Date: 2019-01-21 05:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Azúcar Esfinge

New Star

MANHEIM WAGNER

Published by Azúcar Esfinge 2019

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 Manheim Wagner

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781731000484

ISBN- 13: 978-1731000484

Cover Photo by Jeremy Coleman

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Charles Baudelaire Quote translated by Nagi Kafu

Abe Kōbō Quote
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“The true travelers are those who leave for the sole purpose of leaving. With hearts as light as balloons, unable to flee from ill fate, they just call out all the time, ‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ without knowing why.”

—from Le Voyage by Charles Baudelaire, as translated in American Stories by Nagai Kafu

“One measure of a civilization, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society.”

—from Secret Rendezvous by Abe Kōbō

1

“Can you start work on Saturday morning?” asks the voice on the telephone.

“Sure.” I look out the window. My neighbor dressed in pink silk pajamas is wafting a charcoal fire with a bamboo fan. The drone of a TV cascades down the lane. “Vietnam and Rwanda vow to increase bilateral ties.”

“Good. See you then,” the voice says. I hang up the phone and take a hit of weed. After three months of no work, futile poetry and scribbled-out lines, I have a job.

New Star ELT Centre. Mark Boyle started it after being fired from Atlas Education Centre. He got caught shagging one of his students. An old bricklayer from Brisbane, married with seven children, he conned some born-again church for start-up money.

I’m supposed to teach a children’s class; good thing I’m a bachelor. I glance at my notebook.

Prostitutes stand in front of the old jail.

Gay hustlers walk around lakes.

A blind man taps the shelves in a bookstore.

The biggest hotel is empty.

A dog walks on its front legs.

Teens cruise on their motorbikes.

Sandalwood drifts.

The poetry comes when the vodka runs out. I take another hit. The ceiling fan spins. It’s May. The humidity creeps, pushing down tree branches. A cockroach scurries along the base of the chalk-colored wall — a sure sign a storm is brewing.

I look at the photos I’ve taped to the wall. A Chinese opera singer puts on makeup, while a boy flies a kite. Thu Duong’s wavy long hair envelops her almond-shaped face. A pile of correspondence from people back home lies on the desk.

I’m broke, living in a two-story house with high ceilings. My studio stays empty. The paints I bought, unopened, mock me. You call yourself an artist. A piss artist can do better than that.

I take a nip of cheap Vietnamese vodka and watch more cockroaches scamper from under the wall. They’ll die in an hour. I sprayed insecticide along the exterior...time to go to the roof.

TV aerials litter the gray sky. I sit in my wicker chair, beer in hand, watching the lightning strike the city edge.

2

A gate with a cheesy cross and the Star of Bethlehem opens to a narrow road that snakes around a couple of ochre-colored warehouses printing soapboxes. At the end, a terracotta-tiled courtyard fronts an old villa. A small fountain shoots water above a fishpond.

Inside the villa, I’m greeted by a chubby British guy named Rick. “I’m glad you could make it today.”

Like I had any other choice. Humanity does not take kindly to those not enslaved by a job.

Wearing my best office clothes, tailored in Bangkok, I follow Rick past the reception desk to the staff room. Stacks of English books line the bookshelves.

“Mark is back in Australia visiting his family, but like we said during the interview, we pay fifteen dollars an hour. If this class goes well, we’ll have more classes for you soon.”

I nod my head. Being awake at 8 a.m. is not good for anyone.

“Huong will be your co-teacher, to discipline the kids if need be,” he says introducing me to a Vietnamese college girl with long straight hair, wearing glasses. You’ll be responsible for teaching grammar and vocabulary. Here’s the lesson log. You can see what James taught last and when you’re finished, write what you taught today. It’s pretty simple.”

Prepositions of place. An easy lesson if there ever was one. I look at the book and scribble my lesson plan, making small talk with Huong. She’s from Hanoi and working here part time to help her parents pay for university.

I mix some instant coffee and follow Huong back out past the reception desk, to a pale-green painted classroom around the corner. Inside, twelve Vietnamese children between the ages of five and seven greet me with a big “hello” spoken in unison.

I write my name on the whiteboard, while Huong explains to them that I’m their new teacher. Then I quickly learn their names and begin introducing the prepositions to my rambunctious audience. I can see right away Huong will be of no use. The children fight and scream over her meager reprimands.

Fucking great.

I finish my attempt to have the children pronounce the prepositions and send them on their way through an obstacle course I created out of the classroom furniture. It’s a race against time to see who can yell out the prepositions the fastest as they individually go over, under and around all the furniture. The winner gets a bag of candy, while I get to kill a good bit of time.

So it goes, over, under and around for forty-five minutes. All the kicking and screaming of prepositions have thankfully prolonged things. I take a sip of water and look at the clock. Fifteen minutes to go.

I put the kids in pairs and they use the prepositions to guide and instruct each other around the school and back to their waiting parents. Day one is finished. I say goodbye and walk back to the staff room.

“Things seem to have gone well,” Rick says. “The immediate feedback was good. We have some adult classes to fill this week if you’re looking for more work.”

“Sure.” I exhale, feeling banal repetition hang over my shoulders.

“For someone who needs a job, you sure don’t look grateful...To be honest, your interview was terrible. Luckily for you, we had an urgent need and you have the CELTA.”

“Lucky for both of us,” I reply, writing my lesson into the lesson log.

“You seem like a good teacher though. Let’s see how you handle an adult class and go from there.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I grab my things and say goodbye to Huong and Rick.

3

Chu Nguyen is a retired dissident. He spent the late 1960s and early 1970s in one of Uncle Ho’s gulags. He was an economics professor at Hanoi University before he refused to teach the party line. When the communists came to his office, he stood defiantly.

“I told them I’ll never be your dog henchman,” he laughs. The large lump in his throat, going up and down, as Thanh, his nephew, lights a cigarette.

“Ho was a bastard. He was never a nationalist. He was a communist first,” Chu Nguyen says, tapping his sinewy fingers on the table. “He did everything Mao did.”

I take a sip of beer, as Thanh chimes in, “He never liked kids. It was all a myth. I grew up near Ho Tay and Uncle Ho’s house on stilts. One day, we were playing football near his house and the ball went right under it. I went to get the ball, and there’s Uncle Ho yelling at us, telling us to beat it.”

“That sounds about right,” Chu Nguyen says, raising his mug. “Uncle Ho liked fathering children with peasant girls from the country.”

“To Ho and his illegitimate children.” We clank mugs and take in some steamed snails with ginger. A couple minutes of silence pass as we eat, watching teenage girls with ponytails scurry around the ochre and white fleur de lis patterned tile floor of the Bia hơi, delivering orders of beer and food.

”These girls. They’re all from villages,” Thanh says. “The only chance they have is to meet a guy who has money.”

“Or meet a foreigner like Dave,” I joke, swatting away a mosquito.

“Dave was stupid to get involved with Mai.” Chu Nguyen ashes his cigarette. “I don’t care how many cows he bought her father. She’s not educated and will spend all his money.”

“I suppose,” I say, taking in a whiff of Citronella.

“Let’s see what happens,” Thanh says. “Maybe she’ll prove us wrong.”

We take a final sip of beer and motion for the bill. Twelve bucks, not bad at all.

Chu Nguyen gets on his motorbike and goes home, while Thanh and I stroll towards Uncle Ho’s Mausoleum.

“Fuck Ho Chi Minh! Fuck you, Uncle Ho! You motherfucker!” Thanh shouts.

And no sooner than turning the corner onto Chùa Một Cột, we’re confronted by two police officers in their olive-green commie uniforms.

“Just play dumb tourist. Pretend you don’t know Vietnamese,” Thanh whispers.

I acknowledge Thanh with my eyes and listen. The cops ask Thanh if he’s seen anybody shouting. Thanh replies no, and the cops ask him what he’s doing with a Westerner. Thanh replies that I’m a tourist new to town and he’s just showing me dear Uncle Ho’s Mausoleum.

The cops then wish us a good night and continue on their beat.

“That was funny. We’ll have to do it again!”

“You can,” I laugh. “The secret police are already asking my neighbors questions about my behavior patterns. I don’t need anything else in my dossier.”

“Don’t worry. I’m a good commie. I’m the first one to vote on election day.” Thanh smirks. “I drop the ballot into the box and smile. They think I’m a fine example. Then they get to read what I wrote on my ballot. Fuck you! You communist bastards!”

4

Back at work, Rick gave me two classes of Vietnam Airline’s ticketers and engineers and found someone else to teach the kids. My mornings and afternoons are free. I’m back getting drunk and smoking weed all night. A gentleman’s pace if there ever was one.

Go ahead and laugh — three hours a night, six days a week. Such is the life of a part-time teacher not on contract. Nobody with a brain would sign on full time, with all the Directors of Study scrambling to fill classes. I can set my own schedule provided I scratch the DOS’s back every once in a while, taking on a new class temporarily until it’s filled.

It’s a game of favors, and as long as I appear helpful and cordial, I’ll continue to get work and get the schedule I want. The average teacher turnover is less than three months. A month back on the job I’m already number three in seniority behind Drew and Little Tom.

I lift my head out of thought and look around the bar. The din of local punters, NGO workers and fellow teachers drowns out whatever thoughts I had left.

“Hey, mate!” Drew flashes his empty bottle with his Midland’s drawl. “It’s your turn.”

“Piss or Bia Hanoi?”

“Too right. Get me a Tiger. I may as well support the Tiger girls I teach.”

“Touché,” I snap back and walk past a group of NGO workers.

A voice shouts, “Do you work or teach English?”

Funny, fucker. “I got better things to do with my time than exploit the resources of developing nations.”

I turn back around and order two Tigers, supporting Drew’s girls and their sleek navy blue Tiger dresses.

The lucky bastard is teaching a class of Tiger Beer girls. They work at higher-end bars in town and sell Tiger to customers, getting a commission on every keg sold. They compete with the Carlsberg girls, who wear shape-fitting green dresses with Carlsberg brazened across their chests.

Personally, I prefer my beer girls to have a tiger that extends from their crotch around to their ass. What can I say? I’m an ass man.

I grab the two beers and head back upstairs to the balcony that extends around the upper level of the Labyrinth, one of the only bars in the Old Quarter open past eleven. It’s our home every night when we don’t want to go home.

Mao, the bartender, plays a bootleg CD of hip western techno, and rumor has it plainclothes secret police frequent the bar in search of dossier material, so Steve says.

He teaches one class at New Star and works as the assistant to the BBC Hanoi correspondent. When Gary Glitter was on his pedophilic rampage through Southeast Asia, Steve gave the staff room weekly updates from the Vietnamese government’s press conferences.

You want to see an elephant, kids? Unzip my fly and pull out my pockets!

I digress here not to paint a scene, but to give my mind a break. I’m a shit painter. I hand Drew his beer and sit against the exposed brick wall.

“How are you liking New Star?” he asks.

“It’s not bad. The pay is on time.”

“I wouldn’t get used to that. Mark has been a few days late with pay a couple of times. He likes the karaoke ôm places a bit too much.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a little karaoke touch with some good-looking gals if you got the money.”

“He’s already got a honey, Chau, the office manager.”

“Is she the student from Atlas he shagged?”

“Bingo.” Drew laughs. “Be careful around her. She’s a spiteful bitch.”

“I had that feeling, the way her fake smile greets me.”

“She has Mark wrapped around her little finger. Where do you think she got all her jewelry?”

“To each his own.” I take a swig of beer. “What’s with this gossip about having a new investor?”

“Mark blew most of the Christians’ money on booze and whores. He found this guy Tom. Big Tom, we call him, was out here just before you started. He’s married to some rich woman in Korea.”

“Great. Is he posing as a Christian, too?”

“He’s got a doctorate in theology, and he was a chaplain in a penitentiary somewhere in Tennessee. Whatever that’s worth.”

“So, the school is a pyramid scam of sorts.”

“I didn’t say anything. You connected the dots.”

“As long as the pay keeps coming, it should be amusing...What about Rick?”

“He’s nothing to worry about. He’s been at New Star a month longer than me. He’s up from Saigon. He lived there for a few years.”

“In one ear, out the other then?”

“You got it. He takes being DOS too seriously.” Drew finishes rolling up a joint and lights it.

“Mao doesn’t care?”

“No.” Drew exhales, watching the smoke rise to the A-frame wooden ceiling. “I used to be a solicitor in London before I came here six months ago. This is a lot better.”

“What brought you all the way here from ol’ Blighty?”

“The history and the women. I’ve travelled Vietnam a couple of times.”

“They’re a frustrating bunch.” I hand the joint back to Drew.

He takes a hit and Mao shouts, “Last call.”

The frenzy for the last drink ensues. We finish our joint and head outside past the shuttered shop fronts of the Old Quarter.

The flickering light of random street lamps guides us through the narrow maze of streets to Hoan Kim Lake.

Late night lovers hold hands and embrace under trees, while a few sporadic motorbikes zoom by.

5

The city swarms like locusts.

Cascading motorbikes,
the hum of a fan…

drones.

It’s a maddening beauty.

Just after a few intersections
the roads change names.

With a twist of the tongue,
police become fish.

Shutters hide night from day.

Neighbors live three feet away.

Women crouch on tiptoes
flapping bamboo fans
wafting charcoal
and smoke into the air.

Workers run in and out
of unfinished concrete skeletons
carrying large bags on their shoulders.

The Ministry of Education,
a crumbling gray Soviet block
lies on Đại Cồ Việt Boulevard
just south of Lenin Park.

There at night, whores proposition themselves.

Junkies shoot up behind fences.

Men park their motorbikes
in front of barber shops
that stay open late.

Further to the west side, estates line the lake.

Large foreign hotels rise above the shore.

Trúc Bạch Lake, people race around
peddling artificial swans.

I sit at my particleboard desk, beating my palms against my forehead. The oppressive humidity, bulging out the veins in my temples. You’re a shit writer, no better than the veneer finish peeling off this desk.

I rip out the page from my notebook and crush it into the trashcan. The self-critic, asshole satisfied no one will ever read such shitty poetry.

Thu Duong’s brown eyes beam at me off the cream-colored wall. It will take years for that photo of her to fade. I begin to write.

She held her cheeks in her palms, while her lithe fingers framed her tan forehead. The wide smile on her face, excited at the sight of a cocker spaniel puppy. My trusty old Nikormat’s shutter catching the moment.

We had been riding around West Lake on her Honda Cub 90cc motorbike, stopping along its shore to take photos of the magnolias in bloom. The white blossoms swayed in the afternoon breeze.

I picked a flower from a branch and put it in the lapel of Thu Duong’s jacket. She laughed and grabbed another blossom, gently pulling the petals apart and tossing them into the air.

The pen stops. Glimpses of sunlight come through the shutter. Daylight, an unwelcomed guest. I take a sip of vodka and draw the crimson drape.

I am back on Hàng Gà Street, two years ago, freshly arrived in Hanoi, 2,500 dollars to my name, spying through the window of the antique shop next to my hotel an attractive girl with long wavy hair, who was reading a book.

Hand-carved wooden hill tribe statues line the exposed brick wall. New Headways in her hand, she looks up and smiles. Feigning an interest in the wooden bric-a-brac, I walk into the shop and say, “Hi, I’m Michael.”

Her eyes catching mine, she laughs. “My name is Thu Duong.”

“Nice to meet you,” I reply as she grabs a chair for me, to sit down next to her.

“I’m studying English. I want to speak good English.”

Just the gateway I need. “Maybe I can help you. I just arrived in Hanoi and I want to learn Vietnamese.”

“You help me, and I’ll help you.” She shows me the page she’s studying. Gerunds and infinitives, two interchangeable functions.

I grab a pen and diagram the grammar. She practices and we do the book exercises together.

After a few minutes, we switch roles, and she teaches me, Tên tôi là Michael. Tôi là một nhà thơ, không phải là một khách du lịch. Tôi sống ở Hà Nội.

My name is Michael. I’m a poet, not a tourist. I live in Hanoi. It’s always good to know the essentials.

6

Another successful day of work is complete helping further the education of Vietnam. The foreign English teachers of Hanoi and Vietnam vow to spread English to the rich and those who want to be exploited by a foreign company.

I take a sip of beer and look at Mair, the crazy Canadian Jew who drove all the way from France, through the Middle East, to Hanoi.

“You guys are nuts. I wouldn’t date a Vietnamese woman,” he says looking over the balcony. “They’re psychopaths. You’d be better off meeting a nice French woman like I did.”

Little Tom and I hold our beer and stare below, watching a group of Vietnamese women talk on the street. Their white áo dàis reflect the moonlight, as the candlelight flickers across the ceiling.

It’s payday and we have a wad of đồng to spend. Little Tom, no doubt, has his mind on some whore, whereas Mair and I are content to save a bit of money.

Life as an English teacher in Hanoi brings all kinds. Take Little Tom, he was teaching in Bangkok before he came to Hanoi. He claims he was in Bangkok for seven years, swatting away pussy.

