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.