars and you traced the curves of the karst cliffs in the north.

That foggiest of Saturday mornings you caught the Du Già market in full swing, scythes and machetes and cellphones on offer. Pants, chickens and rakes piled high. One blink and you’re back in Xizhou, weaving guests through the morning market, ducking questions about vegetables that don’t exist in English and taking cuts of raw pig skin into your hand at the vendor’s behest. Ignoring the cruelty was impossible then as it was now. Live fish scooped out of teeming, shallow bins are held down and weighed, then slung over a matriarch’s strong shoulder, the sack wriggling itself into an oxygen deficit. Live hogs tied belly-up on the back of a speeding motorbike. Ducks pecking at blooded dirt. Perhaps it had perturbed you as a child new to Hong Kong, the first time you heard the cleaver. That was a long time ago. Long enough ago that you don’t recognize what dread feels like when it starts driving up your abdomen in search of the pit of your stomach. No one knew anything about anything but they knew it crawled out of a market. A civet cat, a pangolin, a bat, a raw corpse kissing damp morning air behind an old green hill. You got mad and couldn’t understand why, driving down the mountain on an empty stomach, wondering if you hadn’t left your courage on that Cambodian bus.

It’s possible the sign posted outside your apartment when you returned to Hanoi asked for residents to maintain an appropriate social distance, but you don’t read Vietnamese. You will learn this term in Spanish instead. It wasn’t long before an email confirming a one-way ticket from Hanoi to Dubai to São Paulo to Buenos Aires dropped into your inbox.

Pedestrian Ambitions

From twelve to one thirty in the afternoon I get a lunch break. My commute to the lunch table is a hop and skip, just three minutes. Four, if the motorized Hanoian populace wakes up feeling particularly homicidal. After a fine meal of noodles and goose in the alley across the street, my desk-mates hang back to share a cigarette. It has scarcely been thirty minutes. Knowing I will decline to partake, they flash me a smile as I crinkle 30,000 VND (USD $1.29) into one of their hands and turn away. “I’ll see you in an hour,” I call.

I arrived in Hanoi a few days before I was due to start my job and hunkered down in an Airbnb for two weeks. In that baby purgatory, I’d hoped to procure suitable, more permanent, housing and maybe drag my book to various public spaces around town. This is a good time to find your feet, advised the voices on the other end of the phone. I looked down. My feet remained predictably attached to my ankles. I kicked on a pair of comfortable sneakers, slung a crowded bag across my chest and took a left at the door. 

West Lake

A giantess wept as she walked, allowing the tears to run down her cheeks and plunge into the earth, razing tree and brush and leaving behind pockets of translucence that would reflect the rising and setting of the sun. No, that doesn’t sound right. High water volume. Low terrain. Soft and silty sediment. Hanoi, city of lakes, progeny of the Red River. City planners of yore assented to their curves, designing lakeside pedestrian paths and speckling them with benches for the fishermen, for the elderly, for those who guard the cages of roosters and puppies. I weep as I walk, barely registering the titters of passersby flummoxed at the sight of me. My hand is pressed to my wet face, mainlining the frantic murmurs of a phone-bound mother straight into my ear canal, thirsty for recognition. 

The streets around my office widen and narrow voluptuously. Yes, to walk them is a curvaceous and sensory experience of jacked up sidewalks littered with dog shit and upturned bricks and the cheeky grin of a young man behind a plume of barbecue smoke. As is common here, my coworkers indulge in a midday office nap, retreating to the conference room floor with pillows and blankets. Unfortunately, my lizard brain is still uncomfortable rendering itself so defenseless where there may be predators about so I haven’t quite been able to nod off at my desk yet. Thus, in inescapable awaked-ness, I have given every lane, way, path, boulevard, and alley in the neighborhood a thorough walkabout.

