The Boy in the Road
MIDWAY THROUGH MY FIRST BOWL of pho, surrounded by the soothing tinkle of the piano bar at the Hotel Sofitel in Hanoi, I realized why I was so scared on my first day in Vietnam: It was the cyclos.
Not the tricycle taxis tourists take, but the motor-cyclos, the working cyclos, the gas-belching bikes that hurtle from home to work to temple, often with a family of four sandwiched atop, or a huge basket of lilies, a mountain of green papayas, a pane of glass. Stepping out of a taxi across from the hotel, I was nearly mowed down by an old man balancing a load of goldfish in plastic bags. I gaped and reached for the door handle, but the taxi was gone. The goldfish? They were long gone too. There was nothing to do but move and hope the cyclos would spare me.
They did. As I learned over the next few days, to cross the street in Hanoi, you must take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across. And that was a good thing, because the cyclos were like a bad Zen parable: Everywhere I was, there they were, a madness of mosquitos, whirring and buzzing and nipping at me without mercy. The symbol of Vietnam, I knew, was a stork balanced atop a turtle. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out which one we tourists were …
