In which Ellen and I compensate for our failures by buying everything in the Republic of Vietnam

         We’re on our way to Ha Long Bay and our driver pulls into a compound of low yellow buildings.  Elegant white stone statues line both sides of the road:  Romanesque women with bare breasts and no arms, Dali-style abstracts where a twisting figure-eight reveals two lovers about to embrace.  I’ve been to China before so I understand what’s happening as we climb out of the van and are pointed toward the bathroom.  But I don’t think Ellen does.

“Meet you ten minutes,” the driver says, and pulls off in the van—to the other side of building. 

Which means, of course, that after we’ve peed and helped our kids pee and apologized to the bathroom attendants for the inordinate amount of pee on the walls and floor, we have to walk through the building. 

Past all that merchandise. 

This particular warehouse—because that’s what it is:  a huge building, maybe 50 meters by 50 meters—is filled with traditional Vietnamese art:  handmade silk ties, silk-stitched tablecloths and pillow-cases, carved wooden bowls, egg-shell paintings made from flattened pieces of eggshell glued to wood and then lacquered so that the final painting has a cracked, textured look. 

All of these items are beautiful.  Gorgeous even.  And, it turns out, they were all made and are sold by the physically handicapped. 

All of which is nice, but for one small detail:

I don’t care. 

I want to get to Ha Long Bay.  I want to get on a junk and watch the waves and see those magical, dragon-curved mountains popping up out of the water around us.  Eventually, yes, I want to buy some souvenirs of Vietnam, but at this point I’ve only been here for 24 hours and I’m not in the mood to be guilted into buying some fancy crap that’ll spend the next 15 years gathering dust in some drawer before eventually getting pawned off on gullible neighbors at a garage sale.      

The only two comforts I have in all of this are: first, the knowledge that, all over Asia at this very moment, this same thing is happening to approximately 1.5 million bald white guys.  This is how things work in China and Vietnam and Cambodia and Malaysia:  tour guides and van drivers and concierges get kickback for getting tourists to buy stuff.  Ten years ago when I was first in China, a tour guide drove us past a crowded city square full of people laughing and dancing, saying, “Don’t you wish you could get out here?”  “Yes!” we all yelled.  But he just smiled and took us up to some god-forsaken mountain in the middle of the night to see a 1/1,000,000^th scale model of the dam we would see in real life the next day—all because there was gift shop there run by the his sister’s brother-in-law’s uncle’s cousin’s half-daughter twin’s pet schnauzer. 

My second comfort comes from the fact that I know that my wife, Ellen, isn’t going to be taken by this crap.  No, Ellen is a down-to-earth common-sense woman raised by two depression-era parents who taught her how to spend her money wisely.  Why, I’ll have you know that in our house we wash and re-use our Ziploc bags—sometimes two or three times.  And it’s a good thing, too—about Ellen’s tightwadedness toward spending, not about the plastic bags—because, Ha Long Bay aside, yours truly just loves to buy fancy crap that’ll spend the next 15 years gathering dust in some drawer before getting pawned off on gullible neighbors at a garage sale.    

This in mind, I stroll confidently through the art gallery, gently tugging Jamie away from the life-sized etching in lace-thin glass of two Vietnamese women wearing Ao Dai, until—

“We should buy some of these.”

I turn and stare at Ellen—or the woman who I thought was Ellen.  She’s holding a pair of silk-embroidered table runners. 

“Why?” I say.  I can’t think of what else you say to the alien that’s sucked out your wife’s brain and replaced it with it’s own, lime-jello-y self. 

“For—“ my wife says, and then names some obscure cousin that came to our wedding 17 years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.

“Really?  Because, you know, we just got here.  We have two whole weeks to buy gifts.”

“We have a lot of gifts to buy,” she says, rattling off three dozen names of people I’ve never met.  “We should get started now.  Besides,” she says, then silently nods toward the one-armed, no-legged man who doesn’t actually have a torso either, and who is somehow nonetheless hovering nearby, managing to appear simultaneously helpful, courteous, non-obtrusive, and quietly dignified (I hate people who can do that, by-the-way).

So we choose two of the table runners.  And then we choose three more.  And an egg-painting.  And two sets of serving dishes.  And three of the wonderful water-color paintings that Americans think of as typically Asia, with the tall mountains and willowy trees sketched out in faint, misty lines. 

Fortunately, though, that’s all we buy for the next three days.

Of course, we spend the next three days on a boat.  After that, we go to Hanoi and go apeshit. 