“At AUA, all the girls came on to all of the teachers. I had to beat the ugly ones away,” Little Tom smirks, licking his lips. “It was fun, too much fun. I had to get away.”

His all-American tanned skin glowing red, he takes a sip of beer. “But Hanoi looks no different. There’s pussy everywhere.”

“That’s your problem. It’s not the quantity of them. It’s the quality of the women that matters,” Mair says. “These women are heartless. They want a ring on their finger.”

I take a sip of beer and watch the smoke from a citronella coil drift into the evening breeze. It’s easy for Mair to say these things. He drove a Range Rover with his French girlfriend, Marie, all the way from France to Hanoi.

“At least Vietnam is better than Syria. The cops here only shadow you. In Syria we were detained for a bit and had to contact our consulates.”

“That girl, Lieu, in my VTV class wants it,” Little Tom blurts. “I could easily stay in Hanoi, but my grandparents back in Florida haven’t seen me in ten years.”

I try to not roll my eyes. Little Tom thinks every girl wants his perfectly coifed gelled hair. His grandparents are supposedly loaded, and he sees that as a way to get to grad school, to do a master’s degree in TESOL. He is in Hanoi because he is broke. He couldn’t even buy a ticket home.

Teachers in Vietnam make the most money in all of Southeast Asia, and Little Tom is here to make some money, so he can go back home and beg his grandparents for more money. It takes all kinds to be here in Hanoi. I’m here because of the allure of the áo dài. No traditional dress, with maybe the exception of a kimono, has the same sensuality.

Seeing a sliver of porcelain tan skin through an áo dài is enough to send a man to the nearest toilet, to jerk one out. It’s that bad. And forget about it when they open their mouth. The words sing out of their mouth, sending you to rapture.

It’s why I’m here. I saw it first back in 1998 during the Asian economic crisis, when I bailed on my job in Korea for a month. After that, I took care of my grandfather while he was dying from emphysema and got myself a teaching certificate, so I could come to teach in Hanoi. My Jungian therapist said I read too much Vietnamese history and internalized it, making myself a Viet Minh warrior.

7

I hop off the back of the motorcycle taxi outside New Star, pay the driver his dollar and walk into the terra-cotta courtyard. A tall lanky guy in his mid-fifties with black hair parted on the side that sticks to his head like a short mop, stands next to the fishpond.

“It must be Big Tom,” I chuckle to myself. Word has it that he’s out of the hospital from his motorbike accident. The way I see it is he’s lucky to have escaped with a dislocated shoulder and a couple of broken ribs.

The story goes that he got drunk with Mark at some karaoke place and crashed his motorbike in a ditch on the way home. His wife back in Korea sent money to cover the hospital bill — a great way for a doctorate in theology to live — shagging whores, overseeing the language school in which he invested his wife’s money.

God hath no fury like a “pious” Christian in a karaoke touch joint. Tom introduces himself and we shake hands and without warning or contextual clue, he launches into his “CIA” days.

“I was dropped off at night along the Red River and I had to swim to West Lake. I was a frogman in the Navy, so I could do it,” he says in his Southern drawl, leaning against the raised blue and white tiled fishpond.

I stand dumbfounded, rooted to the terra-cotta courtyard. My voice escapes me as I sense more bullshit coming.

“I made it to Hanoi in a day and a half and lived off snails and fish I caught from West Lake. The company wanted me to take reconnaissance photos of key installations.”

I look at a few goldfish scurrying for food, trying to picture a big dumb white guy with pasty skin and gold-rimmed glasses, striving to make himself look inconspicuos in 1980’s Hanoi.

“This was when we had to worry about the communist threat. I took the photos and sent the photo canisters up the Red River to a pick-up point.”

At this point, I go with the flow. There is always a pathological liar everywhere I go. Back in Korea, it was Tony with his constant revision of his life story. Here in Hanoi, I have Big Tom living off the profits of his wife’s pharmaceutical company. Life is grand, as a short stocky man walks out of the school into the terracotta-tiled courtyard, extending his blocky hand.

“You must be Michael,” he says, shaking my hand. “I’m Mark Doyle.”

“Nice to finally meet you. How was Brisbane?” I ask, letting go of his vice-like grip.

“Not bad, mate. I got to see the little lady and the family. A welcomed relief.”

“It must be difficult living away from them,” I say, looking around taking stock.

His light blue shirt tucked into his pleated dark gray trousers with brown penny loafers scream day laborer turned businessman. His cube-like face is framed by closely cropped salt and pepper hair. A former rugby player for sure, his cheap cologne, no doubt picked up at duty free, radiates throughout the whole courtyard.

“It never gets easier. Luckily, the school keeps me busy,” he replies adding unnecessary diphthongs to his words. “I see you met Tom. He’s going to help me run the school. Business is expanding and we’re going to need all the help we can get. You’ve come on board at a good time. There’ll be a lot of work for you.”

“Good.” I keep my best straight face. “I’m looking forward to helping the school grow.” Standard stock for situations like this. I fight the urge to roll my eyes.

“I’m glad to have a man like you. Rick tells me you had a run-in with Atlas, too.”

“Yeah. They offered me no support in getting my work visa after my tourist visa expired,” I reply, reliving the hour-and-a-half shaky bus ride, past all the farms and rice paddies, out to the airport. “I had to go to Noi Bai immigration to try to find the correct copy of my arrival card. Noi Bai gave me some Swiss guy’s card and I couldn’t change visa status without my proper card. Needless to say, I spent a day at the Noi Bai immigration office with no results.”

“That sounds about right. You won’t have to worry about that here. We have better connections with immigration.”

“Glad to hear that. In the end, I had to leave the country to get a new arrival card to start the process over again. Atlas refused to compensate me for my troubles and I quit.”

“What a mess, mate. Now that I’m back, we’ll have to have a work party.”

And with that, Mark and Big Tom strap on their helmets and take off on their motorbikes.

“Must be nice to live off your Korean wife’s money.” Drew laughs from the opposite side of the courtyard. “You can end up being a CIA frogman in karaoke touch places.”

“Too right. Looks like Mark has a pal to sanctimoniously worship the Good Lord with.” I shake my head. “I guess there is nothing better than running around with young girls fresh off the farm, painted in make-up and fake eyelashes.”

Hanoi has more facets than a diamond. Scratch below the surface and you’ll find an existential maze.

English teachers come and go within three months. Either hiding from something back home, damaged or stuck here after their money ran out, they play the game, earn money and move on, and those of us who fail to fit into those categories stay for a while and try to grow roots, learning the language and culture.

It’s neither easy nor difficult. A personal Vietnamese teacher to teach intonation and an English/Vietnamese dictionary gets you places fast, and a nest egg of cash gives you freedom to not work for months at a time. It is neither here, nor there — it is all at once in your face — in bars at night avoiding the nightly 11 p.m. curfew when windows get shut, curtains get drawn and stereos get turned off. Then we all become quiet for the longest fifteen minutes of the day.

The cops know everyone is hiding in the bar, holding their drinks, and the bar staff knows a few dollars will keep the cops away.

It is the charade we go through every night. Some people think they are here to help develop Vietnam, getting chauffeured across the country in Mercedes sedans and Land Rovers. Others think they are here to keep up diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and the rest of us teach English with no hope or goal other than to move on someday.

Sprinkle in some backpackers and a few other people who own businesses, and you get the picture. A small confined world of con artists in a bigger world of suspicion, bribery and corruption. No different than anywhere else — you can go around the whole world and find nothing except yourself in the end.

The constant is you and your perceptions. Nothing will change that. All the NGO workers will go to bed knowing they are a fraud. All the English teachers will go to bed and know they are a fraud, while all the backpackers will go to bed, knowing they are a privileged fraud.

8

“Do you know if ten CDs for a dollar is a good price? I think she’s trying to rip me off,” a grungy blonde-haired backpacker says, looking towards me as I drink my morning coffee at a café in the Old Quarter.

I shrug my shoulders in indifference. The truth is I hope he gets ripped off. He's here on a holiday from some Western country, and this poor Vietnamese woman is trying to put food on her table, selling pirated pop CDs to dumbass tourists.

The voices swirl in my head as I sip my coffee. Vietnam and North Korea vow to increase bilateral ties. “Do you know how to get to One Pillar Pagoda?” The workers committee of Haiphong have vowed to increase production of canned fish.

It never changes — a new group of dreadlocked backpackers have hit town, asking asinine questions, and the Vietnam News is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Every city has a soundtrack if you listen closely enough. Past the roar of the motorbikes, life moves as it has for millennia. Wiry women in conical hats balance baskets — a long piece of wood stretches across their shoulders tethering rope — selling fruit, vegetables and nuts, while other women perch on street corners with cauldrons of steam, serving phở.

A cacophony of bells and voices. Sinewy men pedal cyclos, delivering people and building supplies. Baguettes are sold off the backs of bikes for one thousand đồng each. The city thrives with every passing basket or bicycle.

Shoeshine boys carry their small wood boxes into Bia hơis and restaurants. Dressed in dark gray slacks and striped button-down shirts, shuffling around in tan plastic shower sandals, they look for tourists and freshly arrived expats. One shoeshine for a dollar will pay for their food for the day.

It all works somehow. Teenage boys and girls are lured from the countryside and taken advantage of. Carrying baskets, pushing bikes and shining shoes from dawn to sunset, they become hardened and grizzled, flopping at night against buildings or in crowded rooms. And against the odds, one or two break free, usually at the benefit of a Westerner.

Mao has been in charge of office resources at New Star for a year. Handing out pens and photocopying for the school, he usually sits at the reception desk below the giant Star of Bethlehem logo next to Thu Nguyen, the pretty wide-eyed receptionist who entices prospective students.

Mao used to hustle shoeshines all through the Old Quarter, sleeping in doorways at night. Now, he sharks pool and hustles some guy named Joe — a burly American guy who fancies young Vietnamese lads.

Rumor has it, Joe helped Mark get out of a jam with a karaoke girl, while Mark’s wife and nine kids were still in Hanoi. Joe helped Mark get rid of the girl, and Mark agreed to take Mao on at New Star.

As for Mark’s family, they’re back in Brisbane. His wife took exception to Mark shagging Chau and took the kids back to Australia. Somehow, they’re still married.

The things you learn drinking beer in Hanoi. You could fill a book with them and get yourself out of any jam. The problem is, everybody has dirt on everybody.

Take me for instance. I’ve become numb — I go to fictitious barbershops, where girls wear áo dàis, for rub-n-tugs and ten-dollar blowjobs.

It’s a maddening beauty. All the tree-lined boulevards, yellow ochre and French villas bring you here. Then after a while, you become insular, trusting no one and everyone, hoping for something to keep you in Hanoi. No matter how long you’ve been here, you’ll never get the local price in any market. You get the expat price, which is still cheaper than the tourist price. A three-tiered system that always works in their favor.

They hold the cards and we grasp at bottles of beer to numb our senses. Graft and bribery will get you everywhere, as long as you know someone in the party. The yellow star always burns brightest when there is money involved. Five dollars could get you access to a building, to place recording bugs.

As long as they got a dossier on you, that’s all that matters. Until recently the locals couldn’t move to a new place without a relocation permit. Now, they get to vote for party candidate A or party candidate B in elections that are more than likely rigged.

Scarlet and gold banners hang all around the city. Their message no different than the red, white and blue — have children, raise a family, buy a bunch of products you don’t need and let “us” do all the thinking for you.

9

Another day at New Star begins, trying to play the part of a teacher who cares. I hear a rumble coming from the edge of the school compound and see Mair in his olive-green Range Rover.

He parked it there at the edge of the compound over a year ago when Mark hired him.

The muffler is gone and thick gray exhaust bellows around the terra-cotta courtyard.

Rumor has it there is a repair shop that has a muffler, but Mair is saving his money to buy a house in Vientiane. Laos is his end game. Hanoi is just a stop on his and Marie’s sojourn.

I sit with envy next to the fishpond, watching the exhaust plumes. Other than saving some cash and travelling Cambodia and Laos, I have no plan at the moment.

I fantasize about going to France. My ex-fiancée was there twice and was afraid of me going there. She said the French ladies would latch on to me. I don’t know; I’m not that attractive. A full beard, balding hair and a thin body, I’m not exactly a catch. The women here like me all right, but it’s difficult to tell if they are attracted to me or their fantasies of all the money I’m supposed to have.

Take Mair, he left Canada when he was a teenager and moved to France and worked a slew of jobs before he settled into teaching. Ten years older than me, tan skinned with short brown hair, he practices karate and takes care of himself, something I should learn how to do.

Other than the booze and drugs, I have nothing going for myself. But, does anyone ever really have anything going for themselves? We spend our whole lives chasing the illusion we keep of ourselves, the ideal person and the ideal situation. Then we die, and it doesn’t matter at all.

What matters is what is here and now.

“I ain’t going to Goa.” Alabama 3 swirls around in my earphones. “Ain’t to Goa now.”

If there is one thing I know, I don’t want to be smoking hash and dancing to techno on some third-world beach. No full moon party, no techno raves for me. I’ve embraced my misanthropic journey.

Go ahead and laugh. People are just illusions chasing the accepted illusions of religion, love, war and politics. Consciousness expansion requires inward retrospection. No amount of peace and love will solve the world’s problems until you have embraced yourself.

10

Hung a tall intelligent guy with pockmarked cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses, stands in front of the classroom surveying the emotionless faces of his classmates.

“The Degar people deserve their own country. They’re not Vietnamese. They’re their own people,” he says and glances at his notes. “They’re ethnically different. The Central Highlands is not Vietnam’s land.”

He pauses and gazes at the map of the Central Highlands he drew on the whiteboard.

“If the Degar people separate from Vietnam it will be good for democracy. The rest of us in Vietnam will start to question the government.”

Silent, I monitor the class, glancing at the students’ faces, looking for signs of disapproval. None to be found, I place my index finger vertically over my lips, then point my finger up to the ceiling and to the corners of the classroom. There could be bugs here. Government officials regularly come to the school to “inspect” its credentials and our credentials as teachers.

I put nothing past them, and I worry about Hung speaking his mind. Students, in general, are more outgoing and more daring to speak about controversial subjects in a second language.

“The Montagnards are the original people of Vietnam. They are not Mọi. Our government has no right to view them as savages. They had all the coastal land centuries ago, before the Cham took over their land and forced them into the highlands. The class continues to look surprised. It is not every day your EFL classroom turns into a history lesson.

Hung takes a breath, seeing all eyes on him. The eight other students motion for him to continue.

“Even the French saw Degar as its own country. They made borders in 1946 and called the area Pays Montagnards du Sud Indochinois. There were over three million Degar people then. Now, there are only a few hundred thousand.”

Still examining the classroom for bugs, I sit in my chair at the head of the class and watch Hung.

“Our government, since they won the war in 1975, has been committing genocide on the Degar, killing them and torturing them. We’re no better than the Americans, Khmer or Australians, who killed their native peoples.”

There you have it, folks. Genocide can take place without the public being aware. A holocaust can be whitewashed and thrown under a rug, all in the name of socialization or reeducation.

“The FULRO fighters were correct to fight our government. They deserve their own country, and we deserve our own country with the freedom of speech.”

Hung stops and wipes the sweat from his forehead with a white handkerchief from his pocket. What was said in the classroom could get us into trouble. But it needs to be said. People should not live aloof, in fear of who hears what they say.

The secret police come to my neighborhood once a month when I’m at work. They talk to my neighbors, asking about my behavior and what I have done.

My neighbors, all stand-up people, have to say something. They can’t say Michael is a good guy, we don’t see anything bad. So, they lie and tell small tales.

I know this from my neighbor, Cong, a middle-aged guy who works at a marketing firm. He took me out one night to the local Bia hơi. And over a few beers, steamed peanuts and quail, he told me about the police coming to the neighborhood to get information about me.

“We can’t just say anything. We have to say something they want to hear,” he said, with an anxious look. “That’s why we have problems talking to you at the end of the month.”

My neighbors, for three weeks, are the nicest people, inviting me into their homes for dinner. And for one week, they act like I am invisible. I understand. I told Cong that, and he was relieved.

It is the way of life. It is no different because I am a foreigner. The communist government has based their “society” on snitches.

Chu Nguyen spent twelve years in a reeducation camp all because someone snitched on him teaching classical economics. Everyone has a dossier on them. Mine probably says, “He likes to drink, pick up whores and write bad poetry. In addition, he enjoys talking to shady characters who linger outside the expatriate bars.”

It is the way it goes. When the secret police are not trying to get a snitch, they are following you. Or, so Steve says, as he claims to have been followed around Hanoi multiple times.

I fear nothing, yet I fear everything. All it takes is someone seeing me hand a wad of đồng to a shady character in a dark alley, in exchange for a small package of opium or weed, wrapped neatly in newspaper. The Vietnam News would finally have a headline not related to Vietnam securing bilateral ties with some other dubious nation.

