Crossing the Road:
Lessons learned from a Vietnamese family
BY Carolyn Smith
I went to Vietnam looking for a semes ter of new experiences—and I certainly found them. I encountered poverty that wrung my heart, I continually saw my life flashing before my eyes as I traveled, and I experienced homesickness on a previously unfathomable level. I acquired a number of unidentifiable red bumps on my skin, I peed in places that most Americans wouldn’t classify as bathrooms, and I learned that the sensible way of crossing the street was to walk directly into a line of streaming traffic and not stop. Overwhelmed and frightened though I often was, I was determined to make something of my three months in this country.
In this adventurous spirit, I had set out one October day to explore the city of Hanoi , which had been my home for a month. Rising with the sun and smog one Saturday morning, I boarded Bus 24. Lurching through the city, packed among sweaty Vietnamese bodies, I was eager to get off the bus when we reached the stop for the Vietnam Museum of Ethnography.
Bursting out of the bus doors, I looked around to find a hot smelly street that looked exactly like every other street in Hanoi . There were no museum-esque buildings in sight, no English-speaking street vendors, no nice cafés to which I could retreat and escape the staring eyes and pointing fingers. Not knowing what to do, I just stood on the street corner, turning my map around and around in an attempt to project a sense of knowledge and control I didn’t feel. I couldn’t help but think about the paved sidewalks, organized roadways, smooth car rides, and familiar destinations that would have characterized my travels back at home. Here, I was utterly alone.
And then along came Hien, a girl who single-handedly restored my faith in the generous hearts of the Vietnamese people.
“Are you lost?” she asked as she pulled over on her rickety bicycle.
Not only did Hien understand and know where the museum was, but she offered to pedal me there herself if I’d climb on the back of her bicycle.
Eventually, we made it, and Hien accepted my offer to buy her an admission ticket. As we toured the museum, we talked and shared stories, experiences, and some very intimate details of our lives. Divulging everything from boyfriend stories to family secrets, our day continued as we went from the museum to Hien’s “flat.” This small, dingy room, though quite nice by Vietnamese college-student standards, would make an American college dorm room look like a luxury suite. After talking more and meeting her friends and neighbors, we exchanged home and e-mail addresses, and Hien put me back on the bus with explicit directions to my dorm, promising to contact me soon and take me to visit her home village.
Hien made good on that promise—and that’s how a month later I found myself sitting on her family’s mattressless bed being served a feast of freshly killed chicken. This was a visit to remember—for Hien’s family and village, as well as for me. What I wasn’t prepared for, as Hien and I took the long bus and motorbike trip from urban Hanoi to her rural home, was that Hien’s village was a military base, and her parents were Vietnamese soldiers. I think that I was the first non-enemy American that many of these people had ever met, and they greeted me with remarkable warmth. Except a few misspelled signs forbidding entrance into “No Stress Passing” zones (minor miscommunications across the language barrier provided me with an endless source of amusement throughout the semester), the village was an incredibly friendly and welcoming place. The main comment everyone seemed to have was, “American? You rich, we poor.”
To this I would feebly reply, “Oh no, you’re not poor!” This was a ridiculous comment to make in the face of such blatant economic disparity; these people were indeed very poor. Being in the military is the primary occupation for those who have little money and no other employment options, and the village’s standard of living reflected this lower-class status. While Hien’s family wasn’t destitute, I was overcome when I saw the bare gray concrete two-room crumbling shack that was her home. “The entire contents of this family’s material belongings could fit into my single bedroom at home,” I thought. But sparse though it was, the Nguyens took great pride in their home: the traditional Vietnamese ancestor altar was prominently displayed, and more contemporary decorations like her brother’s Harry Potter poster hung proudly on the walls.
And there was love in this house. As I was welcomed into this family circle, I could feel the love among its members that I had so dearly missed in the months that I’d been away from my home. I felt it emanating most strongly from Hien’s mother as she prepared the feast, chatted away at me, grasped my arm. While comforted by this familiar warmth, I was also struck by something about this family’s love that differed from my own: their love had a quality of determined fortitude that my own family had never been forced to develop. Theirs was a strong, courageous, resilient love that had fought to survive troubled times and was prepared to hold its ground in an uncertain future.
Hien’s parents’ love was prepared to battle with forces in the ambivalent future as their daughter had been accepted to university in Hanoi and was living in a city environment that was incredibly foreign and frightening to them.
An even more frightening future lay before their son, a nineteen-year-old who was to leave the week after my visit to do industrial work in Taiwan for seven years so he could earn some money to send home. The fates of both these children were insecure and held many frightening possibilities, and their parents’ love had to be tough in the face of this fear.
The roots of this resilient love, I discovered, sprang from the difficult lives that Hien’s parents had led, experiences that I can’t even imagine living through. They had both fought in the war, lost their loved ones, and survived the years of extreme economic hardship that followed. As the day progressed, Hien translated her mother’s story for me. When Hien’s mother was four years old, she was out playing in the field when an American bomb hit her home, killing her parents and all but one of her siblings. She was too young to remember her parents, but she will never forget the day that they died. “A horrible, horrible day,” she shook her head and cried, softly weeping for the family she never knew, and the orphaned, war-torn years that followed their deaths. “War is a terrible, terrible thing.”
“I can’t even imagine a life of such heartache and hardship,” I thought, amazed that this woman had welcomed me so enthusiastically and warmly into her home. I have never met a more vehement critic of President Bush (some communication breaks through the barriers of language!), but she didn’t carry this animosity over to include me. I was relieved by her ability to recognize me for the empathetic, slightly homesick girl whom I was, resisting the prejudicial urges that characterize so many cross-cultural encounters.
We were reaching out and embracing diversity in a monumental way that day. While stomaching that chicken was a difficult task for me, I’m sure that it was even more of a leap for Hien’s mother to invite this American girl into her home. And yet, for an experience so ideologically grand, it was really quite simple. It was eating chicken and drinking tea and walking through rice paddies. It was glimpsing into another world and finding threads of common humanity. It was a moment when the events that happened “then” became secondary to the connections that we were forming “now.”
As the day wore on, it came time for the customary Vietnamese afternoon nap. I never imagined that I would feel comfortable enough to fall asleep beside Hien on the hard mattress-less bed board upon which we had just eaten lunch. But surprisingly, I entered a restful slumber, peacefully dozing off amidst the sounds of her father watching soccer on TV, her mother chatting with the neighbors, the birds chirping and the chickens clucking outside. When I awoke, I lied still and just stared at the gray concrete wall, trying to take in the fact that real people live their lives like this, and that I was actually there sharing that life with them at that moment.
That was quite a while ago now. I have long since returned to the box of my normal, comfortable, familiar life—a place where chickens stay safely in pens and KFC take-out containers. When I think back on my adventures with Hien, the memories of “then” cast a fresh perspective on my trivial concerns of “now.” Having been in a place that is so far removed from the realm of reality that I typically call “life,” I can better appreciate how my joys and concerns, dreams, routines, and problems are not the whole world. The life I live is not the only reality that can, or should, exist.
Somewhere out there is a little village where people have never heard of computer viruses or fifteen-page paper assignments or scheduling meetings or counting calories. Somewhere out there, people are recovering from wars and sending their children off to foreign sweatshops. Somewhere out there, people are trusting in love to weather them through tumultuous storms. Somewhere out there, chickens are crossing roads, just to get to the other side.
Carolyn Smith is a senior Sociology major at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS). She studied abroad with HWS in Hanoi , Vietnam last year. Contact her at carolynsmith06@
hotmail.com.