The marrow of a place moves to its own music. I’m a purist so I prefer to be invited in and prove my worth through rigor and consistency. I marched up and down this city in those early days, much as I did last year when I arrived in Xizhou. Only, my companions down Dali roads were just wagtails and an ancient wind. Here, sixty-five-minute traversals from Hai Bà Trưng to Tây Hồ pulse with emergency. The shirtless men who practice Dá Cầu (毽子for my 朋友) beside Hoàn Kiếm lake are liquefying before my eyes, roaring with each kick and shaking off petals of sweat I could bathe in. Rivers of chicken blood run languorously into the gutters, pooling for the muscular rats that dwell underground. El que busca, encuentra. He who searches, finds.

sticky rice and mung bean

Commerce is brokered on two planes. Econ classes squish the juice out of tangible, material realities but what I readily learned as formal and informal economies are more like eye-level and knee-level economies. The sidewalks are crammed with people drinking beer or coffee, or tucking into phở and bánh quẩy - all seated on low plastic stools. Vendors are also engaged in a deep squat, lowering chickens into a gurgling vat or counting bills in a tin. My mornings begin standing directly above a woman delicately serving up warm portions of turmeric sticky rice onto sheets of newspaper, pavement matriarch feeding us sleepy bees on our way to the hive. At noontime, a man sits on a stool and industriously wicks black polish left and right onto the nose of a men’s loafer. Shoe-owner sits copacetic with friends around a low table, feet snug in a pair of borrowed slides. Everything paid in cash, a pricing scheme centuries in the making. An economic ecosystem sixteen inches off the ground.

I walk thirty minutes to work in the clear morning and thirty minutes back to my home in the dark. I am considered a very tragic case, and I often do my coworkers a favor by accepting a lift, kneading away the worry knot in their hearts. But it is my pleasure and my gift to myself to walk freely and make my face known. Sore feet are a balm for the brittleness I’ve allowed to creep inside these two months. It is lonely to step outside in bewildered skin and walk where there is no one waiting for me. It is still not clear to me whether I will one day be felled by the thousand cuts of the familiar.

Two old friends came to Hanoi this month, calming my anxiety with the weight of their bodies in my bed, with the yogurt and coffee they slipped quietly into my hollow kitchen. The three of us walked together, too. Long walks with shoulders bumping and on street crossings, hands holding. They see it too, how scuffing your shoes in a dirty puddle is a baptism. These days I go walking because I have nothing else to do. Walking because maybe it will lead me somewhere I am meant to be.

Front Brake

grab me, pick me up and turn on the throaty engine, do you have change for a 50,000?

I’ve been waking up to a new sun, one that burns brightly over the streets of Hanoi and washes my new bed, my new sheets, my new floor. The coffee is almost alcoholic in its intensity, meant to be drunk on the banks of a lake or a five-way intersection. I’ve said goodbye to my days of walking upon stony village paths and have fallen into a more reckless rhythm. I don’t know how to ride a motorbike (yet) (ever) (this brain was very expensive and the warranty has since expired), so I let myself be grabbed.

Singaporean start-up behemoth, Grab, has decimated the ride-sharing competition in Southeast Asia, comfortably holding onto 73% of the Vietnamese market share in third-party taxi hailing services, and from where I’m standing, leading the market in lime green outerwear. But the crux of the ride-hailing industry in Vietnam, nay, I dare only speak from my limited perspective, in Hanoi, lies in GrabBike. You can read as many Economist articles as you please, ruminate with furrowed brow on the future of the gig economy, or deliver sage oratories on the Asian Century, but nothing prepares you for the intimacy of climbing onto the back of a stranger’s motorcycle and letting go. 

It’s trust. Corporate compliance trust that lights up my screen, “Make sure you’re getting on the right bike. Check the license plate to confirm.” I am who I say I am. You are who you say you are. He trusts that I will sit still. I trust that I am safe in his care. We both trust that everyone else on the road has as much of a stake in their lives as we have in ours. 

in his nook

It’s closeness; real physical proximity. Sometimes we cut corners so tight, I get spooked and must stop myself from throwing my arms around the driver. On particularly narrow stretches of road I am tempted to scoot into his back and form one binding unit. If we’re tossed, we’re tossed together. But it’s also the strangeness of a stranger. I keep my body tense and firm, thighs clenched so they don’t press against his torso (read: straddle him). Still, touch is inevitable, and unfailingly, I fumble with the helmet’s straps upon dismount. The driver motions me to him and, holds my head in his hands, helps me unclick.  

But I can’t unclick because we’re moving at full tilt. Vietnam at a glance: “lower middle-income country”, but with the GDP growing at rates of 6 to 7 percent each year. The fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia. Grab ate Uber for the tasty sum of 27.5% stake in the company, and it’s anyone’s guess who will be the next to succumb to its omniscient power. What does that mean for drivers? Sorry, independent contractors AKA those not “core” to the business AKA nonessential to the function of transporting a combined 327 pounds of human mass from one place to another. GrabExpress, GrabFood, GrabFresh, GrabPay, and GrabFinancial do seem uniquely positioned to argue that point. Yet the roads continue to teem with those willing to drive more hours for less pay, in a more noxious atmosphere and under constant surveillance in perpetuity in perpetuity in perpetuity.