English teacher from the United States arrested for buying drugs off the street. Corrupt trial to follow soon.

A life sentence in jail is something I would rather not experience. At least I can get paracetamol/codeine effervescent tablets at the pharmacy. A codeine-laced vodka and juice is always handy when you become paranoid, feeling you are being followed.

It happens more times than not and when it happens you avoid shady characters for a few days. I don’t know. Drugs seem essential here. Without them, my head would be on a swivel, full of paranoia, looking for snitches and people following me.

11

It is Sunday in Hanoi. Every available open space has a badminton net strung across it. People, rackets in hand, chase shuttlecocks and send them back and forth across the net. Shouts of joy and laughter fill the air. Countless winners and losers shake hands throughout the day as I stroll along the chaotic streets full of motorbikes.

It is the only day off work for many of us. English teachers, mostly work six days a week during the evenings. An easy life for sure, we’re lucky to be making a good living.

The average Vietnamese worker pulls in about three hundred dollars a month, while an English teacher working eighteen hours a week brings home easily over a thousand dollars a month. We can easily save money without trying all because we happen to be from countries where the first language is English.

People all across the city work their asses off all day long, while I pretend to work for a few hours a day, feigning interest in improving Vietnam’s English ability.

Ripped sinewy construction workers haul large bags of cement over their shoulders into three-story concrete skeletons and spend their evenings at construction sites, cooking over open fires.

The smell of burning wood billows as they prepare their sleeping quarters in the musty, damp unfinished first floor. The divide is unfathomable, all because I carry an American passport.

Though sometimes I buy a bottle of cheap vodka and give it to the construction workers in my neighborhood. It is usually accepted with smiles and a series of thank-you’s. A couple dollars out of my pocket is nothing. I’d give them opium if I could, as all pain should be numbed.

On the corner of Tran Quang Khai and Trang Tien, two dodgy-looking guys wearing baseball hats smoke cigarettes and squat, watching two black fighting cocks flap up and down, trying to peck at each other. The one with a majestic plume of golden feathers around its neck takes to the air, digging its claws into the scarred torso of the other cock. A few shouts and some money is thrown down by a couple of onlookers, as the beaten-up cock gathers itself and entangles its green feathered neck around those majestic golden feathers of the other cock.

They then proceed to jab each other with their beaks, dancing around in a circle. The onlookers gather up the pile of money and distribute it accordingly, while the two dodgy guys separate the cocks.

I keep on walking towards the Opera House. Girls wearing áo dàis zoom by, sitting side-saddle on the back of their boyfriends’ motorbikes, while other girls wearing Western clothes, sit normally on the back of motorbikes, locking their arms around their boyfriends’ chests.

The yellow ochre French architecture and large green leaves swaying in the breeze sends a smile across my face. Two years in Hanoi with no aim or ambition except to stay out of the United States — I lessen my stride and gaze up at the big cumulous clouds. Mike Bishop, lover of man and beast alike, Arturo Bandini would be proud.

The pit bull extracted from my chest; Hanoi, you city of dust and beauty, I ask for nothing. Everything is both here and now.

Life is here, in the marrow that goes through my bones. In every man or beast alike, it will never go away as long as you plant your feet on the ground and accept the black asphalt and the large fronds that fall to the ground.

12

Little Tom has convinced me to go out for a night of fun. I’m on the back of his motorbike, scurrying through traffic on Au Co Boulevard. Constantly on and off the throttle, he keeps to the right, looking for some place he frequents often.

“It’s up here,” he says leaning his chin over his right shoulder.

I could care less where it is. I only wish he would watch where he is going. People and other vehicles have a habit of appearing out of nowhere, and I don’t want to become road kill.

You’ll never catch me driving in this town, where the only rule that seems to apply is the biggest vehicle always wins. Call me a pussy — I’d rather let other people play chicken on the roads.

The bike slows down as Little Tom downshifts into a parking area in front of a large two-story building. Horns flare, motorbikes and large trucks zoom by.

Little Tom stops the bike and I climb off, finding myself surrounded by girls wearing áo dàis. A whorehouse. Fuck!

“It should be a fun night. Which one you going for?” Little Tom dismounts from the bike, placing his helmet on his handlebars.

“Seriously?” I ask. “A true man whores alone. Only college boys go whoring together.”

Little Tom looks at me stunned. “Come on. It’ll be fun.” His face gaining blood and excitement as he tries to slap the bum of a whore.

I flag down a Xe Om. Little Tom becomes a blurry dot, as the motorbike taxi maneuverers into the traffic. A mixture of soot and exhaust chokes up my lungs, as Little Tom completely disappears.

If you are going to go whoring, you should do it alone and treat the girls better than you would any other woman. They have a shitty job, and the last thing they need is a bunch of knuckleheads partying.

Off the motorbike walking through the Old Quarter, the reverb of an electric guitar echoes. A straggly middle-aged man walking with a guitar strums the chords of “Rider in the Sky,” followed by a boy holding his portable amplifier and a money basket. A few crumpled-up bills lie in the basket, as I toss in 15,000 đồng. A dollar isn’t much, but it will at least get them a meal.

I continue down the narrow street along the open sewer. Green water carries broken leaves and bits of paper to the drain. Gray clouds obscure the crescent moon, as streetlights begin to turn on one by one.

Shopkeepers roll down stainless steel doors and the dusk crawls onward like a wounded animal. A staccato of horns blare, while red brake lights dot the incoming darkness.

Free of Little Tom’s attempt at bonding, I walk into the Labyrinth and order a beer. Clinton’s “People Power in the Disco Hour” plays on the stereo. I tap Drew’s shoulder.

“I see your fun with Little Tom is over,” he laughs.

“It was over before it began. He tried taking me to a whorehouse.”

“It’s hard to teach a dog new tricks. I’m sure he’s missing whoring around with his pals in Bangkok.”

I take a sip of beer. The carbonation causes me to belch — one bad taste is traded for another.

13

Back home at my desk, vodka and codeine cocktail in hand, I swish a few ice cubes around my glass staring at the cream-tiled floor. The smoke from my last hit of weed lingers in the moist air spiraling upwards through the lemon hue of the incandescent light, towards a murky darkness.

My mind ceases to function in the present moment, and I see myself standing back on Hàng Gà Street.

Winter’s mist hangs above the city, not wanting to leave. I meet Thu Duoung outside the antique store. Her smile brings light to a dreary day.

“Let’s go to Trúc Bạch Lake. I made nem cua bể for lunch.”

I hop on the back of her motorbike, jokingly sitting sidesaddle.

“You’re not a woman,” she laughs.

I straighten my legs and rest my feet at the sides of the motorbike as Thu Duong takes off into the hustle and bustle. Other motorbikes and the occasional car zoom by. Horns tweet and honk.

The gray light makes the pastel colors of all the architecture vibrant. The sudden thought of forgetting my camera envelops my mind, but it is soon replaced by the splendor of Thu Duong’s hair whipping behind her. Its fragrant smell...straight to my loins.

Months have gone by like this. Not a kiss or a hug. The company is always welcomed and mutual. She doesn’t want to think or talk about Phu, her boyfriend, who she reluctantly stays with.

An IT worker for the government, he electronically spies on her. I got her in trouble once for sending her an email when I was on holiday. Phu monitors all her online activities, as I’m sure he monitors a bevy of other people’s activities.

Nothing can change that and nothing will until I put a ring on her finger. It is the game we play. I hope she changes her mind and she hopes I see all her indirect requests.

To say Hanoi is conservative would be an understatement. Weeks of pent-up sexual frustration are taken care of in the dark night with uneducated girls from the countryside in fictitious barbershops.

I laugh to myself, holding on to the motorbike. How life could be different if I had chosen to live in Saigon, that bastard child the commies can’t control. Day and night the saga goes.

Up ahead, Trúc Bạch Lake comes into view, and Thu Duong maneuvers her motorbike into the parking area. We dismount from the bike and Thu Duong lifts the seat, grabbing a small basket wrapped in red and white plaid cloth.

The weathered pinkish gray tile of the lakeside dissolves back to the cream tile of my room. A few loud honks of a motorbike echo up the narrow street. A burst of orange sunlight slips through the crack in my drapes. The morning has already started. I take a hit of weed and see the evenly spaced tiles of my room dissolve into the din of a slow locomotive.

Rice paddies follow industrial buildings and industrial buildings follow rice paddies, never quite catching up to the narrow gauged French railroad tracks. Dressed in my cheap Armani knockoff suit I had tailored in Bangkok, I look out the window and at Thu Duong.

Her light green dress hugs the slight curves of her body. A band of white lace highlights her pert breasts, as the hiss of the brakes jostles the car. Vendors in conical hats hawk their goods along the gray slate platforms of Haiphong Station.

The yellow-ochre colonial building, a beehive of activity, gives way to a small asphalt square. We hop in a taxi, weaving through swarms of motorbikes that dart and swerve to avoid people crossing the busy streets. Signs and awnings jut off boxlike buildings that hastily line the pavement.

The clamor of horns creates an avant-garde symphony of dissonance. No matter how large or small the city, a raucous chaos of commerce ensues.

Getting out of the taxi, the thick humid air sticks to my skin. Gaudy white archways give contrast to the ochre walls of the wedding hall. An older man greets us and leads us into an atrium with a terribly designed neoclassical chandelier. Hundreds of electric candles hang above twirling diamond-cut crystals. The yellow light accentuates the high white ceiling full of rectangular inlays.

We sign the guestbook and take a seat in the rococo-styled ballroom. Tiny gold fleur de lis stand out on the cobalt-blue carpet. I try not to look down and instead look at Thu Duong, all dolled up for her friend’s wedding.

The token Caucasian, I’m here to give the newlyweds some cachet. Thu Duong holds my hand; she’s tired of Phu, fond of the attention of being with me.

The bewilderment of repressed sexuality and locked-up conservatism hits me in the face. I gaze at my empty glass and continue to see myself months ago in Haiphong, shaking hands, greeting all Thu Duong’s friends in stilted English and Vietnamese. The days go by without rhyme or reason. We’re all fools on a grand stage with no director in sight.

The poems I write attempt to keep me from this thought. Armed with a disjointed series of memories, we stumble through life thinking we know best, basing decisions off past actions and past inactions. More orbits around the sun, more lost hair, more lost cells, our self now is better than our self of years ago. That’s what we are led to believe; however, if you cut yourself open you won’t find any memories — just flesh, bone and marrow.

14

Vice Minister of Fisheries Dr. Nguyễn Thị Hong Minh was on hand at the Hon Gio Fisheries today to inspect worker efficiency. He met with local district leaders and first division workers of the fishery to discuss the exportation of sea bream.

The news broadcast cuts to a shot of an awkward-looking man in Chinese-styled gold-rimmed glasses shaking hands with workers in white and gray rubberized work-suits. Cameras flash and the broadcast cuts back to a short-looking woman with shoulder-length hair, who is wearing glasses while reading off a teleprompter in flat monotone English.

“Prime Minister Phan Văn Khải met with leaders of the National Assembly…”

VTV News never fails to bring excitement to my life, as did editing Chu Nguyen’s book about Buddhism.

Crossed out lines and rewritten sentences jump out from the pages of the manuscript. He wrote parts of it in Vietnamese and translated them to French then English.

“I want to show that quantum physics has always been a part of Buddhist theory,” Chu Nguyen says, looking at his manuscript.

I nod my head and take a sip of beer. The bia hơi we are at is known for being a hangout of local poets. Right across the street from a dilapidated unfinished multistory hotel, the green-painted cement floor of the bia hơi is littered with peanut shells.

“They never finished that hotel,” Chu Nguyen says. “They ran out of money. Now, we poets come here to drink and compose poems about its cement and steel beams.”

What windows that have been installed are covered in dirt and dust. The setting sun reflects off grimy attached aluminum panels. The cul-de-sac entrance awaits nonexistent VIPs as talk ensues.

“If you keep touching the table, Tibetan Buddhist theory says your hand has a chance to go through the table.”

“The Tibetans were onto subatomic particles?” I ask.

“Yes. They also have a theory about teleportation, but I didn’t write about that,” Chu Lai nods.

“Would that explain the number of crazy Indian yogis who claim to be in multiple places at once?”

“No. They are insane,” Chu Nguyen laughs. “Insane like me. I put my house up for sale. I’m going to move to Paris.”

“Wow,” I exclaim and clank mugs with Chu Nguyen. “To Paris!”

Chu Nguyen laughs. “My sister married a French officer and they live in Paris. I want to see the Seine before I die.”

I shoot Chu Nguyen a puzzled look and he continues: “The French were better than the communists. We had order when the French were here. Then, the dog henchmen took over and reorganized everything. You had peasants being promoted to high-ranking positions and professors that did whatever Uncle Ho wanted.”

Chu Nguyen wipes a bit of sweat from his forehead.

“It was a travesty. My family had some land and the communists took it all away except for our house in Hanoi. My mother died heartbroken and my sister went to France. And, I continued fighting the idiots until they put me in the reeducation camp. They could never kill my spirit, and now my spirit will finally leave this hellhole.”

“Hanoi is not that bad,” I say pointing out the cute waitresses with their hair in ponytails.

“Them?” Chu Nguyen laughs. “They are uneducated farm girls in the big city. The communists killed all creativity. Every piece of art and every book had to have that bullshit proletarian party line. We intellects still have to be suspicious. The Party has people everywhere.”

I nod my head in agreement and take another sip of beer.

“Look around. All these men are poets. They have no future or audience because they won’t tow the Party line. Bao Ninh was lucky. The Communists couldn’t stop The Sorrow of War from being published.”

The big screen TV switches from the English VTV news to an English Premier League match and life all along the street moves as it has for millennia. People zoom by on their motorbikes on their way home from work. Old women and teenage girls balance baskets over their shoulder peddling vegetables and fruit.

15

I shake my head in disbelief, looking at a photo of the Bamiyan Buddhist statues above my desk. A group of dipshits in Afghanistan blew them up with dynamite because the buddhas didn’t match their limited view of the world.

Now, no one will ever see them. A pile of rubble stands in their place, while a pile of rubble is what humanity seeks to become. Outdated dogmas and sects lead people down narrow paths of intolerance.

I may be stupid, cynical or naive, but living your life according to what some imaginary friends said nearly 3,000 years ago is not a way to live. What evidence is there of some illiterate prophet who dictated his “good” book to a scribe. What evidence is there of a guy who sat under a Bodhi tree?

Anyone can write an allegory full of temptation, blindness, disease and homophobia. I choose not to.

One man’s morals are another man’s sins. You can go crucify me if you want, but I’m not sure you would want to make a martyr out of me.

There will be no apparition of some lady from the sky to save you. Everyone is their own redemption. Everyone is their own savior. All thought is non-local; thoughts come and go without any idea where they come from.

Do you honestly know what dictates your actions? I sure as hell don’t.

You can break things down to their minuteness, but you will never have an answer because there will always be a smaller kernel than the smallest one you previously discovered.

And those kernels are both inside you and out floating in the universe. Information is energy and energy is information. No tree, no cross and no veil can change that. All belief is a summation of accepted lies.

Everything rises out of nothing — a hermetic something that has no differentiating or distinguishing features. I am no different than you, and you are no different than me. We both live on a common surface that arises from the passing of knowledge in the vast nothingness of space.

In essence, we are nothing but an illusion living on a plane of nothingness, where we interact and receive knowledge from the vast nothingness of eternal space.

The booze mixes with the codeine and weed, slurring my thoughts. Clarity only exists for a moment. The sky, indigo turning blue, obfuscates the morning star with a wave of sunlight.

It is these moments, where all the chemicals in my brain fight it out, and these moments between despair, exhaustion and intoxication allow the world to be tolerable.

I sigh and light another bowl of weed. The smoke envelops my lungs; the big hospital that cures the world of its ills, not in sight — I get up from my desk, draw the bedroom drapes closed and fall onto the cream sheets of my bed.

16

Whatever. I unlock the front gate of the house, grab my bike and head out for a spin. The humidity hangs in the night sky just above the tops of buildings. Motorbikes swarm around me, honking their horns.

The din of Hanoi roars. People go places. People go home. What else is there to do when you leave the threshold of your world?

In the end, we all return to that original singular nothingness of space. Until then, we pretend we are people who have aims, goals and ambitions.

I sigh and pedal slowly along the dark streets near Lenin Park. Streetwalkers hawk their trade and get on the backs of shadowy motorbikes, no doubt headed for a nervous rendezvous in some sleazy room nearby.

I continue to pedal under dusty silhouetted fronds, looping around the narrow streets. A tingling sensation envelops my crotch; I find myself heading back to the streetwalkers.

My dick is getting hard, and I haven’t had a wank for days. Fuck it. I stop my bike next to a less haggard-looking pro.

Long straight black hair down to her mid-back. Black form-fitting dress. She takes a puff of her cigarette and greets me…“Xin chào anh.”