I’ve never been any place where there’s more stuff than Hanoi, Vietnam.  Every corner you turn you find art shops and gift shops and tailors and tie shops and places to buy bowls and plates and Tintin paraphernalia that’s outlawed in every state but California.  You can buy Ao Dai and Dai Ao and Auld Lang Syne.  There are women on the streets carrying oranges in baskets and pineapples on bicycles and musical instruments and whole sheets of tin cut and hammered into the shape of Mao Tse Tung french-kissing Ho Chi Minh.  (And it’s official folks:  I will never get back into Vietnam). 

I suppose to be truthful, it’s not that there’s actually more stuff in Hanoi—it’s just that there it’s out on the streets where you can’t miss it.  In Hanoi, the shops literally vomit goods onto the sidewalks; there are places where you actually have to step off to curb and into traffic to get past a particularly expansive flow of ceramic gods or “hand-made” artificial-silk purses.  There is so much stuff in Hanoi, that I can’t imagine there’s any way it can all every actually be sold:  there just aren’t enough people to purchase everything.

Fortunately for Hanoi merchants, though, Ellen and I are willing to try our best. 

Probably the only thing Karl Marx got right was the idea that the revolution would be threatened by the fetishization of material wealth.  Basically, what he meant by this was that poor folk would be distracted from the grave injustices of the world by all the new, shiny crap they could buy now that factories were making everything cheaper.  When we “fetishize” something, it takes on an added value that exists only in our eyes:  where most of us see feet as smelly lumps of flesh that carry us from place to place and produce nail clippings, to someone who fetishizes feet, they’re sexy and provocative, flirty and dirty and ooooooh, so very naughty.

Not that I’d know. 

Those are nice sandals, by the way. 

What scared the living be-jesus out of Marx was that the poor would start thinking that all the new junk they could buy at cheap prices—gloves, soap, clothing, candles—somehow solved the problems in their world—little things like social injustice, social inequality, and the oppression of entire nations, races, and genders for the benefit of a few.

We do this all the time.  We’re having a bad day; maybe, for instance, our spouse took away our favorite pair of black leather pumps.  Then we’re walking down the street and we see a life-sized replica of a water buffalo welded out of hammered tin, and we picture ourselves sitting in our living room, gazing happily at our water buffalo while sipping a banana daiquiri, and the image makes us feel all warm and fuzzy and filled with hope for the future.  That the water buffalo in no way solves the larger issues in our lives—e.g., our disagreements with our spouse, our inordinate affection for sling-back sandals with red leather laces—is beside the point. 

Back when we lived in Ohio, my Chevy Citation started to smoke and burp every time we drove it more than ten feet.  Sensing intuitively that this was a bad sign, we decided to buy a used car from a friend back in Wisconsin.  That weekend, while I graded papers, Ellen and a colleague drove back to Manitowoc to pick up our new vehicle, a Dodge Colt, bright red, with “Smokin’!” painted on the side.  All Saturday and Sunday, as I dragged my brain through paper after paper beginning “Webster’s dictionary defines . . .” I kept finding myself thinking about that shiny red car, it’s fancy sound system, it’s manual clutch and fluid stick shift.  I’d picture myself driving along the highway, listening to music, the windows down, my hair blowing in the wind (this was a long time ago), not a care in the world.

And I’d feel happy.  Having that car, I was certain, would give me something my life currently lacked:  I would be a better person with that new car, smarter, more likeable, easier to get along with.  My jokes would suck less, my racquetball game would improve, and God would stop pulling out wads of hair in the shower every morning. 

Finally on Sunday evening, Ellen arrived with the new car.  She handed me the keys.  I climbed in, rolled down the window, cranked up Vanilla Ice, and put it in gear.   

I wasn’t, of course, to the end of the block before I understood I was the same balding, unfunny, racquetball-losing jerk I’d been before.  Only with a different car. 

 

Ellen and I didn’t buy a new car while we were in Vietnam, but we purchased pretty much everything else.  I don’t know what happened.  Everything we saw was just so pretty, had so much character, would be just perfect for our house back in Virginia.  We pictured ourselves sitting in our living room back in Lexington, sipping banana daiquiris and gazing at a life-sized replica of a water buffalo made out of hammered tin, and we knew, just knew—well, you know the rest . . . 