Author Esmé Weijun Wang says the soul leaves through one’s feet, and I believe it when I’m aloft on a bike. My head is heavy under a helmet, my legs fused to the seat, unwilling victims of the unholy trinity: flesh x sweat x leather, but the soles of my shoes are exposed and unspooling my essence right there onto the highway. 

We are tearing through these roads together, in the thick of wind. First, I close my eyes in fear, then in acceptance. Really, I can’t say it any better than Jorge Drexler does in his song Movimiento –

 “si quieres que algo se muera, déjalo quieto”

Movement - if you want something to die, keep it still

The Shared Asset

Our first glimpses of each other

I think about how stupid lucky you are, every day. You may have forgotten this, you’re still very young, but you didn’t always have me and mom around. I actually had quite a fulfilling, if not sedated, existence before you were born. Let’s just say I had want for very little. I did not have want for you. But it was a brisk January day when your mommy May walked into the office with a blanket bunched up by her breast and a meek face peering out from over it. She had been out walking when she saw a man stride past, swinging a box violently in his hand. You know the type, a hard-faced farmer that leaves cigarette smell lingering in the air. He turned into an alley, then a few minutes later she turned into an alley, and saw the same box sitting square in a dumpster half-full of rotting food and rotting boxes. That’s why we call you dumpster kitten or trash cat. She plucked you from destitution and sat down across from me at work, brimming with anger at what she’d seen. As you pawed around in between chair and table legs, mewling non-stop and shivering, we looked at each other. “Can we keep him?” I asked out of posterity.

We don’t know what your first name was, probably nothing at all, but when we met we started calling you Lucky. It seemed apt. We even gave you a proper Chinese name, 乐奇 leqi. Le for happy, qi for curious (as in, killer of cats). Xizhou is a town of pet-owners, and within minutes word had circulated that the two foreigners were taking in one of their own. Your kitten carrier, litterbox, and the first few days of food came to us free from the hands of a coworker who had lost his own cat a year before. We considered the spectral implications of taking items from the recently deceased, but I’m not exactly flush with cash at the moment so the marinations of that thought were short-lived. We lifted you from the rancid box as I lowered myself on the asphalt floor of my room, our eyes level. May took a bus forty-five minutes away for food bowls, litter, and toys. I don’t intend to make you feel guilty, but that first night, I just couldn’t sleep. As soon as I turned off the lights and crawled into my bed, you leapt in with me and buried under the duvet, nestled in the crook of my knee. I thought cats slept on the floor? I laid there petrified for hours, terrified that in my unconscious slumber I would roll over onto that being next to me, small as the palm of my hand, and wake up in the morning to a dead cat. We’re in bed together now actually, as I write this. My computer leaning against my thigh, your body warm near my feet, eyes unfocused as the night and clacking of the keyboard wear on.

I’ve never met a cat I liked, and that included you. I didn’t like your fragile body, estimated at five weeks old at time of abduction. I didn’t like it when you crawled up onto my chest and started purring. What a foreign sound. I already have my big dog back home, and I felt that by taking you in, I was committing a betrayal (he still doesn’t know about you yet and I would appreciate discretion on your part moving forward). But I responded to your neediness, and I think that was what saved us. You need me for your survival, and if I don’t sit with you in the sun every morning, come back home during my lunch break to change your water, or keep an eye on the viscosity of your bodily functions, you’re not going to be okay. You don’t have a mother cat to teach you, nurse you, or discipline you. I used to run to the litterbox after you’d used it and grab your paws with my own hands, both of us going through the motions of burying things in the sand.  As you know, we call you Sen 千 now. The name of a brave girl from a movie we love.

Not long after we’d found you, May and I decided it might be wise to take you to a vet. It occurred to us that the reason you were so unceremoniously dumped into the ether was because your first family didn’t want to deal with some disease, an illness we would have no way of knowing about until it was too late. That was a day. There’s just something about a countryside veterinarian. The bus ride took us an hour and a half, and you were shaking in your carrier the whole time. May and I took turns holding you and susurrating in your ears, in your belly, into your back. We arrived at the clinic early, peering through the grates until a hard-boiled woman unlocked the doors. As the lights turned on, the howls and yips of interned animals rang out. Dogs with limps and snaggled-teeth began to emerge from the corners, sniffing you out and causing your claws to attach to skin that had previously belonged to my shoulder. May and I looked at each other, wondering if, in our mission to protect you from disease, we had brought you into the very place you might contract one. As we waited for the vet to finish looking you over, we saw a mangy dog get stepped on by another client, and a mixture of blood and excrement violently ejected from its rear. May and I, aghast, clutched you between us and vowed never to return. I think you like our current, different vet. I’m not getting the same conviction out of you when you nip at his hands.