I smile. She has the one commodity I need. I ask her how much…“Bao nhiêu tiền?”

“Mười đô la,” she laughs, eyeing my rusting bicycle.

Ten dollars for a go. I ask her if she wants to go back to my place.

“Làm cách nào?”

“Trên xe đạp của tôi,” I answer, saying that I can give her a ride on my bicycle.

She laughs, saying there is no room on the back of the bike for her.

“Get on the front,” I laugh, motioning for her to sit in front of me.

She climbs onto the handlebar and sits across it, as I pedal back to Đại Cồ Việt Boulevard, gingerly crossing the flow of motorbikes and old Soviet construction vehicles.

I can’t help but smile; she’s laughing and waving to the people we pass.

She turns her head to me and smiles. “Em đã không được trên một chiếc xe đạp từ khi tôi em năm mười lăm.”

She hasn’t been on a bicycle since she was fifteen, and I haven’t given a girl a ride on a bicycle since I was fifteen.

It’s a match made in heaven. I continue to pedal through the narrow maze of small streets to the alley I live off.

I stop the bike at the front gate. She hops off. I unlock the gate and the door. She follows me into the house and up the stairs, still laughing.

We sit on the edge of my bed and begin to make out. She slides her tongue in and around my mouth, while I slide my hands under the back of her dress, unsnapping her bra.

My hands slide around to the front and I feel her soft pert mounds. Her nipples are tight and hard.

She pushes away and removes my shirt and shorts.

My cock is standing erect through my boxers. She gently squeezes my dick and pulls off her dress. I grab her panties and pull them off.

Her small black tuft feels like silk in my fingers.

She mutters “em đi tắm” into my ear and heads down the small hallway to the shower.

I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling fan. My dick pulses, as she comes back with one of my red towels wrapped around her body.

“Anh đi tắm.”

I make my way to the shower, turn on the water and quickly lather up. The whole while, my dick bounces with energy.

I turn off the tap, dry myself and return to the room naked.

I stand at the edge of the bed where she is sitting.

She grabs a condom from her small bag and slides it onto my cock. The constriction of the rubber adds more pressure. I don’t think my cock has ever been this hard.

She falls into the bed, pulling me on top of her. Like magic my dick is inside her, and I slowly thrust all around her pussy.

She feigns pleasure, putting her arms around me, biting her lips, making eyes at me. For a pro, her vagina doesn’t feel too used; it grasps my cock as I continue to thrust.

She squeezes her pelvic muscles in an attempt to make me succumb faster, and I pull out, moving her body to a kneeling position.

I then enter her from behind and start the whole process again, grabbing her small pert breasts. She tightens her pelvic muscles again and I blow my load, convulsing in weeks of pent-up frustration.

I pull out and remove the condom, throwing it into the trashcan.

She wraps her hands around my cock, petting it.

“Good,” she says in English and laughs.

We both go into the shower, lathering each other, and I notice a tattoo on her inner thigh that says, “Duong.”

I ask her what it means, and she says it is the name of her boyfriend who was killed in a motorbike accident a few years back.

She says she is twenty-four and she and Duong were meant to get married. And, after he died she went into a tailspin, finally hitting bottom walking the street.

My chest cavity sinks. I don’t know what to say; I hug her and she says it’s okay. She’ll get off the street someday.

We go back to my room and put on our clothes. I hand her an extra ten dollars. She thanks me and kisses me on the cheek.

We head back downstairs, out the door, and onto my bike. I pedal through the empty narrow streets, back across Đại Cồ Việt, to where she was plying her trade.

She jumps off my handlebars and we kiss goodnight.

17

Back at work, the school is expanding despite Mark and Big Tom’s increased siphoning of funds to supplement their partying with karaoke whores. We’ve now got Development and Agriculture bank classes along with more general English students. The school itself has moved into two new buildings out in Quan Hoa District.

Little Tom left Vietnam. He got his grandparents to bankroll a master’s degree back in the States. I’m not sure what he’ll do without cheap prostitutes.

Meanwhile, Drew continues to pursue Tranh. She constantly seems to have another older rich Vietnamese man in the fold. Poor Drew hasn’t got anywhere with her. A reasonable man would have given up by now.

Big Tom is back in town from Korea. He says he has a bunch of teachers in Korea who want to come to Hanoi to teach. I scoff at the idea. Students in Hanoi spend a large percentage of their salary on English classes, in most cases over half their income. Back in Korea, English is a joke. It’s something to make parents feel good, by sending their children from the age of five to language academies. In reality, they’re paying to be rid of their children.

Yes, education is paramount in Korea. The adult language schools are nothing more than pick-up joints, and most of the foreign faculty can’t teach basic grammar.

I told Mark this, but he thinks Big Tom has a good idea. Anyway, the school is expanding and we have two new teachers, Sarah and Chris.

Sarah took the place of Little Tom and has become the most popular teacher. I guess that’s because of her long thin body, her white skin, her long curly red hair and her West Country/Bristol accent.

The male students in particular linger after her classes waiting for the chance to talk to her, while Sarah politely engages them, making her way out of work, to the backpacking soiree in the Old Quarter.

She ran out of money traveling Southeast Asia and has wound up in Hanoi as many backpackers do, trying to get an English teaching gig. Her sister Sally is a bit miffed, as she wants to keep travelling. Luckily for her, she’s drawing severance pay back in the United Kingdom.

Poor Drew fancies her, too.

“She must be ripped, being a corrections officer back in the U.K.,” he says to Mair and me.

“Why don’t you go get her, tiger?” Mair asks, taking a sip of beer.

“I have Tranh to think about,” Drew replies, rolling a joint.

“What’s there to think about?” I ask. “Tranh has been playing with you for months.”

“She likes me but she wants a ring around her finger.” Drew runs his tongue down the rolling paper and seals the joint. “I’m not sure I want to do that.”

“Of course you don’t,” Mair chimes. “She’s a Vietnamese woman. She’s a psychopath.”

I laugh and take a hit of the joint.

“What do you mean? Ly is nice,” Drew says.

“Ly, Rick’s girlfriend? You mean the woman who was seen flying back to Saigon with another man?” I ask.

Drew takes a drag from the joint, exhaling a plume of white smoke into the air.

“Ly, the woman whom I had talked Rick back from the edge over?” Mair laughs.

Drew gazes at his shoes. The weight of his two large top front teeth seem to push his head down.

“I had to chaperone those two back to normal relations. Ly denied anything happened, and Rick was forced to believe her.” Mair takes another swig of beer. “The poor guy has no choice if he wants the relationship to last.”

I take a sip of beer. “You won’t catch me with one these birds unless I’m paying for services rendered.”

Drew gets up from the table to fetch us some more beer.

“What’s with him?” Mair asks. “He couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse if he tried.”

I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know. For a former solicitor, he seems rather naive.”

“To look down on you for shagging whores. I don’t get that either.”

“You talking about the time at the work party were I grabbed one of the karaoke ôm girls and took her home?”

Mair shakes his head in acknowledgment. “That’s all he has to do…hell, if he has some quasi hang-up about that, he should at least get a rub and tug. The way he pouts about Tranh is stupid. That girl will never go for him. She would have by now.”

Drew comes back to the table with our beer, and I head downstairs to the toilet.

A typical night at the Labyrinth, looking at the scribbled graffiti above the urinal, trying to make sense of how I got to this place.

When you live in a land of corruption, greed and lust, you either find yourself in some self-created chasm, or you end up like Drew dreaming and pining for some puritanical idealism that is neither here nor there.

I don’t profess to know which option is better. I just know life is better when you are able to partake in all the available carnal pleasures.

Call me an idiot if you want. But, what good is an unfulfilled life of piety?

18

Chris came to Hanoi with only a backpack, looking rather gaunt. He caught a case of malaria travelling in India and spent most all of his money in Bangkok getting it treated. With the little money he had left, he bought a ticket to Hanoi, to line up a teaching gig to recoup some money.

When he first showed up at New Star, we all thought he was a junkie. Hanoi has no shortage of junk and cheap amphetamines that are manufactured in makeshift labs all over the Old Quarter.

After pleading his case, Rick took on Chris to teach children’s classes. The tall lanky Canadian, as we call him, has done well so far, earning enough money to buy some proper teaching clothes and finding an apartment near West Lake.

He has also done well with the pudgy female NGO workers. He’s currently shacked up with one, taking care of the Canadian ambassador’s residence while the ambassador is away on holiday.

Other than that, some students in my Vietnam Airlines class cut out a Vietnam Airlines plane from a photo and attached it to the poster of New York in my classroom, flying into the Twin Towers.

“Sorry, airlines. We always have the highest rate of cancellations and delays,” they laughed.

The government runs the airline and it is as inefficient as any government organization. My students perform the same jobs as any other airline employee working for the big international airlines, and they get paid shit.

It’s flat out extortion. Their salaries are frozen and subject to government approval. If they go on strike or protest their low salaries, they’ll be made redundant. It’s that simple.

The Communist Mandarins run the country with a tight fist, siphoning all the money into their and their cronies’ coffers. In my two years of living in Hanoi, I’ve seen foreign capital come and go.

Vietnam vows to fight corruption in investment capital. Vietnam vows to lift restrictions surrounding foreign investment. The headlines cycle in The Vietnam News over and over again, and the only vow I see is in the increased amount of red tape and graft.

Western companies invest, pay for the “necessary” permits to invest and then pay for more necessary payments to invest, until they have enough and pull out of Vietnam. Then Vietnam vows to eliminate graft involving foreign investment.

Ad nauseam it goes — no different than the wreckage at the B52 Victory Museum on Đội Cấn Street. Glass towers get erected all around the city. Foreign companies put their offices in them, only to leave after six months. The office floors lay empty. Cubicles, desks and chairs remain bound in place. The dust and dirt collect on the windows, and the Communist Mandarins, with their Chinese gold-rimmed glasses, stash more foreign currency into their bank accounts.

It trickles down to all levels. My last six-month work visa cost 110 dollars. Eighty dollars of which was to grease the necessary pockets at immigration, while the remaining thirty dollars was to pay for the actual visa. Before that, it was 200 dollars for the same six-month work visa; it all depends on each school’s contacts at immigration. The higher up the contacts, the less money paid.

This is no rant. I dare you to look at the country of your origin; you’ll find the same level of corruption. The only difference is here in Vietnam the corruption is transparent. Whereas in Western countries, “funds are re-appropriated,” and prices are inflated, to line the pockets of politicians and military contractors, or in more visible cases, to pay for mafia protection.

Nothing ever changes. The more things appear to change, the more they stay the same. No amount of scholarly study in cross-cultural comparison will ever get at the root of anything.

19

Across the street,
a man whistles at canaries on his roof.

I’ve walked around Hanoi with these two lines in my head. My notebook has remained untouched for weeks. My inspiration has waned with the moon.

The lights all around the outdoor restaurant blot out the night sky. At our table, Big Tom takes another swig of beer and puts his fork into another snail shell.

“These are the same kind of snails I ate for two weeks when I was here in the eighties, snapping photos for the CIA.”

The pile of large brown shells and shards of ginger send their steam upward towards Tom’s imaginary friend in the sky — a ceremonial sacrifice for the bullshit we are receiving.

“It was tough, roughing it like that.” Big Tom wipes his forehead with his handkerchief. “I could only surface towards daylight and sunset. I had to remain unseen. The secret police knew I was hiding somewhere near West Lake.”

At this point, none of us dare to interrupt or contradict Big Tom. When someone believes their lies, they believe them to be the truth. I roll my eyes and look over at Mair and Drew, who both acknowledge the purgatory of our situation.

Big Tom continues to ramble.

“Swimming downstream was much easier than swimming up the Red River. You could imagine. After two weeks of eating snails and filling my canteen with any available clean water I was ready to be lifted out.”

A PhD in theology and shit for brains. Big Tom spews the same stories with different details each time.

I take another sip of beer and look over at Mark. He’s oblivious to it all, playing footsies under the table with Chau. As long as there is money coming into the school, Mark doesn’t care. He plays the charade of a concerned educator, leading our monthly pedagogy meetings, where he draws brainstorming maps on the whiteboard of all the key phrases he learned doing his master’s degree.

Student centered. Engaged learning. Computer-assisted learning. Learner autonomy. The circles are always the same, and his final comment is always the same: “You guys are doing a great job. Keep up the good work.”

The reality of it all is I’m sick of it all. I’m sick of working for a scumbag. I’m sick of living in Hanoi, and I’m sick of the charade I’m playing.

Deep down, I’m going nowhere fast. None of the wisdom I’ve gained helps. I spin in the same rut.

Tonight will be no exception. We’ll finish eating and drinking at this restaurant, and Mark will take us to a swank hotel bar with karaoke girls.

We’ll continue to drink and get pissed. Sing bad versions of “It’s a Wonderful World,” “My Way” and other karaoke classics, while the girls will take turns sitting on our laps and feeding us nuts and fruit.

Mair will leave after a drink or two. Drew will sing songs and try to avoid having any contact with the girls. Chris will drink with us until the end and go back to the Canadian ambassador’s residence, while Mark will have ditched Chau before we’ve gone to the hotel bar. Then Big Tom and he will leave with four or five karaoke girls.

I’ll leave with one because I’m bored and drunk. I’ll pay for a taxi to my place. We’ll go to my room and have drunken sex. I’ll pass out and wake up with a splitting headache, wondering if my cash is still hidden.

I’ll get out of bed, feeling every ounce of gravity, stumble down the hall to the bathroom, take a piss, then pull the laundry detergent box down from the shelf to see if my cash is still there.

I’ll go back to the bedroom. The girl will have her clothes on ready to go home, demanding fifty more dollars than what we agreed upon.

We’ll get into an argument. She’ll threaten to call the police, and I’ll give her an extra ten dollars. She’ll smile, thank me and leave.

It goes like this every time we have a work party. I continue to drink hopelessly, already knowing the outcome of the evening.

20

The smell of cheap perfume and stale cigarette smoke lingers in the bedroom, while the midday sun overpowers the maroon drapes, sending reddish rays of light all over the room.

My head spins at a rate that feels faster than the earth’s spin. My eardrums reverberate; my mouth tastes metallic and dry. I feel the need to retch, but my stomach refuses.

I have vomited three times in my life. The first time when I was five, I drank Coca-Cola immediately after brushing my teeth, the second time when I was six, I drank orange juice right before brushing my teeth, and the last time when I mainlined a shot of heroin when I was seventeen, while I was working as a dishwasher.

The head cook was a junkie, and she said it would make the busy night go by faster.

But the only thing that went faster was my head in the toilet, heaving barely digested food all over the white porcelain.

The follies of youth don’t seem far away, as living in Southeast Asia reduces men to being perpetual teenagers. The hormones of puberty come back along with a self-destructive sense of invincibility.

Luckily, I gave the girl an extra twenty dollars in advance. There was no argument; she gave me her cellphone number in case I felt the need again.

I stumble out of bed downstairs to the kitchen and mix some vodka and orange juice, then back upstairs to my room and light a bowl.

21

Chu Nguyen puts his hand on my thigh, as is the custom here when men are close to each other. A sign of mutual respect, no sexual advancement at all.

I smile and beckon the waitress to order a couple more beers. The large-scale green industrial fans blow violently, scattering peanut shells across the bia hơi.

“Have you heard from Dave?” he asks, grabbing a cigarette from his pack.

“No, I haven’t. You?” I reply.

“I got an email the other day. Mai left him. She ran off with a rich Vietnamese guy in California.”

Shocked. My jaw drops, as the waitress plops two mugs of beer on our table.

“I told him a million times. She wanted that U.S. visa. He was a sucker to marry her and take her to San Francisco.”

“So, what’s Dave doing about it?” I ask.

“He filed for a divorce and he’s selling the house. He wrote about becoming a hermit near Mount Shasta.”

“That sucks.” I grab my beer and take a long slow swig. Even the flies are flitting about the table in a lethargic manner. The air is stale, heavy with humidity. The monsoon season is about to hit, affecting men and beast alike.

Weeks of mugginess have swollen my hands. I’m barely able to release the handle of the mug. The usually bustling geckos have crawled down the ochre walls to a bit of shade close to the white-tiled floor.

“I hate to say I was right, but you can’t trust those country girls. You have to marry someone close to your economic class…”

“Or be prepared to spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time,” I finish Chu Nguyen’s statement.

“Exactly,” he laughs, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray.

The lump in his throat, now the size of a golf ball, vibrates with his laughter.

“Have you seen a doctor?” I ask, concerned.

“Yeah. They have me on some pills for it. They say it’s fine and not cancer.”

“Good,” I reply and take another sip of beer.

Chu Nguyen raises his hand off my thigh and firmly puts his hand back onto my thigh.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you something. Now that I’ve finished my book about Buddhism, it’s time to move on.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I’ve only known Vietnam my whole life. I’m seventy-two. I just want to sit on the banks of the Seine and breathe the Parisian air.”