If, as I’ve been told, people buy stuff to fill a hole in their lives, Ellen and I must have a gash the size of the Mississippi River delta tearing through our world.  We bought 15 watercolors, a dozen purses, 42 serving plates and bowls of various sizes, 11 lacquer paintings, and 107,000 miniature wood carvings of everything from the tourist cyclos that are everywhere in Vietnam to of-scale replicas of downed American fighter jets with the crispy pilot still inside.  We bought carved wood with in-laid mother of pearl, and mother of pearl with in-laid wood.  We bought tableclothes and pillow covers and scarves and cinnamon boxes and something long and green and smelling vaguely of sulfur and baby powder that, I have to admit, I still haven’t quite identified. 

Some of our purchases were just stupid:  at one point in Ha Long Bay, we were dragged to a tiny fishing village consisting entirely of houses floating on blocks of styrafoam.  We were told that this was a “tour,” but of course it ended with a visit to the village gift shop where, for some reason we still haven’t quite figured out, we bought five 8x6 watercolor paintings for 10 US dollars—a piece.  That this was roughly twice the price you’d pay for a similar painting in, say, Des Moines, didn’t occur to us at that moment. 

Another time, I was somehow suckered into paying $10 for a big flimsy piece of red paper with the symbol for “Happiness” on it.  I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but when we got back to Hong Kong and pulled that crappy little piece of scrap paper out of the suitcase, all I could think was “Temporary Lobotomy.” 

Other times, we made some really smart choices:  arriving in Hoi An, the last stop on our two-week tour, Ellen and I both felt mildly disgusted with ourselves, like a pair of would-be dieters who’d just gorged themselves on a six-pound box of chocolate.  No more, we told ourselves.  We’re not buying another thing.  Nothing.  We don’t care if the Lord Jesus Christ himself comes out of an art gallery and says, “With this painting, ye shall have everlasting life”—we’re not buying. 

Then, as we strolled through the narrow streets of the old city, our guide, Kem, pointed to a tailor shop and said, “If you want to have something made, that’s the place to go.” 

Now, there are a lot of tailors in Hong Kong.  Walk down Nathan Road any day of the week and you’ll be accosted by three dozen young men offering custom-made suits.  My friend Chris regularly goes to Shenzhen, just across the boarder into mainland China, to get tailor-made shirts, pants, and suits.  I always found this a little funny, as most of my clothes come from this guy named Eddie or his friend Mr. Bean, and I couldn’t see the need to shop elsewhere. 

The more I thought about it, though, the more I occurred to me that, actually, most of the stuff I bought on-line or from magazines really sucked.  It seldom fit the way I liked, and when it did, the materials were often too waxy, or too coarse, or just plain cheap.  Standing outside that tailor in Hoi An, I understood that I could pick exactly the fabrics I wanted, the colors I wanted, and have clothes made to exactly my, admittedly rather peculiar, body shape.  Why not? 

When I mentioned this to Ellen, she looked as though she was going to be sick.  “Leave me out of it,” she said.  “I’m done.  Done.” 

So I left her to wander with the kids and went inside.  It didn’t take me long to figure out I’d made the right choice.  Normally, I hate buying short-sleeved shirts for work—everything looks like Best-Buy uniform rejects—but inside the tailor’s I found some nice cotton/linen blends that were light enough for summer but formal enough for work, no “My Name Is:  Todd” tags required. 

I was just moving on to the silk cotton-blends (and yes, I really am gay) when I turned around and discovered Ellen had wandered in.  She was talking to one of the clerks, pointing to a dress dummy on the top shelf wearing a short-sleeved blouse with shaped sleeves and rounded collars.  In her hand was a light cotton with a flower print. 

She saw me watching, and shook her head.  “I’m just looking.”

Nine shirts and two skirts later, we walked out of there poorer but oddly satisfied. 

And frankly?  Not really that much poorer.  After all, my friend Eddie can’t sell me a long-sleeved silk-cotton dress shirt for $17.  Or a matching silk tie for $4.

We had to buy another suitcase to make the trip back to Hong Kong.  When we arrived, exhausted and tired but happy, we unpacked all our dirty laundry and all the kids’ coloring books and all the half-eaten candy bars and the roughly 6,247,891 shells we’d gathered at the beach.  Once all that was done and the laundry machine was pumping away, I started collecting all the gifts and decorations and clothes and just plain junk we’d picked up, and laid it out on the bed. 

Or tried to.  It didn’t fit. 

“Ellen,” I hollered over my shoulder.  “Is this a double bed?”

She yelled something that sounded like “Treen Pies.”

“Really?”  I could have sworn it was a double bed.   Or even one of those extended twins.  Because, you know, if it really was a queen-sized bed, that meant we bought an awful lot. 

An awful lot.

Aw well, I thought, at least my life is better. 

And then, of course, I realized once again that it wasn’t true:  I was the same jerk I’d always been, only with a hell of a lot more stuff.

