“I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them… The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Each night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered one another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.” — THE LOVER
I arrived too early to the station at Ninh Binh, a darkened room with open doors where people smoked inside. Among the names and numbers on the TV on the wall I tried to find my train, 17:40 to Da Nang, but the numbers kept on scrambling in complicated patterns, so instead I ate rice crackers and watched as all the tourists came to squint at the same screen. It was how you passed the time. Either way, the train would come. Tim had offered me a ride — he’d repaired his motorcycle and was headed south, like me, to see his mother in Hoi An — but his intentions were transparent; plus we’d already crashed once on the way back from last night’s party, which didn’t bode so well for a 700 km drive. I had told him I would call him when I made it to the coast, but my phone hadn’t been working, so I guess this was goodbye.
Tim ran a bar in Tam Cốc, the kind where tourists went, its claim to fame a roaring bonfire hemmed in by wooden chairs where you could have the conversations that the tourists never tire of, trading boasts of where you’ve been, how cheap it was, how warm. He was as dashing as it gets for a guy pushing 5’0”, dressed like some kind of 1950s gas station attendant with the clipped and baroque accent of a Vietnamese boy who’d been to British boarding school. He had told me his life story by the time that I left town: a spell in Australia, an Irish wife, two kids with Western names; the divorce, the Hoi An mother who didn’t understand. Born in the Year of the Dog. That’s why he and I, a Tiger, got along so well, he said.
The tourists around the bonfire, British, Belgian, Quebecois, were instruments in the performances that Tim put on each night. That is to say, he played them, sending out rounds of happy water (Vietnamese rice wine) and conducting them in rousing chants: “Một – Hai – Ba – Dzô!” To the chavviest backpackers he’d assign the highest tabs (“For you? 500,000 dong”) which most of the time they’d pay without complaint. Then he’d look at me and wink, bring me another Tiger beer or light my cigarette. And though it’s true that I, at present, am operating at the height of my seductive and psychic powers, this is neither here nor there. When you’re the girl who’s winked at, you needn’t overthink it. All it ultimately means is you came to the bar alone.
A poem by a man called Julian, recited at Tim’s bar.
In Tam Cốc it’s like you’re at sea, but on land. Limestone mountains rise like islands from the flooded rice fields, a soggy, sultry, melancholy landscape whose sensibility I shared. I’d arrived by bus at sunset, which happens here like sleight of hand: the gray sky barely deepens, then in an instant drops to black. That morning on the island I had gone a bit insane, convinced by the sudden, inexplicable death of most of my electronics that I was standing on the doorstep of my feral, strange new life, but here I felt revived. The cool night had the smell, the feel of a stone rolled away from the mouth of a tomb. The weepy strains of karaoke, the yellow glow of lanterns from distant billiard halls — paired with the right music, the evening’s elements conspired to draw from me a perfect ache of morbid lust. That Marguerite Duras mood — am I horny, or shall I kill myself?
In the morning a lukewarm shower, breakfast fruit and ca phe den, after which I walked away from town, its dim massage parlors and bootleg shops, the cafes selling sugary egg coffee and steaming bowls of pho, towards the translucent shapes of mountains receding into fog. Water buffalo, mother and child, stared blankly from a soccer field behind an empty school. Red flags bearing stars or hammer and sickles hung wet against the gray and green along the muddy road; beyond that, rice fields overseen by horrifying scarecrows in their cone-shaped farmer’s hats. There is sorrow in these wetlands, evident in photographs, but when I asked Tim later on if perhaps the place was haunted, he abruptly changed the topic. I didn’t mention it again.
I followed a family of goats into what I saw was a cemetery, the kind that were all over the further out you got from town. In the shadow of the mountains, the graves were roomy and elaborate, nicer than some of the houses I’d seen. Vietnamese Buddhists don’t cremate their dead, they bury them in the fields or next to the house. The feng shui matters: a grave should be near a mountain or a stream, in harmony with its surroundings and with the dead’s astrological sign. The goats went on their way. I uploaded a video of them to my Instagram story. At home, it was Saturday night. I could see who’d viewed it, who had tapped it with a heart; the names of men I hadn’t met before.
“I need to get away from these people,” Tim whispered as he passed to stoke the bonfire. “Let’s go to a party.” His was an ostentatious American-style motorcycle, not like the little sporty ones that people rode in town; from it he pulled a second helmet, which he handed off to me. Tonight he wore a leather jacket and heavy workman’s boots. Since the divorce, he told me, he’d had one Vietnamese girlfriend whose image-conscious parents disapproved of how he dressed. It was plain to see that he was caught between two worlds, and I could see now my appeal, our sort of slapstick six-inch height differential notwithstanding. In any case, I like a party. I pulled the helmet on.
On the bike, the night was cold, the wet streets mostly deserted. We streaked away from town in the direction of Ninh Binh City, my arms loose around his waist. It wasn’t lost on me that I was on my way to an undisclosed location in a place I’d never been with a man I hardly knew and a phone that barely functioned, but it had always been the case that these things ended up okay. I had put my faith in angels, in Tim, and in myself; it’s true, my attitude was rather mystical of late. All of a sudden there was music, American pop of the 2000s. We had arrived at an abandoned lot where a rickety tour bus had been hoisted up on stilts and repurposed as a nightclub, from which streamed purple neon and the squeals of karaoke. From his pocket Tim retrieved a perfectly rolled joint. Vietnamese weed, turns out, was strong. I couldn’t say how long we sat outside the karaoke bus, drinking Tiger beers while Tim told me about his mom, his kids, his ex-wife; then blearily put helmets on and headed back to Tam Cốc, dim headlights illuminating the long and narrow path to my hotel, turning the corner just along the rice fields, then suddenly sliding, horizontal. We had crashed beneath a banner wishing guests a happy new year: “Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!” “This has never happened before,” Tim said unconvincingly as I stumbled to my feet, my right side slick with mud. He proposed another bar. “Tim,” I sighed, “I think it’s time that I went home.”
An announcement on the speakers, in Vietnamese then English: SE5, 17:46, Ninh Binh to Da Nang, was arriving at the station. The train exhaled to a stop and in the rush, I found my carriage, a four-bed bunk I shared with a family: a young couple, grandfather, and their charismatic baby, who serenaded me on cue with the Happy Birthday song. From the top bunk I watched the sky go black as the train rumbled through rice fields and bright storefronts of silent towns, rocking me gently into 10 untroubled hours of dreamless sleep.
For Part 1 of the Vietnam Diaries, click here. And tune in next week (or thereabouts) for Part 3 (Toothlessly Devoted 2 U).