“You’re still thinking of moving to France?” I ask.

Chu Nguyen shakes his head yes. “I sold my house and I bought my ticket. I’m leaving in a month.”

“Congratulations!” I say and clank mugs with Chu Nguyen.

“My sister and brother-in-law have an extra room in their house I can use. I’ll buy a beret and a cane, and look like a regal old man watching life go by. I can do nothing more in Hanoi.”

Chu Nguyen takes a sip of beer and smiles.

“Uncle Ho and his gulag couldn’t kill me. I’m not a young man anymore, but I can still go to a place that appreciates intellect. Screw these dog henchmen. Vietnam will become another manufacturing center like China, where the local population is exploited as cheap labor.”

I swat a mosquito away and put my hand on Chu Nguyen’s thigh.

“You deserve it. All I ask is that you keep in touch,” I say.

A tear in my eye — life moves forward as all rivers move forward to a greater body of water. We finish our beers, and I walk with Chu Nguyen to his motorbike.

He kickstarts the engine and drives away into the dusty humid air.

22

Back at New Star, Sarah has gone and left. Her sister Sally had enough of Vietnam, and Sarah made enough money to continue their travels.

Mair continues to flit across Hanoi, teaching the rich Korean expat kids. The money is there for sure, but who wants to teach kids who don’t want English forced upon them?

Drew still hasn’t got laid, and he’s depressed. Tranh went off and got married to some rich Vietnamese guy she had only known for a couple of months.

It is a maddening place. The longer you stay, the less you know. Teachers come and go, not knowing why they came to Hanoi in the first place. A cultural malaise for sure. We all show up in the “Pearl of the Orient” with that sense of adventure and wanderlust, and then gradually the virtues and values we brought wither away.

The stagnant humidity creeps into your soul, blurring your vision with mirages of beauty, lust, intoxication and heartbreak. It’s best to not get attached to anything, and if you’re lucky, you make some money and leave. Otherwise, you’re in for something unknown and dark.

You have to remember it’s their land; they have fought off the Chinese, the French and the Americans. What makes you think one person can make a difference or be any different than any previous foreign invader?

The callousness is on every street. Children with no hope sell postcards to tourists while other children wander from bia hơi to bia hơi, trying to eek out some subsistence by shining shoes. Girls and old women from the country push loaded bikes, full of fruit and vegetables all day. Amputees and Agent Orange victims scurry about with elbows and knees on homemade carts, begging for money.

I question why I am here, and I question the divide I see every day. If there were some compassionate divine being, like their Buddha or Jesus Christ, would we still have all this despondency?

Over 5,000 years of recorded human history and we still can’t figure out how to live together. War after war and conflict after conflict does nothing other than cull our brothers and sisters, while hardening the survivors from having any feeling of empathy.

I am no better than you, and you are no better than me. We are all victims of a convoluted system we’ve created. Every day we ignore this, every second we ignore this, the divide becomes worse.

23

“Everyone, this is Murray,” Big Tom says. “He just arrived from Korea, and he’s going to be taking over Sarah’s classes.”

I look up from my lesson plan and see a stocky middle-aged man with pasty skin wearing a gray three-piece suit and yellow wire-rimmed aviator glasses. His nose and cheeks are red — a sure sign of a teacher who as Big Tom claimed likes to party.

Two huge diamond rings permanently fixed to his swelling fingers, his perfectly quaffed graying red hair frames his ashen complexion.

“Mike, here, will tell you about the Vietnam Airlines classes,” Big Tom says.

I get up from my chair and shake Murray’s hand. The handshake is firm and hard from his two rings.

I sit down and Murray sits next to me, as we go through Sarah’s lesson log.

“These students are professional and expect a lot,” I say, noticing the smell of booze on Murray’s breath.

Great. Big Tom has imported a whoring buddy. His failed attempts to get us to go whoring must have prompted him to bring Murray into the stable.

“It’s pretty simple. Follow the sequence of the book and spice up the lessons with some activities, and give them a chance to talk to you,” I continue, trying not to shake my head.

Murray pages through the lesson log with about as much interest as one would have cleaning out their sock drawer.

“I’m sure we’re going to have some fun here. I’ve always wanted to live in Vietnam,” he says in an Eastern Canadian drawl.

I nod my head in acknowledgment and show him around the staff room, pointing out all the textbooks and supplemental resources.

Drew and Steve look up from their lesson plans and smirk.

24

The scene at my local bia hơi is the same as most bia hơi. Teenage girls from the countryside scurry around the beer hall in shower sandals, delivering beer and side dishes to men talking and smoking cigarettes. The TV blares for the attention of no one.

I crack open a few steamed peanuts and watch the passing street traffic. My poetry flounders like bugs caught in a spider’s web trying to escape, only to run out of energy and die. The great designs I had to turn the third story of my house into a painting studio become further removed with each mug of beer and each passing day.

An afternoon buzz on a Saturday, a day off work and a day off from myself. The beer fuels thoughts of indifference and flight. I know my time in Hanoi is coming to an end, but like a love affair you knew was unhealthy from the start, I cling to a decaying photo with frayed edges.

Thu Duong was here. I ran into her last week in the narrow maze of streets in Bach Khoa, near my house. Her long flowing black hair smelled of perfume and joss stick. She was playing ping-pong with some of her office coworkers at the local recreation center. Her tight white blouse exquisitely wrapped her thin torso, pushing her pert breasts to the fore.

My knees felt weak as they came near her black trousers. We said our pleasantries and I asked how Phu was doing. She said they were planning to get married, and I asked her if she was excited. She didn’t answer, but instead looked above at the dust-covered fronds.

Her tense and nervous body language said it all. She didn’t want to marry Phu; she was holding hope for me to step up. I languished in the cobbled street with my hands in my pockets. How I wanted to run my fingers down her back and say, “Everything will be all right.” But, I couldn’t. I couldn’t commit then, and I can’t commit now.

It’s the demon I carry. I can’t commit to myself. I can’t commit to a place and I can’t commit to another person. I roam vacuously, holding images of people and places that I have left.

I hold them dear like one would hold their prized possessions. It’s all I’ve got, these images. I know they’re gone and I know they’re finished. I tell myself that someday I’ll write about them, but I tell myself a lot of things.

I stare at my empty glass and beckon the waitress for more beer and peanuts.

I was never asked if I wanted to be born. I was just born into anonymity. Like the rest of you, I want nothing but ask of everything.

The discarded peanut shells strewn across the lime-green tiled floor seem to be a good metaphor.

I’m good at cracking shells, but I never get at the essence of anything. Life obscures the fleeting glimpses I have at the kernel. Its gray clouds part every once in a while, when none of my possible actions can change anything.

The Buddhists all say to live in the now and free ourselves of the ego. I say live anyway you can. At thirty years of age, all I’ve learned is that life never gets easier. Its shells renew, and crack them as I may, I never reach that point of awareness or any point of action.

I’m a passive passenger in my own life. Reality flows by like a film. I reach for it, but it turns to dust like old nitrate film.

If I could set that nitrate on fire — I would fan the flames, jump up and down and scream I live here on an insignificant celestial body that orbits a larger insignificant celestial body, which orbits the galactic center of the Milky Way.

But, I can’t scream. My voice has not arrived.

Live you say. Stop thinking. Let go of the ego.

But, the world does not allow that. The world only allows suffering.

The moment you are content is the moment it is over. You can only go down from that type of platitude, and down is where I dwell. If you set your compass for the lowest point on the horizon, then you can only go up, or that’s what I tell myself.

I know one day I’ll leave Hanoi and set my sights on something new, on another perceived better place, on another perceived romance and set on another temporary world of suffering.

It’s all we can do. We are temporary beings living in the three dimensions which our limited physical being has the ability to process.

Nothing short of a hallucination or a holographic image can take that away. It’s why we all flail away, trying to escape this limited reality we see. If only we could push through those barriers of time and space and put our being in a fourth or fifth dimension where pure beings of empathy and hope surround us with love, compassion and understanding.

Until then, I will crack peanut shells in my hand and ask questions that will never be answered. Until then, I will get up and go to work, knowing the answer is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

25

The tide goes out.

Black stripes recede.

Fishing boats —
dint lights on the horizon.

Sand on my feet.

A satellite passes in the sky.

I ash out my joint and continue looking at the multitude of stars radiating above Quan Lan Island. A few wild mustangs run along the white sand beach towards the large sand dunes behind me. The quiet rumble of gas-powered electric generators can be heard in the distance, supplying electricity to the town every night from five to ten o’clock.

To my right, the black silhouette of a mountain towers over the island. The oppressive heat of Hanoi has turned into a cool night breeze. With my notebook, I sit. Not a soul wanders outside of town. The white foam of the beach is all mine.

The craziness of life in Hanoi suspended for a weekend, I’m on the farthest eastern island in the archipelago — the next body of land Hainan Island has been disputed for centuries. As I am not one to get into disputes, I keep looking at the unpolluted sky.

A large pale arm of the Milky Way lies above, parallel to the sea. Its billions of stars represent the best chance we have to return to pure energy and stardust. And the pale blue dot I sit on offers us hope we can get out to the stars, where we belong.

All the trivialness, banality and inter-fighting of our species would be gone in that instant. That instant which says we are eternal space-farers. It’s difficult to imagine, I know, but it is the only hope we have, crossing the course of the galaxy and finding other civilizations.

Be they benevolent or be they malignant, we would have escaped the confines of our celestial neighborhood and embarked on a journey that will expand our consciousness and raise our awareness. Until then, we are a self-destructing species acting out the abundant apocalypses in our mythos.

Imaginary friends, imaginary boundaries and fossil fuels only allow our species to spin its proverbial wheels in a self-created cage. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of the cage.

Forget about some outside species threatening humanity as that snake oil salesman Reagan said back in the eighties. Nothing can unite humanity other than itself. The thrill of a fiat currency has gone. Bankers raise interest rates and decrease interest rates in an ever-increasing con game to steal wealth from the masses.

The currency is ourselves and the casino is the universe. Nothing can stop us from realizing this, but we must see it and we must believe it. With no belief in humanity, we have no chance, and I have nothing left but to put my bet on humanity.

26

The journey back to Hanoi was filled with adventure on the open seas. I hopped a ride on a fishing boat with some locals back to the mainland for 30,000 đồng. The captain wanted to charge me double because I was not Vietnamese, but a short wiry grandpa figure with a white Fu Manchu mustache and straggly white hair spoke up on my behalf, saying he fought against the Americans for the freedom of the Vietnamese people and he would not stand for any double standard bullshit.

We had a beer together at a bia hơi on the mainland before I caught my bus back to Hanoi. Our species does have hope, and I tend to forget that in the listlessness that is my being.

Back at work, Drew has met another girl, Phoung, whom he fancies. He’s already talking about taking her on a trip up north to Sapa. Romance comes all the time to dreamers.

Murray has already dwindled the class size of the Vietnam Airlines class from sixteen to ten. And these students have to have a ninety percent attendance rate or they lose their jobs. Big Tom and Mark don’t seem to mind. They have a new karaoke ôm buddy.

Chris has found another chubby expatriate to play house with watching a Dutch diplomat’s home, while he is away on vacation. He’s also had some more clothes made in effort to look the part of a teacher and not a backpacker passing through. The adult students and children like him.

As for me, I take to the classroom on autopilot. I have no care for teaching, or a desire to help Vietnam speak better English. We English teachers serve no purpose other than to teach the local population enough English to communicate with their foreign exploiters.

The talk is of another investor. Mark and Big Tom have blown through Big Tom’s investment and the profits of an ever-expanding school.

Xian, the school’s accountant, has befriended Drew and me, treating us to dinner and drinks several times. My antenna says something is up. Nobody treats you to free meals and booze unless they want something.

I go along with it, for lack of anything else to do. Inertia leads the way, and I feign satisfaction with my life in Hanoi. Nothing I do will change anything. The earth will still rotate and orbit the sun, and I will wake up in the morning.

What else is there to say, as I find myself sitting next to Big Tom on a large red pleather sectional couch, beneath a tile mosaic that seems like one of those innocuous paintings that hang in furniture stores?

A few colored-in geometric shapes and a few random black lines try to give the random shapes some obtuse meaning. A bottle of Johnny Walker Black sits on the glass table, while a slew of scantily clad girls fill our glasses with ice and booze.

I’ve come to a dark place where the wheels turn slowly.

Big Tom is hooting and howling like a child, grabbing and pinching a couple of the girls’ asses.

“Look at the nice little tits on that one,” he bellows, handing the microphone to a long slender girl.

There always seems to be a downward spiral before I embark upon a change. I stare at my glass of whisky, my head full of wanderlust and escape.

“She’s going to sing a song for you!” he shouts.

Great. Just fucking great. Further down the abyss I fall. The girl starts to sing that stupid Celine Dion song from Titanic.

“Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you.” She slides across the red pleather couch onto my lap, kissing my neck between verses.

“Ain’t this a slice of heaven! These girls are stupid,” Big Tom shouts. “You can do anything you want to them! Whoo hoo!”

He grabs another two girls onto his lap.

“These girls are nothing but country girls. No education but to suck cock and fuck!”

The lights swirl around the dingy room full of Big Tom’s cigarette smoke. I down my whisky, hoping to drown out the evening.

“My wife always packs condoms in my suitcase when I leave Korea. She’s a good traditional Korean woman.” He continues grabbing the ass of another girl, flipping through the songbook.

Another girl pours me a new glass of whisky, and I slam it as my Celine Dion serenade comes to an end.

Then another girl sings a traditional Vietnamese song. Karaoke is always better when you’re not able to understand any of the lyrics.

And finding the drunken courage I need I ask the pious Christian next to me, “What about the seventh commandment, you know the sin of adultery?”

“They’re fucking farm girls,” he laughs. “Nothing but fucking stupid pagans. They don’t count. They’re going to go to hell, like all the convicts I used to chaplain in the penitentiary.”

27

Mark bobs up and down in the white plastic chair like a punch-drunk boxer who has absorbed too many self-inflicted blows to the head.

Beer, food and words go in and out of his mouth with no care other than to keep the illusion he holds of himself: pious Christian owner of an English school, helping Vietnam to succeed in a new century.

“Mate, everyone knows the Ice Age was caused by The Great Flood. Water seeped up through the earth and overwhelmed the land,” he says, looking at the ice cubes in his Bia Hanoi.

I try not to roll my eyes.

“Noah got all those animals onto his boat and set out to sea. He saved humanity and the animal kingdom, carrying two of every species.”

I look over at Drew, who is keeping his best poker face.

Fuck? Is this guy serious?  Did he go to high school?

The Ice Age was caused by increased volcanic activity and fluctuating ocean currents. However, if Noah did exist, he was probably a Sumerian king called Ziusudra, who was warned of a great deluge by the god Enki. Or if The Flood did happen, what’s to say all those whack-jobs are wrong who believe the planet Niburi crossed paths with earth’s orbit and caused The Flood?

Or maybe Jesus rode a brontosaurus across the Hills of Galilee in search of keg parties, monster truck pulls and cheap whores. Maybe He even helped Mark lay a few bricks back in Brisbane. Maybe He even helped Mark con a group of Christians to give him start-up money for New Star, and helped Mark send his wife and children back to Australia, so Mark could boast about his sexual escapades.

I take a sip of beer. Drew lights a cigarette. Mark continues to drone on about Creationism.

I look out at the throng of motorbikes zooming by...there’s that moment, when it doesn’t matter what the other person is saying — their lips move, but your attention is elsewhere, watching a fly get swallowed whole by a gecko, or a person limping on crutches with a leg amputated below the knee.

Drew and I are here to ask for an extra day off, but we never get the chance. Mark has seized the opportunity to reify himself.

“I don’t know about you guys, but coming to Vietnam has been the best decision of my life. I was nothing but a cog in the wheels back in Australia. Here, I’m a god amongst peasants.”

Not knowing what to say, I shake my head. Again my attention shifts elsewhere, this time to waitresses delivering food and beer.

“I went from working on a construction crew to guiding my own life, and it’s Jesus’s doing. The Good Lord found a place for me, and I’m thankful.”

The spew continues. Drew excuses himself, heads for the bathroom. Left on my own, I have nothing to say.

I raise my beer and try not to smirk. “To a brighter future.”

“It will be, mate. We’re getting more money for the school. Big Tom has a Korean friend who wants to invest in the school. We’re in the process of drawing up the paperwork. Soon, we will be expanding again.”

“Expanding what?” Drew asks, finally back, taking a seat, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

“Mark was saying Big Tom found a Korean investor to help the school,” I answer.

“Yeah. I’m sure you guys will like him. He speaks good English and likes to party.”

And, there you have it — the prerequisite for any new hire at New Star: “He likes to party.”

28

Without the teachers at New Star, would Mark and Big Tom have an audience or any validation for their “religious” beliefs and their shenanigans?