And some really nice shirts. 

Our Family on the Verge of Destruction

   We’re sitting on our ship on Ha Long Bay.  The dinner has just been cleared away, and our guide comes in to talk to us about the plan for the next day.  One of us mentions how charmed we are by our little three-room junk, and the guide laughs and asks us how old we think it is.

It’s a tricky question, really.  It certainly looks old:  everything from the pine paneling to the ornate trim of the windows has an attention to detail that doesn’t seem the least bit modern.  Then, too, I think of the spot on the upper deck where a piece of trim was coming loose; and right behind us in the lounge is a joint where the lines of the wood on each side aren’t quite flush. 

Someone guesses 10 years, someone else guesses 20.  Again, our guide laughs, then tells us the ship is only three years old. 

“Yes,” he says, “it is brand new.  The company built it after the other one sank.”

Suddenly he has our full attention.  Sank?  Like, in the water?  A boat like this?  Full of tourists?

“Um,” says our friend Bay, who’s the other paying adult on this particular floating coffin.  “Sunk how?”

“Oh no, no, no,” the guide says, still smiling.  “In the harbor.  The captain put it in too close.  The tide went out, the keel broke and the ship sank.”

“Oh!” we all say, bright and cheerful once again.  In the harbor.  When the tide went out.  After the people had left.  Well, that’s different then. 

 

The thing is, that night when I wake up to go to the bathroom, I peer out of the tiny porthole over the toilet and notice that the water outside seems awfully—well, high.  True, I hadn’t really spent that much time in that particular bathroom during the day, staring out the window and taking measure of the waterline.

But even so, standing there shivering in the middle of the night, peering out of the window at the dark mountains against the midnight sky, my sleep-muddled brain feels relatively certain that, at those few moments I did glance out during the day, I was looking more above the line of the water than along it. 

Going back to bed doesn’t help.  Curling up under the sheets next to Ellen, I put my head on the pillow and tell myself not to worry, just to relax and go back to the sleep. 

The only thing is that my pillow, resting on my mattress, resting on the bed which rests on the floor of our cabin which rests in the lower part of the boat—my pillow acts as a sort of megaphone, magnifying all the sounds of everything below me:  the squeak of the mattress, the scrape of the wooden bed on a wooden floor, and, beneath all of that, very quietly, very steadily, this sound:

Glub, glub, glub.

 

You should know that one of my earliest childhood memories is pulling into the driveway of an old family friend in Pennsylvania after a long drive from Wisconsin.  We are there to visit my father’s old parish, but as we pull up to the house, all of us, even me at the age of four, notice the surplus of cars in front of the garage.  Some of them are police cars, state cruisers, an ominous sign even if it isn’t dark and you aren’t exhausted from driving all night.

What happens next is more family legend than actual memory:  we step into the kitchen of Aunt Cel and Uncle Jim; Jim and a minister friend of theirs step out of a back room and take my father by the arm; quietly, gently, they inform him that both of his parents have been killed in a car accident. 

We learn later the accident was frighteningly simple:  my grandparents are driving along a rural highway in Northern Wisconsin, my grandmother at the wheel; the right front tire of the car slips off the pavement and onto the gravel; struggling to maintain control, my grandmother steers to the left.  The tire comes free and their big old Oldsmobile shoots across the yellow line and into the path of an oncoming tanker truck carrying milk. 

A milk truck.  Think about that.  My grandfather, a small-town kid who went from pushing a broom to being town mayor and president of the local bank, was killed instantly.  My grandmother was still alive when the emergency people arrived, but was dead soon after.  One minute earlier or twenty seconds later, that truck would have been a half-mile away or thirty yards past, and I would maybe have a memory of Gus and Marie, rather than just a bunch of photographs of two people whose voices I wouldn’t recognize.

I have more memories from that night:  almost as soon as we’d arrived at Marcel and Jim’s, we climbed into a friend’s station wagon and started the trip back to bury my grandparents.  My brother and I were in the way-back in these little kid-sized sleeping bags.  I remember those sleeping bags, how they were half the length of regular ones.  I thought they were neat. 

Anyhow, I must have slept most of the drive out, because I couldn’t sleep at all going back.  And I must have been loud and antsy and asking all the wrong questions, because at one point I remember peering over the back seat and seeing my father twist in his seat, struggling against the headrest as he shouted at me, his voice ragged and wet.

 

Driving in from the airport in Hanoi, we pepper our guide with a million questions:  where should we eat, how do we know we’re not getting ripped off, how much should a good meal cost?  He answers everything we throw at him, even though it’s late and the kids are rowdy and he knows we’re leaving for the bay the very next day and none of this will matter. 