You’re growing, Sen. I have pictures of us in the early days when I would take you to the office, so you wouldn’t be alone in the mornings, and you’re a mite. And as you grow, you become more intrepid and courageous. You’re a pain in the ass, but you’re so brave. Nothing scares you, not even if you tumble down from the top of my fridge and onto the cold floor. All you do is climb back up. You bolt out the door whenever I leave the room and make for the second floor of the courtyard. How many times have I asked you not to go up there? The landlord recently bought chickens and I know that’s where he keeps them. This is a non-negotiable. You do not have all your shots yet, so you will not approach the poultry.

You’re a pain in my ass in ways you can’t even comprehend. Remember last month, when we thought you might have worms, so we got you a little pill to take? It was traumatizing for May and I to feed you that thing, even wrapped up in a piece of pork we asked the kitchen staff to cook up special for you. In the process of holding you down and forcing it down your throat, you tore up my hand so badly I was bleeding onto the floor. As I walked to the sink, an older man saw my mangled limb and turned pale, insisting I rush myself to a clinic for a rabies shot. That seemed a bit dramatic. I suppose, yes, you’re not vaccinated against it yet because you’re still too small…and we did find you in a literal dumpster so it’s hard to know your medical history, but rabies? How could you have something as vicious as rabies without having already died, or at least exhibited symptoms? I laughed it off and washed my cuts, but after a couple of hours the thought persisted. I’d go, but only because it’s 100% fatal. I hate you for this. Did you know it’s five shots over the course of a month? And no consumption of coffee, alcohol, or seafood (?) during the course? I got to the hospital the next day, and officially leveled up on risk tolerance. Walking into that country hospital, the first foreigner to step in there since Nixon opened up China, just repeating the Chinese words for rabies, vaccine, and immunoglobulin under my breath. Next to me a farmer pulled down his pants and motioned for the nurse to give him a shot on the ass.

May and I are partners in this. Everything we do is in service to you, our baby, who needs us. The complaining, the clean-ups, the texts I send May at three in the morning when you’ve decided you’ve had enough sleep and want me to partake in a game of slaughter the moth— it’s all worth it to know we stole you away from that wicked life. You seem happy. We may not be momma cats, but you still retreat into primal bliss with your soft cotton blanket, kneading it between your paws every night, suckling on its surface. May takes my key in the afternoons to spend time with you, rub your ears, and play, even as you attempt to separate her fingers from the rest of her corporeal self.  

You are my roommate, my baby, my ward. I live alone, but I have purpose with you, and someone to come home to. This was always going to be a short-term living engagement, a temporary room and a temporary life. We still don’t know what we’re going to do with you once our year in Xizhou is over, and we talk about finding you a good home among our loving friends. But every time I go through the motions of discussing it with May, I know in my heart that no one is going to love you the way I do. No one else saw you with the dirt in your eyes, crying for hours from hunger and fear. No one else lay frozen from 10 pm to 5 am, willing themselves to keep still.

Bamboo, Characters, and Cakes

evening rituals

It’s known as the chattering of sparrows, the sound the tiles make when you wash them on the table. With a good set, the rectangular tiles are cool and heavy in your hand and stack together with resonant clicks. The sparrows talk to one another for a few minutes until interrupted by the groans of a loser. Money is conceded, received, and a new ma’jiang [mahjong] game begins.

I always believed there was a huge entry barrier for ma’jiang. The game is not made for me, is not a part of my history, and who was going to expend the energy to explain it? I was aware of its ubiquity, of course. Living in Beijing I couldn't ignore the scores of older Chinese men, pajama-clad, sitting on stools, tossing tiles between friends. I would pass them on the street, lazily curious, but ultimately accepting that I felt about ma’jiang the way I felt about bridge -- it was a game consigned to a time and age that preceded me. But then one evening here in Xizhou, some friends suggested that my American colleague, May, and I join them for a few quick rounds before dinner. 