Large contracts from companies come in to the school’s coffers and continually go to boozing, partying and whores. Our paychecks this month were a week late. I’m beginning to suspect things are not as rosy as Mark paints them.

My sights are becoming set outside of Hanoi and Vietnam. Sure, it’s an easy life here, working eighteen hours a week, boozing and doing drugs with the occasional liaison with some uneducated girl from the countryside who sells herself in the big city to help the family farm. But, it creates a deadened space. My nerves, cells and thinking have become coated with a film of ennui, which tells me it’s time to run and never look back.

Molecules and atoms all break down to infinite subatomic particles that all interact with each other. You can separate two joined particles and send them to opposite ends of the universe, and they will still have a memory of each other, sending information across the universe to each other.

You can separate the bone from marrow, and there is still being. Our bodies will decompose and our cells will transform into new matter, which still has consciousness. Nothing can stop it from happening. We live on the edge of mortality every second we breathe.

The atmosphere of our planet and its electromagnetic field protects us from the radiation and gamma rays of deep space, but that is an incredibly thin layer, thinner than our skin in cosmic terms.

Would religion, booze, sex, politics and degradation exist if no one was there to observe them? Would we exist if there were no subatomic particles to observe each other?

The apocalyptic orgy we call life always leads to an end point. Humanity always fixates on outcomes — get a job, get married, procreate, retire and die. The shackles of society never tell us the journey is paramount. Sure, we have some emboldened prophets who come along and try to nudge humanity to a higher consciousness, but they end up being burned alive or riddled with bullets.

No matter how I attempt to numb myself from such profound thought, I end up at this point, smoking a bowl and staring at empty bottles of beer, wishing for something higher without all the anthropomorphic bullshit humanity has centered on the universe. Things have always been eternal. Every one of our cells came from something else before.

The rock we push up the hill is hollow, full of false beliefs and assumptions. Science is only as good as it is now. All it takes is one cosmic discovery or one discovery in an atomic collider to shift all existing paradigms and dogmas.

29

Xian sits at the white plastic table cracking the shells of steamed peanuts. His black-framed rectangular glasses rest below his gelled black hair, above his hollow cheeks. He smiles and looks at Drew and me.

Waitresses wearing black ponytails and tan shower sandals weave through clouds of cigarette smoke that rise up into the twilight and scurry past tables full of men drinking beer, collecting orders of ginger steamed fish from the kitchen. “I’m glad you guys came out with me tonight,” Xian says looking at Drew and me. “I’ve got a big idea for you to think about.”

Drew and I look at each other and take a sip of beer. There is always something suspicious when somebody invites you to an expensive dinner and has plans for you. Call me paranoid, but after living in Asia for over three years I have seen this a lot.

The scenario usually plays out like this: The “benefactor” invites you to a fancy restaurant, buys dinner and then pitches an insane idea to make money or offers to introduce you to people with more power who want to use you to make money. I take another sip of beer and dig into the delicious food — a feast for Drew and me bought and paid for by Xian.

The feeling of wanting to be elsewhere takes hold of me, but so does the curiosity of what is going to be pitched at me. Being a white native speaker of English in Asia is like being a walking income revenue. Unfortunately, the money rarely sees you unless you take control of your own destiny and teach private lessons. But, that is something I cannot stomach, walking into someone’s home, getting the customary glass of water or cup of tea while feigning to care about some kid’s English development.

I’d rather live a modest life and supply myself with drugs to numb this temporary existence. It’s much easier that way.

Drew and Xian gesticulate with their hands and arms engaged in conversation. I see their lips move, but like a character in a Luis Buñuel film, my attention is elsewhere, a crippled man missing his legs with arms coming out of his chest pushes himself on a homemade dolly, weaving his way through the tables, begging for money.

I drop a few dollars’ worth of đồng into his upturned olive pith helmet, while Drew and Xian keep talking. The vestiges of the American war — a large part of the population missing limbs with birth defects from Agent Orange — a symbol for the guilt I feel travelling the world with my American passport.

Doom, destruction and profits for Brown and Root, Bell Helicopters and any other corporations from the military industrial complex. Talk all you want about the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam or the countless Americans who have suffered the effects of Agent Orange. This country and its people were practically destroyed by fascists in Washington, D.C. testing out their new war toys, which enabled their bank accounts to add countless zeroes on the right side of the all the numbers.

And that’s all we are. Numbers, fucking numbers. You may be the 6,763,215,895th person born, and I might be the 6,763,215,896th person born on this planet, but what hardships have we experienced?

A lost relationship…the loss of your job…a car accident or a dishonest contractor working on your house?

I sit there in the white-armed plastic chair watching a ponytailed girl from the countryside in green polyester pants and tan shower sandals, shooing the deformed beggar from the restaurant. The only money he got was from me, he stares back at me, as if I am able to stop his ostracization.

30

As usual, my suspicions are correct. Xian wants Drew and me to meet his pals, the number three guy at the Hanoi People’s Committee and the number four guy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Apparently, they have a business idea they want to pitch to us.

I’ll listen and go along for the free booze and food, but I know my time in Hanoi is coming to a close. I may not be a quiet American, but Thu Duong, my remaining tie to Hanoi, is gone. Never again will I find myself in the uncertainty of wanting permanence, of wanting to touch her, stroking her silky black hair and smelling her fragrance.

The Vietnam I came to seek was always in my head tied to a mythical woman who would change who I am. The damsel slipped away in the middle of the night in my dreams of life elsewhere. The longing of an embrace is what I seek in myself. The permanence I am after is in me. I feel that now, yet the only permanence is change: Change your habits, change your routine, change your behavior, all the psychologists say. But never once do they tell you to adjust your inner compass and focus on what you want. Instead, they train their focus on making you become a “productive” member of society.

What a crock of shit! Cog number 6,763,215,896 is acting out of line.

A puffy gray cloud cuts across the crescent moon as the light pollution drowns out the stars. I stand outside a swank restaurant in the Old Quarter shaking hands with Drew and Xian.

“Let’s go inside. Quan and Chinh are waiting for us,” Xian says.

We follow Xian into a warmly lit interior with crystal chandeliers hanging above every table. Wealthy people wearing formal jackets and dresses talk above the endless clanging of silverware. Not a setting I want to be in.

Pretentious at best, Xian introduces us to Quan and Chinh. We shake hands and take our seats at an antique French table. So much for the spartan virtues of “Communism.”

Quan has perfectly cropped dyed black hair that swoops across his forehead, while Chinh is wearing gold-rimmed glasses that draw attention to his pockmarked cheeks. They order snails and expensive cuts of beef for us to eat.

A waitress wearing a golden áo dài seemingly levitates to our table and pours us glasses of imported beer.

Waiting for the sales pitch, I focus my attention elsewhere. Foreign diplomats make toasts and drink champagne. I’m sure their toasts are not about bilateral ties with Vietnam.

I look down at my lime-green button-down shirt that smells like two days of sweat. My washing machine broke and the repairman won’t be able to fix it until tomorrow.

Out of place as I always am, I focus back on the conversation at our table. Chinh raises his glass and makes a toast.

“To future opportunities,” he says.

I keep my laughter inside and we all clank glasses and dig in at the marbleized slabs of beef. The meat melts in my mouth as I chew. I look over at Drew, who raises his eyebrows. The pitch is coming.

“Thanks for coming tonight,” Quan says. “We have an exciting idea that could make us all rich.”

“Xian has told us a lot about you,” Chinh continues. “You both are excellent teachers who know IELTS well.”

Drew and I nod in confirmation and I look at Xian whose face is flush from the beer.

“We want to open a school in Hanoi that prepares Vietnamese students to study at universities in New Zealand,” Quan says and takes a sip from his beer.

“We have investors, but we need people to operate the school. That’s where you two come in.”

I look at Drew, then back at Quan and Chinh. “That is a great opportunity, but we need time to think about it.”

Drew nods his head. “If we were to leave our current jobs, we would need a significant amount of money.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Chinh says and raises his glass for another toast. I guess in the hopes of lifting our “spirits” to the task of running their school.

“Take some time to think about it,” Quan continues. “We weren’t expecting a decision tonight.”

The rest of the meal is made up of small talk about my background and Drew’s background. Both Quan and Chinh seem impressed by our knowledge of Vietnam and our desires to leave our cultures behind. More beer and beef are delivered to our table by the lovely golden-clad waitresses.

A man could easily fall in love with any one of these angelic waitresses and write a fantasy of love drenched in the reflected light of the crystal chandeliers. But I have no delusions. I’m sure all these gals are mistresses to some foreign diplomat or CEO in Hanoi. Beauty like this always follows money, and we proles are stuck trying to find the proverbial diamond in the rough amongst a sea of plain-jane office workers and country girls who came to the big city to eke out a living to support their families back home.

Nothing has changed for millennia. And so we go at it daily with the hopes that one thought or action will change our station in life. Yet it never happens, and eventually the weak will settle down with an office worker or some countryside girl.

Nothing can change that unless we meet a woman who has an indescribable sense of elegance and creativity that shakes the core of our being, that makes us beg, crawl and howl like a dog. Until that happens, I’ll continue to post myself up in some new and unknown place and look for meaning. It’s the only thing we can do. Life happens whether you let it happen or not. The only thing we can do is to trust our internal compass no matter how right or wrong it is. So go ahead and howl and bark like a rabid dog and gnaw at the foot of your muse!

Trust me. Life will happen.

31

It’s another Saturday night, and I find myself in a karaoke ôm place with Mark, Mair, Big Tom and Murray. Another week of classes finished and another week closer to the end of my existence in Hanoi, I down my shot of whisky and look over at Mair and roll my eyes. Mair laughs and raises his shot glass towards me.

A gaggle of girls wearing sequin dresses come to our table with fruit and side dishes. Our entertainment for the evening has arrived; we sit around the green horseshoe couch with the girls sitting between us.

Colored lights swirl while Mark pages through the songbook and selects “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton. The cheesy keyboard version of the song plays, set to images of people paddling boats along the Perfume River.

Mark downs his whisky in one shot and croons, “Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?”

One girl refills our shot glasses, while Murray grabs a cute girl with shoulder-length hair and pulls her onto his lap.

“This is why I came to Hanoi!” he shouts.

“You’re damn right!” Big Tom howls and pulls a different girl onto his lap. The other two girls look at Mair and me, and Mair and I cross our wrists, making an X as if to say no thanks.

“Beyond the door, there’s peace, I’m sure.” The lame lyrics continue from Mark’s mouth.

How could anyone write such rubbish? Sentimentality deserves no place in the world. People become bumbling sobs with one sad story after another.

“I must be strong and carry on.” The insult continues. People love mediocrity and strive for it.

With no desire to push beyond the illusion of a solid reality, people marry, get “good” jobs, have children and buy things in the hopes of finding meaning while ignoring others who go street to street begging for money in order to buy their next meal.

Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, every “ism” is the same. Nobody gives a shit about anyone outside of their immediate circle of family and friends.

Lost in thought, I finish my shot of whisky and hear a loud commotion as everyone runs toward the door chasing Big Tom and Murray.

32

Outside on the street under a lone streetlight, Big Tom puffs his chest out and pushes Murray off of his motorbike.

“She’s my girl. Mai’s my girl. You better leave her alone,” Big Tom shouts.

“Fuck you! She’s a whore. She doesn’t belong to anyone!”

Murray gets to his feet and brushes the dirt off his elbows.

“Go fucking ask her who pays for all her stuff.” Big Tom pushes Murray again.

“What the fuck are you saying?” Murray shoves Big Tom against the light pole.

“That’s it, asshole! I brought you over from Korea and all you can do to be grateful is to take my girl home!”

“Come on. Seriously?” Murray pleads. “You’re upset about some fucking country girl who fucks men for a living?”

“Fuck you!” Big Tom takes a swing at Murray and hits him in the chest.

Murray sends a wild uppercut in the air missing Big Tom’s chin, while Big Tom pushes him against a rolled-down aluminum shutter of a closed shop.

The rattling of the shutter alarms the neighborhood.

Lights turn on from second and third floor apartments to see what the raucous is about.

“Come on, guys,” Mark says, putting himself between Big Tom and Murray.

“There are tons of other women to put your dick into.”

Big Tom shoves Mark out of the way. “This is how we settle it back home!” he shouts.

Murray then lands a blow to Big Tom’s chest that doubles over Big Tom. “Take that, asshole!” Murray lands a shot to Big Tom’s head and knocks off his glasses.

Mark again tries to separate the two, but Big Tom gets to his feet and punches Murray in the mouth, busting his lip.

Mark again tries to push Murray and Big Tom away from each other. “If you two are going to act like junior high school boys, then go ahead and beat the shit out of each other. What the fuck do I care!”

Murray then pushes Big Tom against the storefront and hits Big Tom with a couple quick punches that send Big Tom to his knees.

“Come on, Mai, let’s go.” Murray grabs the stunned girl, who probably has never seen two stupid white guys fight over her, and starts his motorbike.

“What are you waiting for? Hop on,” Murray says. Mai hops on the back of Murray’s motorbike.

I shoot Mair a quick look. “Did you see what I just saw?”

Mair shakes his head in disbelief and Murray zooms off into the darkness with Mai on the back of his motorbike.

33

Walking into the staff room earlier tonight, I noticed one less nametag on the mailboxes. Murray is gone. He got fired, not for being a shitty teacher, but for stealing Big Tom’s karaoke girl. Yet another reason I must leave this school and leave Hanoi.

My sanity waxes by the day, and I carry this image. I’m on a train platform waiting for my train and I am the only person who is moving. Everyone else is frozen in place.

I look at my watch. Its hands are frozen, too. A sense of fright and excitement looms. Time has stopped, and I am at this weigh station, trying to move forward in a place where every train and every person has stopped moving.

I see a nomad, almost thirty-one years old, with thinning hair and a beard in a cracked mirror hanging from a platform pillar. The man I see in the reflection looks confused and lost, searching for meaning in hopeless relationships, self-sabotaged dreams, drugs and alcohol.

The platform I stand on, or rather the imaginary stage I stand on is strewn with flowers and rotten vegetables. Its curtain, red, faded pink and full of cobwebs, smells like mildew and sweat.

All the women I have run from are in the audience laughing at me. All the people close to me that I have run from stand with their arms folded. I see myself there in the audience, too, silent and glum.

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I run from myself? Why do I keep asking why?

Everything exists and it has existed for eternity, and when we die we will all return to eternity. The universe has always been this way.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. All those old Catholic clichés pop into my head. The guilt never leaves — the eternal gift to all of us recovering Catholics.

Bless you, my son, bless you, my daughter, for I have sinned. Nothing I can do can make up for the sacramental scars I have inflicted on myself. Spending nights in the company of “massage” girls, going home and grabbing whatever drug I can put into my body, hoping for that great escape that will never happen.

The only great escape is death, and nobody even knows if that is an escape.

Nothing is certain and everything is uncertain. Tomorrow may never come, and tonight may never end. I take a hit of opium, but the questions remain. The abyss stares at me and mocks me.

“You’re nothing but a piss artist. Go ahead, run from yourself. You’ll never get further than where you are at now.”

34

Back in the Labyrinth, the NGO crowd of people dominates the first floor.  Middle-aged men all wearing khaki pants, tailored shirts and expensive watches talk obnoxiously above the chatter and clanking of beer bottles about hydroelectric dams, bridges and newly designed roadways.

The path to “development” always centers itself on infrastructure, building better roads and better dams to provide a better means for developed countries to steal and exploit the resources of developing countries. All these NGO workers start off well intentioned after getting a master’s degree in developmental studies from some prestigious university in some well-to-do country, believing their actions working for UNICEF, the Red Cross, JICA or any another NGO make a difference. Then reality sets in. Power, corruption, greed and personal ambition take over.

Microfinance, large infrastructure projects be damned. When one can build their résumé in a place like Vietnam with “successful” projects and initiatives, that lucrative position at the World Bank or the IMF becomes closer.

I take a sip of my beer and look down to the first floor at the gaggle of self-righteous economic hitmen. The unseen army of the West and Japan. It will never end until every last country has been drained of resources and exploited.

“I’m so sick of these pampered jackasses. I’d love to piss in their beer.” Mair shakes his head in disgust.

“Too right,” Drew agrees and we make a toast.

“To hell with development!” We laugh and finish our beer.

I stagger down the narrow wooden stairs against the exposed brick wall, and order three more bottles of beer from Mao.

Iggy Pop’s “Funtime” plays on the stereo. “Talkin’ to Dracula and his crew. All aboard for funtime,” blares over the din of crew cuts talking shop about this or that “project.”

I pay Mao for the beer and make my way back upstairs. Mair and Drew are engrossed in conversation.

“You can’t keep trying to romance these psychopaths,” Mair chimes. “They only care about money and status.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“I saw Phoung here the other night with one of those NGO pricks,” Drew answers. “Every time I get feelings for a girl here, they seem to run to some rich guy or NGO knob end.”