Beyond that, he offers us two pieces of advice:  the first is that, as good as the street food may look, we shouldn’t eat it.  Chances our, even our Hong Kong adapted digestive tracts simply wouldn’t be able to handle it. 

His second piece of advice? 

“Cross the street very carefully.”

This sounds like funny thing to say to two grown people, but once we get into the city itself, we see why he mentioned this:  Hanoi driving is insane.  Insane. 

Imagine the worst traffic jam you’ve ever seen:  cars are crowded into a single lane from three different directions, drivers are honking, fenders are inches from bumpers that are centimeters from the wheels of that Mack truck.  Congestion is so dense you could walk from one side of the road to the other without touching the ground.

Now imagine that densely knotted corrosion of vehicles is moving at a fair clip.

Now add 10,000 motorcycles—this is not an exaggeration—10,000 motorcycles weaving at high speed through this traffic. 

And keep in mind that half of these motorcycles are going the wrong way.

And that a good third of their drivers are texting. 

The only things missing from the occasion are alcohol, hard drugs, and water cannons outfitted, Mad Max style, to the top of rusty BMWs.  

 Intersections are the best part:  one day we’re cruising along with our guide, and the driver wants to make a left turn onto a one-lane road.  So twenty yards before the turn, he shifts the van into the left land, cruising into traffic.  Seriously, he’s so close to the far curb that on-coming vehicles are steering across the yellow line.

Another time, we watch as a man in his twenties straps his one-year old over the gas tank of his moped, nestles his four-year-old on the seat behind him, and pulls out into traffic without even looking to see if there was a car coming. 

Seeing this insanity, we decide that Hanoi is perhaps best enjoyed from the single city block upon which our hotel is located.  “Look!” we tell the guide  “Tons of restaurants!  A grocery store!  Even a laundry service!  Why would we ever want to leave?”

Ha just shakes his head and tells us a trick.  “Stick together,” he says, “in one big group.  And move slowly.  And whatever you do, keep going.”

We try this and it works.  Moving steadily is the key:  that way, motorcycles can anticipate where you’ll be and zoom by without actually touching you—even if you can feel the heat from their exhaust. 

After awhile, it even becomes kind of fun:  once you get used to it, you realize there are natural breaks in the the traffic, momentary lulls where a light two blocks away hasn’t yet turned green, or some old lady’s been knocked off her bike and everyone’s stopped to help put the oranges back in her basket. 

You might even say that we start to take the traffic for granted.  More than once, we step off the curb without really looking, confident that whoever is out there will be keeping an eye on us.  Only once are we actually in danger:  stepping out of our hotel, we begin to cross to a nearby restaurant when we hear a chorus of “Woooaaaahhh!” 

Freezing, we look to our left:  three young men, two of them smoking, all of them grinning, sit astride a white moped that’s just come around the corner. 

“Sorry!” they call, then roar off down the street. 

 

The crazy thing about Ha Long Bay is not that it’s unimaginably beautiful:  it’s not.  You can imagine it.

You just can’t believe it’s real.

Or that you’ll ever get to go there. 

Made up a karst limestone formations, the legend goes that Ha Long Bay was formed by a dragon who visited and stayed, and all you can see now are the coils rising above the water—1,960 of them, to be exact.  Everywhere you turn, you see the climbing steeply out of the smooth green bay, as forbidding and evocative as castles in a fairy tale romance.

Being on the junk only adds to the unbelievableness of the experience (and yes, that is a real world; I’m an English professor, and I should know, so don’t bother looking it up).  Our boat is thirty feet long, made of rough-hewn planks stained deep red with a pair of tall canvas sails   We chose the smallest boat we could find, and we don’t regret it at all.  There are only three cabins, and we occupy two of them.  Bay, who’s on vacation from a diplomatic job in Kandahar is in the third, and tolerates us and our kids and the late-night drunken brawls that tend to occur wherever Ellen and I happen to be (it’s just the way we were raised).  During the days we climb into sea kayaks and go skimming across the water, exploring quiet coves, floating fishing villages, and limestone caves.   Lunch is served with white linen on a deserted beach. 

At night we return to the boat to seven-course dinners including sea-mantis in carmelized onion, barbequed goat (tastier than you’d think), and vegetables and fruits carved into exotic water birds and miniature replicas of our very own junk.  Our boat has its very own chef, and as much as we love the captain and our guide and the man who makes us Vietnamese coffee every morning with sweetened condensed milk forming a creamy layer at the bottom, the dude we really love is our cook, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Johnny Galecki from the old Roseanne Barr show, and who, at the age of 21, has more talent with a sauté pan than Rachael Ray will ever have.