It is an easy game and we learned quickly. Its closest Western equivalent is rummy, where the object of both games is to form sets of two or three in the same suit or family. There are countless variations of ma’jiang based on province and region, so although we live in Yunnan, we play by Sichuan rules (I’m compelled to note, there is more than one way to play Sichuanese ma’jiang depending on where in Sichuan you live). The game is transactional, rejecting and accepting new tiles until your set is complete. In the beginning May and I played frenetically, texting friends most afternoons to gage interest in an evening game. And I exposed my inexperience as many novices do, asserting that the game was one of chance, not strategy. Overcome by hubris, I failed to acknowledge that if success was truly down to luck with the tiles, then how did my friend QY win every time we sat down to play?

She’s a skillful player, no doubt. But more importantly, she embodies what I most love about ma’jiang: its style. By the time I’ve finished turning my tiles over face-down, QY has already completed her double-stacked row, her piano fingers tapping the table as she waits patiently. We start the game and her back straightens, eyes cast down. The arc of her hand forms a ‘U’ as she picks up a tile using her thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. She needs only to contemplate her hand for a split second before she discards or accepts. When she sees that she can pick up a piece to complete a set of three, she speaks to no one in particular and breathes peng’ba, before knocking two tiles over with her middle finger to reveal her move. It’s a dagger to my gut. Before long she smiles, “zi’mo”. She takes her row of thirteen and they flip over in unison to reveal a winning hand. Her elegance and ruthlessness bring me back to the table every time. She’s only twenty-five, but we’ve started to call her auntie – “a’yi” because of her veteran style. 

Having mastered the basics, May and I have decided to set clear goals for improvement, starting with developing speed. Ma’jiang can be a very quick game, with rounds taking as little as two minutes before a winner is declared. It takes a good deal of skill to consider your hand, determine a strategy, and match your opponent's speed. Once we had started to gain a bit of speed, we wanted to make things a little bit more interesting. Our first betting round, each win or loss was worth 2 毛 ($0.07 USD). And finally, we re-watched that scene in Crazy Rich Asians where Rachel Chu forfeits a win against her potential mother-in-law in order to prove a point about honor. “Oh, yes”, we murmured to ourselves as the YouTube video played. “Yes, I totally see what she did there. Very clever”.

I owe a lot to this game. It has served as a vehicle with which to connect to local coworkers and people of an older generation. It’s brought me places I had previously considered inaccessible. On a work trip to Tengchong, a city about five hours south, I visited for an afternoon and evening at the home of a colleague. Two hours were spent shelling sunflower seeds until someone commented that they had a ma’jiang table in the back. With that, I had something in common with a rural Yunnan laborer who made a living making bricks his whole life. I marveled at his mechanical board. Tiles are tossed into a little black hole in the center and shuffled noisily in the belly of the table before they rise up before each player, neat and clean like bowling pins. Elon Musk who? My wig: snatched. 

 As all sports fans know, you need more than mileage under your belt when trying to improve your game. You need to go see the pros play. In a satisfying bout of role-reversal, May and I decided to, completely uninvited, walk up to some older locals playing a game in the Xizhou market to learn from their technique. This is not as rude as it may sound. Looking the way I do, there is not much I can do in public without attracting the attention of two or three older men. Whether I’m reading a book on a curb or petting a dog, they will saunter up to me and loom over my shoulder, contemplating my very mundane behavior. But with uncharacteristic audacity, May and I decided to leer over a stranger’s business instead, and by God, did we stare. We commented on their strategy, chatted with another nosy woman who had come to see what the fuss was all about, and comfortably settled into our roles in the peanut gallery.

For me, the ma’jiang rush isn’t about the winning or the meager betting pot - it’s the feeling of playing a game I’m not supposed to be good at. It gives me props with the local kitchen and serving staff. They ask about my games and laugh when I suggest we play together. It’s probably not advisable yet, I’d need to work up to that. They’re the big dogs and would not hesitate to destroy me. But I have a more elaborate endgame. When not living in a courtyard in rural China I live in a suburb outside of New York City which allows me to regularly enjoy the food and hybrid atmosphere of Chinatown. In a year or maybe two, I will stroll into Chinatown, specifically Columbus Park on the corner of Mulberry and Baxter St. I will walk past eighty-year old immigrants practicing taiji [Tai Chi]. I will sidestep the women square-dancing in unison to mid-tempo Shanghai hits, and I will walk up to the men in their pajama bottoms doling out tiles and ask for a stool.