“You need to put your dick into one of them and stop smothering them with gifts,” Mair says, flashing a look at me.

“They don’t appreciate nice guys. If you don’t tick off any of the boxes on their imaginary checklist, you might as well try to fuck them and forget them. You keep doing your head in,” I say and take a sip of beer.

“Baby, baby we like your pants. All aboard for funtime. Everybody we want in,” Iggy Pop’s voice cuts through the clatter.

“Words of wisdom there from Iggy,” I say.

“Man, you guys don’t get how much I like Phuong and how much it hurts to see her with another guy.”

“Come on, Drew,” Mair says. “What does she have besides her looks? What do any of these girls have besides their looks?”

“We’re just English teachers. You should make your money, have fun and move on.” I take a sip and look over at Drew who has his head in his hands.

“Listen to Mike. If you take away their beauty and take sex off the table, what do these women have? What do you have in common with them?” Mair asks.

“I can give them a better life back in England,” Drew answers.

“A better life? Do they even want that? They all seem to want to marry a wealthy guy, have kids and impress their family and friends,” I reply.

“It’s their country. We’re just white guys who teach English. We are a dime a dozen. We come to Hanoi, and we leave Hanoi. Do you want all the bullshit of supporting one of these girls back in Ol’ Blighty?” Mair asks.

“I thought Phuong was different,” Drew answers. “She made time for me, and we had a good time together. I thought it was going somewhere.”

“She’s going somewhere. She’s going to the richest guy’s house, and she’s going to make her nest there. Find someone who is into doing the things you like to do. Don’t waste your time chasing beauty. It always ends up being ugly.”

Wise words there from Mair. I’ve spent almost two years here, working and not working, chasing beauty and chasing my buzz, only to have nothing other than money to move on to the next place. This place will become more modern and will get wealthier, but its core values will always remain. No matter how advanced a country’s economy becomes, its culture lags behind stuck in the fields, farms and factories, while rich locals, foreign investors, foreign companies and NGOs reap the benefits. More production and higher prices for goods and services will always nullify higher wages and a higher standard of living.

I look down at the khaki clad crew cut vultures and shake my head in disgust. It will never change. These guys will all move on to another country and do the same thing they are doing now, and I’ll move on to another place and try to forget my time in Vietnam. So it goes.

35

The summer rain has come to an end, and the humidity has dropped to a bearable level. All over the city, people seem happier and full of energy. The skies of late have been rather blue and full of high white clouds.

A nice calm at the end of my summer-long storm, I am ready to leave Vietnam. Another month of pretending to care about English, and I’ll go travel Laos and Cambodia. Vietnam and (you pick the country) will always continue their bilateral ties, and all Vietnam’s government ministries will always report a rise in production of some useless product. It’s how it goes in Communist Central.

The dossier the secret police keep on me will be retired and filed away somewhere. Michael Bishop, a tall lanky American with balding hair, kept to himself for the most part, was respectful of his neighbors, occasionally had sex with prostitutes and may have bought drugs at night from motorbike drivers on the dark streets of the Old Quarter.

The self-deprecation and mockery of Vietnamese news knows no end when I ride on the back of a motorbike taxi.

The fronds of trees sway in the gentle breeze. Autumn is slowly ascending upon Hanoi, and the golden hue of the sunlight has given all the buildings and trees a nostalgic look, as if some French photographer captured it in a sepia-toned photo.

The motorbike comes to a stop outside of New Star, and I hop off the back, paying the driver for the ride to work. I walk up the concrete steps into work, past the vacant front desk and into the staff room.

Mark and Big Tom wanted us all here early for some big announcement. All the office staff, Drew, Mair, Steve and Chris are already there. I grab my books from my pigeonhole and begin to scribble some lesson plans for the evening.

Big Tom walks into the room. “Everyone, this is Frank,” he says, introducing a short stocky middle-aged Korean guy. “He invested in New Star, and we’re going to use that money to expand the school.”

We teachers applaud and clap, feigning a real care about Mark and Big Tom’s front to party and shag whores.

“Thanks,” Frank stammers in broken English. “I came from Korea because I see big opportunity in Vietnam. I excited to work with you gentlemen.”

Again we clap, pretending to give a shit about Frank and his money.

“What’s the first thing you are going to do with the money?” Mair asks.

“We’re going to rent the building right behind us to get more classrooms for our expansion,” Big Tom answers.

A stock answer if I ever heard one, I ask, “What new contracts have you gotten?”

“We got the development bank, VTV and some more Vietnam Airlines classes coming soon,” Big Tom says. “Anyway, I wanted you to meet Frank. He’s going to be shadowing me and learning how we do things at New Star.”

Going to see how you do things at New Star? Why don’t you just come out and say you have a new whoring buddy whose money you and Mark will blow, while putting little to no effort into the school?

With a small modicum of competency, I reckon New Star would have become the largest language school in Hanoi. Mark blew all the Australian Christians’ money on booze and whores. Then Big Tom and he blew all Big Tom’s wife’s money on booze and whores. Then they blew some Aussie university’s investment on more booze and whores. And now, we have Frank’s money.

36

Both Drew and I have decided to not get involved with Quan and Chinh’s venture of starting an IELTS school. Drew doesn’t want to deal with the headache, and I could care less about their school. Meanwhile, Rick has quit New Star and is now working at another language school in town.

Our new Director of Studies, Joseph, is a bald, tall and lanky former headmaster from some school in Melbourne. All business and strict in appearance, he wears tailored clothing and designer glasses. I’m sure he’ll be gone after a few months of dealing with no money to update the English programs and the teaching resources.

I’ll establish some rapport with him to keep my schedule relatively the same and free of children’s classes. It’s the same when any new DOS turns up. Get on their good side, do a few favors for them, and they’ll leave you alone.

I wish the same could be said of Frank. He found out I lived in Korea for a year, and now he wants to be my pal, which involves me going to the karaoke ôm place with him, Mark and Big Tom. He wasted no time in joining the party, and word has it that he has a wife and family back in Korea.

After Big Tom and Murray’s final scene, I have no desire to step foot in any karaoke ôm place. Nor, do I have a desire to spend my remaining days on the piss with Big Tom, Mark and Frank.

Steve has left New Star and is working for the BBC full time and writing for the inflight magazine of Vietnam Airlines. A much better gig than pretending to care about the English development of Vietnamese students. Mair, Chris, Drew and I are the only teachers left from when I started here a few months ago.

Big Tom and Joseph have hired a few new teachers who I haven’t seen. They must be teaching the morning adult classes and the children’s classes on Saturday.

The teacher turnover continues to average three months. I’m amazed I have lasted almost two years working on and off, as Hanoi is not a welcoming place after the first few months. The daily hassle and haggling for everything becomes tiresome, and the lack of culture outside of Vietnamese culture never changes.

I’m tired of being an island of culture to myself. The third floor of my house remains empty. The paints and empty canvases continue to mock me, and every attempt to get a housemate has failed. It’s getting time to downsize my life, cancel the lease on the house and send some stuff home.

37

Vietnam and Mike Bishop have vowed to not renew their bilateral ties. The imaginary headline swirls through my head as I sit outside in the labyrinth of streets in the Old Quarter near Hoan Kiem Lake. Drew and I are at the Tropical Lizard, some new bar a French guy has opened up.

The bamboo-lined walls, the bamboo bar and bamboo barstools make the place feel cheesy like Elvis’s Jungle Room in Graceland. At least there is no wall-to-wall green shag carpet or tourists from Arkansas commenting on the class that Elvis had.

Cute girls wearing tight blouses and miniskirts scurry in and out of the bar, delivering food and drinks.

“Just a reminder. Everyone has to come inside in an hour. The police come by every night at eleven,” the proprietor announces across the bar with his French accent.

I take a sip of beer and put the mug down on the blue plastic table.

“We might as well finish our beer and go inside,” Drew says.

“Sure, definitely more sights to see inside,” I laugh.

“Too right. These girls here are better looking than the Carlsberg and Tiger girls at the other bars.”

I raise my mug at Drew in agreement and down my beer. Drew finishes his beer, and then we walk inside and find a small table across from the bar, against the bamboo-lined wall.

A petite waitress with shoulder-length dyed brown hair and a dark silky complexion comes to our table and takes our order. We order two more mugs of beer, and she comes back to our table with them.

“My friend, Ross, is flying here next week from London,” Drew says. “He works at Rolls Royce and knows about their aircraft engines.”

“Cool,” I reply. “How long will he be here?”

“A couple of weeks. I’m going to have him talk to my Vietnam Airlines class about Rolls Royce engines, and we’ll go to Dien Bien Phu. You should come along with us.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I say and sneak a peek at the petite waitress. Her short legs are well shaped.

She catches me, and I smile. She smiles back and goes behind the bar.

“It looks like someone likes you,” Drew laughs.

“Who knows? These girls in Hanoi love to flirt.”

“Too right. They also love to play you off wealthier guys, too,” Drew says getting up from his seat. “Off to the loo.”

I look around the bar and catch the girl looking at me. I smile again and she smiles and walks to our table.

“I’m Mike,” I say and smile.

“I’m Tien,” she says, blushing.

“How long have you been working here?” I ask, trying not to look at her perky boobs.

“Two weeks. Since the bar opened. You come here often?”

“No, it’s my first time,” I answer and look into her soft brown eyes.

“You have a girlfriend?” she asks and smiles.

“Nope. I’m single,” I say and shrug my shoulders.

“Why? You are a handsome man.”

Now I know she is full of shit. I may be handsome or not. She knows what assets she has, and she knows she has a sucker sitting right here.

“What are you doing after work?” I ask.

“I’m going to the Bamboo Bar. You want to meet me there?” She laughs.

“Sure. What time?”

“Twelve,” she answers, flashes me a coy look and walks away.

I chuckle and see Drew on his way back to our table. The Bamboo Bar is a seedy late-night bar near the train bridge in the Old Quarter. It is always full of Western men, rich Vietnamese men and tons of freelance whores working their trade.

“Were you talking to that girl?” Drew asks as he sits down.

“Yeah. She’s a freelancer working here to get extra cash while she finds more johns.”

“You going to be one of her johns?”

“What choice do I have? She’s already come over to the table and worked it,” I answer and take a sip of beer.

“I’m not judging you, mate, but what will that accomplish?”

“Nothing.” I take another sip of beer and swallow. “I’ll go meet her after work and see how much she wants.”

It’s my last month in Hanoi. Why should I try to change my behavior? All the booze, drugs and sex will be memories, and soon enough I’ll leave Hanoi, traveling to find myself in new places. That’s what I keep telling myself. Who knows if I’ll be able to do it, but I need to try. Or else I’ll end up like all those old European guys in Thailand married out of convenience to a younger woman or married out of convenience to some whore.

38

I bid Drew goodnight, and I walk through the Old Quarter past all the rolled-down aluminum shutters protecting the storefronts. The brisk night breeze blows some leaves off the trees. Green and brown water runs along the streets in the open sewers. Random motorbikes zoom by and disappear into the darkness.

I have no idea why I am headed to the Bamboo Bar. It will end up with me getting drunk and horny, and agreeing to whatever Tien wants. Then I’ll wake up in the morning after a night’s worth of bliss, look at all the images above my writing desk and beat myself up for bringing Tien home with me.

As I round the corner, bad dance music echoes down the street. The late night train for Sapa chugs by on the bridge over the street. No turning back. I open the door and walk into the Bamboo Bar.

The khaki crew cut army is here and so are quite a few foreign entrepreneurs clad in dress pants and striped button-down shirts dancing on the dance floor. Vietnamese women of all sizes bounce from guy to guy, making small talk, trying to earn their money for the evening.

I spot Tien alone at the long bamboo bar and walk up to her.

“Hey. What are you doing all alone?” I ask.

“Waiting for you. I knew you would come.” She flashes me a coy smile.

“What made you think that?” I ask and order a beer from the bartender.

“You were looking at me when you were in the Tropical Lizard.”

We both laugh and clank our beer bottles.
“Cheers!” The cheese I put myself through to have a night with these porcelain-skinned beauties seems limitless. I turn my thoughts elsewhere and check out Tien’s body. It’s petite and compact. No wasted curves at all.

“So, do you want to take me home?” she asks.

“Why not?” I shrug my shoulders and take a sip of beer.

“Good. I need a place to sleep tonight. My roommates and I are fighting.”

“That’s not good. What happened?” I ask.

“It’s a long story. We don’t like each other. I want a new room,” Tien says and takes a sip from her beer.

“How many girls do you share a room with?”

“Three. They are from the country and they are stupid,” Tien answers, pouting her lips.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Hanoi. My parents died when I was young. I had to work since I was a child.”

Most girls here in this profession all have similar stories, whether they are from the country or the city. The only difference seems to be if they are supporting their family back home, or if they have been on their own since their youth.

“Did you always make money off men?” I ask.

“No. I used to sell flowers and bread, but when I got older, my friend said I can make more money sleeping with men.”

A person’s fate sometimes is out of their control, especially in a developing country. Social norms and morality are not even a thought. Pure socioeconomic survival is paramount and these girls will do anything not to be homeless.

I’ve seen it a lot in my time in Hanoi; call me a sucker. I don’t have the heart to turn them away. At least I can be a gentleman for one night and treat them well, as I’m sure they end up in bed with assholes most of the time.

“How often do you come to the Bamboo Bar?” I ask.

“Only when I need money. Foreign men pay me well.” Tien smiles.

“How much do you want from me?” I ask.

“Nothing. I want to stay with you while I find a new room. Don’t worry I will only need one or two weeks.”

“Okay. Let’s go,” I say and finish my beer.

Tien smiles and kisses me on the cheek. “You’re so sweet.”

She’s played me well, and being the sap that I am, I have put up no resistance. All these girls are like love songs. They last for a short lovely time and they disappear. Tien will be no exception, but I have conditioned myself to accept these situations of convenience and make the most of them.

Who knows? I may write a book about these experiences one day. But until then, I’ll take these codependent opportunities and make the best of them.

39

Tien strips off her clothes and leaves them on the white-tiled floor. Her tan body, full of youth and tight, radiates in the dim candlelight of my bedroom. Her pear-shaped breasts and dark brown nipples point forward towards me, defying gravity. Mesmerized, I lie in my bed and stare at her tight round ass, as she turns around and walks to the bathroom.

I hear her turn on the shower and hear blasts of water hit the bathroom floor. The taxi ride here, full of kisses and gropes, has gotten my dick as hard as I can remember. It’s been a few months since I spent the night with a woman, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to perform well, so I grab my bowl and take a couple of hits, blowing the smoke down the stairs to the first floor.

I lie back down on the bed and hear the shower turn off. Tien opens the door and walks into my bedroom with one of my red towels wrapped around her torso.

“What’s that smell? Did you smoke something?” Tien asks.

“Yeah. I was smoking,” I answer afraid to say it was pot.

“It smells like marijuana. Did you smoke marijuana?”

Busted. I answer, “Yep. Would you like some?”

“Yes.” Tien gives me a coy smile, and I pack a few buds in the bowl for her.

“You’re the first Vietnamese woman I’ve met who smokes,” I say.

“I used to smoke with a French man. He go back to France. Now, no more.” Tien takes a hit and blows the smoke in my face.

We lock eyes and Tien falls onto my bed. I can’t tell if she likes me or is faking it. It doesn’t matter. We’ve made our deal and we’ll have our love song.

Ride’s “Seagull” plays on my stereo, an homage to my twenties when I was in San Francisco, engaged and in love.

“You gave me things I’d never seen. You made my life a waking dream.” The reverberated echoing guitars swirl around the room as I kiss Tien.

“Falling like ashes to the floor.” We lock lips and my hands soon find their way caressing her breasts. Her brown nipples are hard in my hands. Her back arched, either enjoying it or feigning it, I kiss and lick her breasts and slide my tongue down to her vagina.

The cacophony of guitars gives way to the upbeat opening of “Kaleidoscope.” Her vagina is wet, and I try not to think about how many other guys have been down here.

Her body convulses and twists and turns as she moans loudly. My little actress is working her way to an Academy Award.

I keep licking her clit and playing with her pussy. Her black pubic hair forms a nice silky triangle. I turn my attention back to her breasts, and Tien grabs my cock, slowly stroking and petting it.

“You got condoms?” she asks.

Not the most romantic way to say she’s ready, but an invitation is an invitation, and I walk over to my nightstand and grab a condom.

“Give it to me,” Tien says.

I hand her the condom, and she goes down on me. Her tongue caresses my dick as she bobs her mouth up and down its shaft.

I can’t take much more. I squeeze her arm, and she opens the condom and slides it onto my cock.

She smiles and guides my cock into her pussy, and the ritual dance begins. Her pussy is wet and tight as I thrust in and out, changing speeds in a circular motion.