That said, it’s worth noting that the boat itself is hardly up to code by American standards.  For one thing, the railing along the top only comes up to Jamie’s waist.  And Jamie, of course, is only three.  Which means the railing only comes up to Lucy’s thigh, and Will’s knees.  Which means falling overboard would take nothing more than, say, tripping. 

And, of course, there’s that glub glub glub noise.  Lying awake our first night on the boat, I listen to this sound, thinking to myself exactly two things:  1)  glub glub glub  is exactly the sound milk makes when you pour it out of a plastic jug into the drain; 2)  glub glub glub is what the bubble above cartoon boats says when the boats are sinking. 

 

 A few years ago I was laying down for a nap one afternoon when a horrifying thought came into my head:  if my family were on one of those huge cruise ships in the Caribbean and it started to sink, could I save my family?

After thinking for a while, I came up with a solution:  we could jump overboard if we had to, Ellen holding onto Lucy (who was then just a baby) and me holding onto Will. 

But then I thought:  would we be able to hold onto the kids when we hit the water, or would the impact shake them loose from our grip?

And then I thought:  even if we could hold onto them, could a child that small survive hitting water with the velocity you’d build up free-falling four stories from the top of a cruise ship?

Then I thought:  what the hell is wrong with me?

Turns out I was suffering from acute anxiety, brought on by a incredibly difficult year that included my return to work after a year-long sabbatical, the birth of my daughter with a mysterious illness it took the doctors months to diagnose, a messy triple search in my department, and the death of a beloved pet that’d been with Ellen and me for 13 years.  And too much caffeine. 

Once I cut back on the Dr. Pepper (who knew 90 ounces a day was too much?), the anxiety went way down, but even so I spent the better part of a year thinking about my fears and my worries and where they came from and why they wouldn’t go away.

Nine years ago, back when Will was first born, a doctor told us that SIDS happened mostly during the first six months.  So, dutiful parent that I was, I spent the first six months of my son’s life, creeping into his room to make sure he was still breathing.

When we passed the six-month mark, I waited for the fear to go away, but it never really did.  There was always something to worry about:  falling down the stairs, drowning in the swimming pool, getting hit by a car, swallowing a thumb tack. 

Consider:  my senior year I dated a woman named Marsha for a pretty significant period of time.  The next year, while I was in England, Marsha went to bed on April evening and fell asleep.  Around 11, a knock on the door woke her up and she answered.  It was an old high school friend who invited her to go out for a drive.  She did, and an hour later, driving back into town, their car was hit and Marsha was killed.

She’d been in bed.  Asleep.  How much more safe can you get? 

I love the movie The Station Agent, but in it there’s a mother who’s haunted by the death of her child while playing on the monkey bars.  One minute the child was fine, swinging happily, then the mother looked away for just one second, and grief became her constant companion.  I was—I am—like that mother, only nothing has happened. 

Yet. 

 

Our last stop in Vietnam is Hoi An, a small, historic city on the central coast.  It’s a wonderful place, if not a little touristy:  the old town is a rabbit warren of narrow streets and old buildings, most of them overpriced (for Vietnam) tourist shops and restaurants.  Nevertheless, it still holds a great deal of charm:  you can take a boat to a nearby island filled with woodcarvers, and on the 14^th night of the new moon, motorcycles and electric lights are banned from Hoi An itself.  On those nights, as you wander from corner to corner, all you hear are the shuffle of sandals and the occasional murmur of women singing to the dan bau, the traditional Vietnamese one stringed instrument that was said to be so beautiful that young girls were forbidden to listen to it. 

Our hotel is on the beach.  It’s a five-star affair, which is sort of embarrassing at first, but then you lay your head down on the pillow that first night and hear the surf crashing on the shore, and you think, “Well, okay.  I can get used to this.” 

The first morning, the waves aren’t really that big, but the current is strong.  Will and his friend Jacob go out and jump over the foam, and every few minutes we have to tell them to move to the right, move to the right, move to the right.  But they keep getting pulled to the left by both the waves and the undertow.  Even the lifeguards—who spend most of their time chatting in the shade and chatting up the occasional bikini-wearing hottie—seem worried by the phenomenon.  Every fifteen minutes or so they come down to the water line and gesture with both arms:  right, right, right. 