Her moaning grows louder and she bites her lips. Beads of sweat run down our backs, and not wanting to blow my load too soon, I pull out and position Tien on her hands and knees.

Her brown skin is so soft to touch, and I slide back in. The shoe-gazed guitars of Ride break into relentless percussive beat. My thrusting is matching it, driving us both crazy.

The music then becomes peaceful again as the lyrics kick in: “She's effortlessly cool. But circumstances can be cruel. And sometimes you must accept.”

A prophetic sign for sure. I keep changing my speeds and my rhythm, grabbing and squeezing Tien’s plump breasts.

“Cum, cum,” Tien moans and tightens her pussy. I explode into the condom, and we collapse onto the sweaty bed.

40

The early afternoon sunlight streams across the cream bed sheets. The crisp and clear air blows in from the window. The tension and ennui I have been carrying of late has dissipated. I look around the room and see Tien putting on her blouse.

“I’ll go look for a new room today and get my clothes,” she says.

In the sunlight, she looks as good as she did last night. I smile and wish her well.

“I finish work at eleven. Can I come here at twelve?” she asks.

“Sure,” I answer. And just like that, our little love song continues. I’m smart enough to know it is not about me. Circumstances have pushed us together. I needed a distraction from all my introspection, and she needed somewhere to stay to avoid a difficult situation. Who knows what that situation really is? But who cares, our tryst has a definite end, and we will appreciate this time together and move on.

I get out of bed and put on my boxer shorts and follow Tien down the stairs.

We kiss, and wish each other a good day. I unlock the front door and let her out.

I stumble back upstairs and throw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and sit down at my desk. The room smells like sex and stale marijuana smoke. We smoked and fucked till the early morning.

I take a hit of weed and look at all the photos and postcards above my desk. In my earlier time in Hanoi, a couple years ago, I felt these images would inspire me to write. Now they act as a reminder of times past.

I grab the cigar box from the drawer of my desk, and I tear the photos off the wall and put them into the box. The light yellow wall looks better devoid of all those images; living in the now is the only true inspiration.

The future only happens in the now, by living in the present. The past has already happened, and the struggle to get to now ends the moment you realize that every moment is now.

My time in Hanoi is nearing its end, and I have no regrets. Everything I have done has led me to now. Everything I didn’t do or didn’t say does not matter, nor will it ever matter. Life does not flow like a film or a book. We cannot edit scenes of our lives. We can only move forward with inherent cruelty knowing life can only be understood looking backwards.

All my thoughts of waking up from a terrible eight-year dream and seeing my ex-fiancée’s loving face in the bed next to me will never happen. All my regrets of running away from Thu Duong and not committing to her or any other woman in my life are illusions the trickster is plying onto me. The journey to the self never ends and everything outside of ourselves is nothing but a distraction.

Stay still, my friend, and listen to yourself. No amount of money, no amount of possessions or passion will ever last. We all will die alone. The journey of now always ends in death.

The death of an idea, the death of a love, or the death of an emotion will always lead to rebirth. And it is up to us, how we handle these ashes and fly away to our true path.

41

Drew and Ross went off to Dien Bien Phu. Being in the middle of my little tryst with Tien, I decided not to go. I was there before, a year ago, landing at the old French airfield, now the airport, and walking across the tarmac, looking at the large mountains that surround the fertile green valley.

The French command had to be out of their minds thinking they could hold up here in a surrounded valley. No amount of trenches and mini Sherman tanks could have ever stopped the barrage of mortars from those mountains.

The one thing I have learned living in Vietnam these past two years is that you should never put anything past the Vietnamese. Their tenaciousness has no end, and they will always find a way to beat you.

The Chinese learned that in 1983 when they stormed over the border all the way to Sapa. Then it became a turkey shoot as the Vietnamese mobilized and chased the Chinese back across the border, twice the distance the Chinese went into Vietnam. You can see why I gave up trying to haggle to get the price I want any time I go to the market — I accept the expat price and move on.

And that’s what I’m doing, moving on. I’ve handed in my resignation at New Star. I have another week or so of classes.

Laos looms on the horizon and Tien has hinted she wants to go with me. I’m not so sure about that. Sure the sex every night has been magical, but do I want to pay for someone else while I travel?

That being said, I offered to pay her way if she buys a pair of sensible walking shoes. A fair deal if you ask me.

I don’t want to dig any trenches when I’m leaving. Freedom can only be truly experienced alone, and the instant you step away from all the things binding you to place or a specific time in your life, it becomes the moment where the unknown releases itself and propels you forward. No belief is needed other than the belief in yourself.

But soon enough that unknown becomes all too familiar, and we’ll have to start the process of digestion and incubation all over again. Unless a person becomes a true nomad with no possessions except for the clothes on his back, this process of existential angst will always be there. But then, the nomad faces the same ennui. He is on the run from it, and so will I be when I go to Laos.

All the faces we see on a daily basis will disappear and become new faces on another journey. And these new faces will vanish once I move to another place. The only faces that are constant are the face you see in the mirror and the faces from the past that haunt you.

Try as we may to overcome these faces, we still encounter them when we become idle with too much time for thought. So be kind to yourself and let those faces vanish as much as they can. For they are on their own journey, and you are also a disappearing face to them in their sense of being.

Humanity has created this dichotomy that can never exist. Permanence can never be actualized unless you accept the permanence of every atom or every subquantum particle constantly changing to become something new.

42

With no more paint or paintbrushes to mock me, I decided to stay in a cheap hotel in the Old Quarter. I gave up the house and purged everything except for my photography camera, some books and a backpack worth of clothes. My tryst with Tien came to an end; she never bought the shoes.

People have to want to be around you. You can never do everything or be everything for anyone. The whole kit and caboodle called humanity has bamboozled us by making us think we are living for some grand purpose. It's difficult enough being everything for yourself, so enjoy the countless rotations of the planet.

The good thing is that I have a bit of money to last me a few months travelling. After that, I have no idea where I’ll call home, and soon I’ll be on a bus to Vientiane.

I take out my notebook from the desk drawer and begin to write.

Children jump into the water, bare-chested,
catching bluegills in their bare hands.

Couples stroll around the lake holding hands,
and photographers take photos of the flowering trees.

The green water offers no reflection.

43

The full moon radiates to the east above the rooftops and TV antennas. City workers wearing conical hats scoop up trash from the open sewers. Their shovels scrape and reverberate every time they make contact with the asphalt and cement.

The endless stream of motorbikes rushes by, surrounding a few taxis and expensive foreign cars. People slurp noodles in the corner shop while tourists walk by wearing large backpacks. Other than it being a different day on the calendar, the scene in the Old Quarter never changes. If I hadn’t lived in Hanoi for two years, I wouldn’t be able to distinguish tonight from my first night here.

I sit with my backpack outside my hotel, waiting for the bus to Laos. Thoughts from the past swirl through my head, and I see myself a year ago at Thu Duong’s house, talking to her father.

The smell of green tea and fried pork permeates the house. Her brother’s wedding photos and pictures of other relatives hang on the white walls, and on the living room table is an architectural model of an eight-story building her father is designing.

It looks no different than the buildings that already exist in Hanoi, as
the hazy film keeps projecting in my mind. We talk of my dreams and goals, and we talk about what Thu Duong’s father wants for her, a husband who takes care of her, some children and a good life for her. He doesn’t care about the ethnicity of the man. He only wants for her to be happy.

She sits next to me, smiling and drinking tea. For some reason, she and her father view me as desirable. I take a sip of tea and look at a photo of her brother holding his newly born son.

I can’t do it, and I know I can’t do it. No matter how hard I try to “fit in,” I will always be a misfit adrift in carnal desires chasing my dream of creativity. Teaching English is a gig that gets me to new places, which inevitably puts me in situations like this.

I take another sip of tea, and the film dissipates.

A second-hand Korean mini-bus, with a logo for some Korean cram school, pulls up. The driver takes my ticket and puts my backpack on the backseats with the other backpacks. I get on the bus and find a seat among the other travelers. I look out the window at all the motorbikes and people going by.

The bus drives through the narrow streets of the Old Quarter and heads south to connect with Highway One, on our way to connect with a larger bus that will take us to Vientiane.

All the houses along the road look the same. Two to three stories with faux columns framing the front doors. I put on my headphones and load “Anyway That You Want Me” by Evie Sands into my CD player as we pass through Thanh Trì and get onto Highway One.

44

The mini-bus stops in Vinh at a fancy restaurant attached to a hotel. The bus driver motions for us to get off the bus. The Aussie backpackers look perplexed. They ask the bus driver in stilted English what’s happening, while the bus driver tries to mime that we are to wait here for the other bus.

I laugh and ask the bus driver in Vietnamese how long we will be here. He says no more than an hour, and I relay the information to the Aussies. We grab our backpacks and get off the bus. The Aussies head into the restaurant for a beer, and I rest under a tree looking through my notebook: stunted attempts of poems, thoughts about a novel and random self-portraits alternate page after page as I leaf through pages from the past several months. Maybe someday this will amount to something.

After fifteen minutes or so, an old beat-up two-tone yellow ochre and white Russian bus sputters into the parking lot and stops. The driver and crew step down from the bus and shout, “Vientiane.”

They motion for us to give them our backpacks, and we get on the bus full of Vietnamese going to Laos. There are no empty seats, so we head to the back of the bus, where the last two rows of seats have been removed.

Huge burlap bags, each the size of a person, are piled up there. We readjust the bags and create spots to sit as the crew finishes tying our backpacks to the roof rack.

The engine starts again, and we’re off into the darkness. The Aussies talk amongst themselves about mates they know from university, and I close my eyes and try to sleep.

Some hours later, the bus stops at a closed gas station in the middle of nowhere near the Laos border. I look at my watch. It’s four in the morning and the border won’t open for a few more hours. I grab my day bag and find a clean stretch of cement to lie down on.

The bus crew begins to open secret compartments all over the bus, transferring as many burlap bags to the compartments as they can. A middle-aged Vietnamese man appears to be supervising them and giving instructions. Obviously, we have some contraband with us on our journey.

The Aussies have found another clean stretch of cement near the garage, where they have passed out, while the other Vietnamese remain on the bus passed out in their seats. I change the batteries in my CD player and play Spiritualized’s Pure Phase album.

“Every day I wake up. And I take my medication. And I spend the rest of the day. Waiting for it to wear off.” The swirling phased guitars make me feel content. Ironically, this is probably the first night in the past year where I have been sober.

No weed, no codeine and no booze. I look up to the sky and find a few constellations. All of the light is hundreds of thousands of years old. Who knows if any of these stars exist right now? Who knows if I exist right now?

If I die, the only proof of my existence will be the people that knew me. But what will happen when they die?

45

The black sky fades to purple. The sun’s rising magenta fingers touch the hillsides, while its growing light washes out Venus. In the distance, roosters begin to crow awakening the other farm animals.

Women wearing conical hats with baskets of eggs, fruit and vegetables attached to their bicycles slowly pedal by to sell their goods in the local market. The cracked orange and blue painted facade of the Petrolimex station lies at the crossroads of this small town. Somewhere in Hà Tĩnh Province, I am at a loss to guess the name of the hamlet I find myself in.

I take out a pâté baguette sandwich from my bag and eat breakfast, watching more women pedal by amidst a small stream of motorbikes. Unlike back in Hanoi, the stream of motorbikes is rather silent. No horns beep, and I can hear the individual engines of the motorbikes.

The bus crew awakens and continues to hatch down the secret compartments of the bus. A middle-aged woman gives them a small wad of đồng for their services. The driver starts the engine, and I follow the Aussies back onto the bus. A few of the burlap bags remain on the bus, and we adjust them again to make ourselves comfortable.

The engine starts and we drive off, back onto the highway to the Nam Phao border crossing, passing motorbikes and trucks headed to Laos. The bright orange sun announces its presence on the horizon sending golden light into the bus. I close my eyes and let the light radiate through my eyelids. Nothing exists to me other than this bus on the way to the Vientiane. The noise from the road disappears the further I look into myself.

46

At the border, we get out of the bus and walk into the cream-colored concrete building. Vietnamese officers decked out in their commie olive-green uniforms question people and stamp passports. I take out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a dollar from my pocket and hold them along with my passport.

I walk up to the officer and hand him my passport, then the cigarettes and the dollar. He quickly stamps my passport, smiles and hands it back. No questions asked, and I walk to the other side of the building to Lao border officials wearing their version of the commie olive-green uniform.

I hand my passport to the Lao official and he stamps my passport. The Aussies follow me, and we walk outside to our bus parked on an asphalt road along an embankment. All the Lao and Vietnamese passengers except for the middle-aged woman, are on the bus waiting, while the bus crew hollers and laughs throwing rocks down the embankment to a small river below.

With nothing else to do, I pick up a rock and join in the fun, and the Aussies follow suit. An international rock-throwing contest on the Vietnam/Lao border. We all laugh and continue to throw rocks, as back near the cream-colored building, the middle-aged woman talks to a couple of Lao officials.

A wad of Lao kip changes hands; she runs to the bus and takes her seat. The bus crew, the Aussies and I, all follow her back onto the bus, and we take off again.

As the bus sputters along Highway Eight, heading east, the sun continues its ascent amidst the green-craggy forested mountains, while a few cumulus clouds hang above making it look like we are driving through an Asian painting.

After a couple hours, we pass Lak Sao and its few concrete buildings and come to a police checkpoint. The bus stops; the middle-aged woman gets out of the bus and talks to the police.

From the window, I can see the police giving her a hard time. It’s obvious she needs to bribe them, and they are trying to get as much kip as they can from her.

Commerce in a communist country. She hands them a wad of kip, probably twenty-five dollars at least, and she climbs back onto the bus. The driver starts the engine and we’re off again, more than likely to repeat this process at every police checkpoint.

47

After stopping at a few more police checkpoints along the way, the bus comes to a stop at a checkpoint on Highway Thirteen just outside Paksan. Our driver turns off the engine, the middle-aged woman gets off the bus and follows the police into a small concrete building. The rest of us on the bus look at each other and shrug our shoulders.

What can we do at this point? This woman has held us hostage with whatever she is smuggling into Laos.

Along the way we have been stopped at Na Hin, Nam Dua and Pak Kading.  Her wad of kip keeps getting smaller, while the rest of us, except for the bus crew, get more annoyed. They must have seen this a million times on their journeys between Vietnam and Laos.

I go to the front of the bus to ask the crew what is happening. They tell me that all the burlap bags are filled with fan belts for cars. The woman smuggles fan belts every couple of months from Vietnam to Laos.

She paid fifty dollars at the border and about fifteen to twenty dollars at every other police checkpoint. They say the Paksan police are the toughest for her to bribe because it is the last checkpoint before Vientiane.

With my Vietnamese all used up, I go to the back of the bus and explain to the Aussies what is happening. We all laugh, while the rest of the bus looks irritated.

Ten minutes pass, and with nothing else to do, one of the Aussies grabs a Frisbee from his bag.

“You want to play Frisbee, mate?” he asks me.

“Sure,” I answer and follow the Aussies off the bus.

The five of us stand on the side of the road in the dirt, throwing the Frisbee to each other. The bus crew looks on and laughs, as we spread out across the empty highway, flinging the Frisbee from one side of the road to the other.

I throw the Frisbee across the road to one of the Aussies, and tell the bus crew to come out of the bus to play. The three of them stumble down the steps of the bus, laughing and hollering. The Frisbee crosses the highway again, and one the Aussies throws the Frisbee to the bus driver who brings his right hand down to his left hand in clapping motion, trying to trap the Frisbee.

The Frisbee goes through his hands, and he chases it down. Another of the Aussies shouts across the road, showing the driver, with his hand, how to throw the Frisbee, and the driver copies the motion and flings the Frisbee in the air — it boomerangs back to him and we all laugh.

He picks up the Frisbee and throws it successfully to another member of the bus crew, who tries to trap the Frisbee in the same clapping motion as the driver. We laugh as the middle-aged woman walks, downtrodden, out of the police building.

She’s crying and talking to the bus crew. The police took a hundred dollars off her, and she has lost all her profits on this trip to Vientiane.

We all get back on the bus, and the driver starts the engine again.

And that’s all we can do, start again — every journey or saga in life comes to an end, and it’s up to us how we forge ahead.

Maybe one day you’ll find yourself surrounded by burlap bags full of fan belts and playing Frisbee on a highway in Laos. You never know what will happen in life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Manheim Wagner has spent the majority of his life in fear of having a full-time nine-to-five job. Originally from Levittown, Pennsylvania, he worked a steady stream of dead-end jobs before taking his first leap into the unknown in 1997, when he ended up teaching English in South Korea and nurturing his desire for exploration. Since then, he has wandered down a slew of random streets throughout the world with his cameras, living in such countries as Australia, Scotland, Vietnam, China and Japan.

He is the author of three additional books including, Korea: How You Feel, What a Day for a Night and Levittown.

He currently resides in Seoul, South Korea.