The next few days are calmer.  The kids, sunburned to the point where they scream every time they step into the shower, spend most of their time in the shade building sandcastles and catching ghost crabs. 

I’m sunburned, too, but I can’t stay out of the waves.  I’m from Wisconsin, after all:  I never saw the ocean until I was 21, and I’ve only actually had beach holidays twice in my life, the second time being this trip to Hoi An. 

I love the waves.  I love diving through them as they crash.  I love floating on them as they lift me up.  I love surfing under them as they pummel toward the shore.  I could do this all day long, for ten days straight, breaking only for the occasional Vietnamese coffee and some sort of shower to get the soap out of my eyes.  I LOVE this. 

Our last morning there, the kids have absolutely no interest in going into the ocean.  Which is fine with me:  during the night, a front moved in and the waves are huge:  standing twenty-yards out in knee-deep water, I let the first two or three break around me and realize they’re actually breaking over me.  And I’m 6’2”—6-5 in my favorite sling-backs.

Even so, I stay out there.  I dive under the waves, I ride over them.  I body surf, laying face down just as they break and letting them glide me to the shore in a churning boil of water and sand and salt. 

Every so often, as I come up from a particularly fun ride, I glance toward the beach, wiping the salt out of my eyes and making sure Lucy or Will hasn’t tried to follow me out.  When I get tired, I go in for a while, sit with the kids under the umbrella, catch my breath.  Then I go back to the waves.

There’s no surprise ending here, of course:  it’s always the last wave that gets you, because only then do you get a clue and get the hell out of the water because it’s too dangerous.   As this particular wave was coming in, I looked at it and said, “Holy crap, this is going to be fun.”  It was huge.  The biggest I’d seen yet, like something out of a surfing movie.

And it was fun, for the first three seconds.  Then it took my 220 pound body and turned me on my head, slamming my neck and shoulder against the bottom like it was hammer and I was a twisted, slanted, very stupid nail. 

I came up coughing and spitting and wondering if my right arm had been torn from the socket or just been broken into a thousand pieces.  Struggling toward the shore, I tried to move it.  I could, but every time I did, pain shot from my fingertips to my toes and I nearly fell over, gasping.

Collapsing onto the sand, I rubbed my arm and moved it, and waited for the pain to go away.  But it didn’t.  It hurt so bad, I kept thinking I was about to vomit. And it kept hurting. 

Eventually, Ellen went for a lifeguard, who found a doctor, who called a car and accompanied me into town to the hospital for an x-ray.  The pain stuck with me pretty much the whole way, right until the very moment the ER doctor stepped into the room, holding the x-ray, and said nothing was broken.  Then, suddenly, it was gone. 

Before that, though, sitting in that waiting room, filling out the forms, the ER doc asked me what at happened.  I told him what I’d been doing, told him how big the wave was, told him how it’d turned me over and pounded the back of my head and my neck on the ocean floor. 

When I was done, he just looked at me for a long time, his face that inscrutable, bland expression I get so often from people in Asia (usually at committee meetings).  Looking at him looking at me, I suddenly knew how lucky I was:  in that instant, I could imagine my spine snapping as I hit the bottom, could imagine the current tugging me out, helpless, as bigger and bigger waves came down over me.  Could imagine Ellen and the kids and those stupid lifeguards not even noticing the disappearance of one very big, very sunburned, very sorry white guy. 

 

I finally fell asleep that night in Ha Long Bay.  And the boat didn’t sink, of course, and I didn’t drown, and I’m not writing from beyond the grave (though, with my winter beard, I may look like I am).  The next morning we got up and went sea kayaking, paddling our boats across 2,000-foot-deep bay, carrying a nine-year-old who can swim, a six-year-old who can swim but is great at panicking, and a three-year old who sinks like a rock every time he steps in water. 

Which is pretty stupid, of course.  But sometimes you just get tired of being worried.  And sometimes it just seems out of your control anyhow, so you do it, and don’t worry about it—or, more realistically, you do it, worry about it at first, then get used to the idea and stop worrying. 

Case in point:  when I saw our agenda for the Vietnam trip, my eye was immediately drawn to one tiny passage in the middle of all the details about where we’d go and what we’d see.  It said: “Transfer to Hoi An via the cloudy Hai Van pass.” 

“Ummm,” I said to Ellen.  “This doesn’t sound good.”

She read it and rolled her eyes.  “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“But it’s a pass,” I said.  “Passes are in mountains.  And it’s cloudy.  And clouds are hard to see in.  Which means,” I continued, following her into the bathroom where she was trying to flee, “which means that we’re driving in the mountains and we can’t see.  Ergo—“

But she was rolling her eyes again.  I let it drop. 

Then, when we’re in Hue, our tour guide hands out a binder full of photographs of the city during the Vietnam war.  They’re fascinating, including shots of buildings and streets that are still standing.  It makes the war very real.

At the back, though, is one picture that freezes my heart.  It’s called “Hai Van pass.”  In the background, you see a gritty army truck chugging up a steep mountain road.  In the foreground you see, and I’m not making this up, a human skull planted on a stick.

“Ummm,” I say to our guide.  “Isn’t this where we’re going?  Like, tomorrow?”

She glances at the picture.  “Yes.  This is a very beautiful drive.”

I point to the skull, which sports one of those conical Vietnamese hats that you still see on women selling oranges or carrying laundry.  “But it’s been improved, right?  The road?  I mean, it’s not so dangerous anymore?”

She looks at the skull, then at me, and then at the skull again.  And frowns.  “No,” she says.  “It is the same.” 

“Isn’t that kind of dangerous then?” I ask.  “I mean, we’ve got kids and everything.”

“Oh no,” she says.  Then she gestures toward the blue sky.  “If the weather is like this, we will be okay.  If not, we’ll take the tunnel.”

“It’s that bad, huh?  The pass?”

“When it’s raining,” she says, “many accidents.  But you don’t worry.”

The next day it’s raining.

“So we’ll take the tunnel?” I say as I climb into the van.  “Because of the rain, right?  Don’t want an accident or anything, right?”

She and the driver both lean forward, peer at the sky through the windshield.  They don’t even consult.  “No,” she says.  “It’ll be okay.”

When we reach the foot of the mountain the misting has increased to a drizzle, and I stare longingly at the line of cars and trucks heading toward the tunnel.  We, on the other hand, veer to the right and begin to ascend.  It doesn’t help my nerves any that the driver seems to think the best way to go around hairpin bends is to swerve into the left lane to give himself a better angle on the curve. 

Watching the line outside the tunnel shrink below us, I say, “Looks like almost everyone else is going under the mountain.”

She nods.  “Only tourists go this way,” she says.  “Tourists and gasoline trucks.” 

And then she laughs. 

And we do too. 

Sometimes it’s all you can do.

 

But then: 

We make it back to Hong Kong okay, of course.  We’re exhausted, but we’ve had fun.  Ellen and I are fairly impressed with ourselves:  we survived two weeks in a third-world country with three kids, the oldest of whom is still afraid to read Harry Potter by himself. 

We crawl into bed, exhausted.  The next morning we wake up, feed the kids, start the laundry.  And we check e-mail.  We have to learn to stop doing this.  It never turns out well.

This time is no exception.  Our friend Lia broke her wrist ice-skating backwards.  But that’s not the half of it.  Not even a tenth.  Not even a thousandth.

Lia’s mother has a boyfriend named Jack, an affable guy who’s a little bit deaf but a sweetheart with the grand kids.  Jack has a daughter who’s Lia’s age, who was a friend of hers, actually, growing up on Long Island.  Not a close friend, really, but a friend nonetheless.  This daughter has a husband, Jeff, and they have a little baby, Margaux, who’s only just one. 

They—the daughter and her family—teach at an international school in Africa.  Over Christmas, they decide to takes a vacation, booking rooms at a resort just outside Mt. Kenya National Park.  One morning they wake up, they take their showers, they get dressed.  They go down to the dining room and have breakfast—toast with marmalade, maybe, and fresh orange juice with slices of pineapple on the rim.  The baby eats cornflakes or bits of scrambled egg her mother feeds her with a spoon.  One of the serving ladies pauses at the table, laughing at the mzungu baby, who laughs back. 

Afterwards, the family goes for a walk.  A guide accompanies them—hotel policy—but he carries no gun; you’re not allowed to so close to a national park, and with poaching so prevalent. 

For a while they stay out in the open, looking at ants and mushrooms, taking photos of the baby as it squeals in its carrier.  Then it starts to rain a little, and they move toward the brush.  They come to a bend in the road.  The guide peers around.  Then he starts to shout.  They run.  Behind them, a mother elephant charges, protecting, it believes, its calf.  Our mother, Jack’s daughter, Lia’s friend, Jeff’s wife, mother of Margaux, baby Margaux, who’s only just one—our mother slips and falls. She is holding the baby. 

 

A milk truck.  A wave.  A scooter.  An elephant.  Popeye’s ship going glub, glub, glub. 

Some things you can’t imagine.   

And then there are things that you can.

You just never imagine they’ll happen to you.