The most memorable part of this trip to Vietnam has been my return by train from Hanoi to Saigon. It was one of those chaotic, immersive, roll-like-the-locals-roll experiences that is the goal of travel for many people. I wouldn’t trade it away, but I hope I don’t have to do it again soon.
At my 1 p.m. departure from Hanoi, I was the only person in my cabin, and I started to think that was preferable. On the way up, because absolutely no one else spoke English and my cabin mates were kind of cold fish, it was a little awkward the whole time. I wanted to experience life in Vietnam, but I also thought 30 hours to myself to watch the scenery and read my ragged copy of Jane Eyre would be fine, too. Reader, I did not have the cabin to myself.
After a few local stops, I got my first cabin mate. She sat in the opposite bunk and didn’t say a word and didn’t look up enough for me even to nod hello. I thought, “Here we go again.” It was really hot, and she was obviously distressed from getting her luggage on, burrowing in her bag for tissues to mop her brow. I kept sitting there grinning at her, waiting for her to look up so I could say, “Xin chow!”
Then, when the porter came by to tell me something about my dinner order, she popped out with a translation in excellent English. She said she hadn’t said hello before because she was embarrassed by how hot she was. We got to talking and became friends, and I depended on her for conversation and translating the rest of the way. She was super nice. She goes by Suzie with her English-speaking friends.
Suzie grew up on a lychee farm in a province near Hanoi and had gone to college in Saigon and is still living there, studying banking and working for an import/export firm. She was returning from a visit home, weighed down with fresh-picked fruit from the family farm, a pile of which she promptly made a present of to me. (Delicious!)
One funny thing about Suzie is how preoccupied she was with her cell phone. At one point it stopped working for some reason, and she could not let it go. She would put it away in her bag and then every five minutes get it out again and examine all the buttons and say, “Oh, I’m very worried about my phone.” Like it had a high fever or something. She eventually got it working and she had a massive collection of photos, home videos, and pop tunes stored on it that she used to entertain the other passengers.
Suzie had ridden 50 kilometers that morning on the back of her uncle’s motorbike with all her luggage to the train station and waited four hours for a train and had gotten on this one without a ticket. The porter (who I suspect was running some kind of side business selling empty seats and SRO rides) had sold her a ticket for a coach seat and told her to rest on an empty berth in my cabin until the other ticket holders got on.
Next, the passengers in the opposite bottom bunk arrived—a mother and her five-year-old daughter. Suzie sat with me to pass the time, and we got to know the others. I was carrying a package of Pokeman cards to offer as a gift, and I got a big kick out of it when the girl replied politely, “Xin com on, bac”—Thank you, uncle—and she spent several hours playing with those.
A boy in the cabin next door spotted the cards eventually and asked for some and kept trying to get in my backpack to find more. He was a bully and a show-off who wasn’t much fun to be around, but he attached himself to me for some reason and I couldn’t shake him. He had a horrible rash on his leg that made me desperate to keep him out of my bunk without being rude, but no luck. I eventually distributed out to him and several others all of the Werther’s butterscotch candies I had with me, and kids were carrying fistfuls of them around the train the rest of the day. I found several of them stuck to my luggage on the floor at the end of the trip, spit out down there whenever a meal time came.
Finally, the occupants of the two top bunks showed up—two parents with four kids under seven. When they appeard in the doorway, Suzie said brightly, “Much luck, much children,” which I took to be a translation of an ironic expression about the coincidence of good fortune and large families. Judging by the sounds in the bunk above me during most of the trip of the mother retching into a bucket, I suspect more luck was on the way.
So that made nine ticketed passengers in the four beds in our cabin, plus Suzie, plus frequent visits from the Pied Piper next door and his growing parade of followers. Eventually, night set in, parents and children piled together family-bed style, the lights were dimmed. Suzie couldn’t find the porter who sold her the coach ticket, and she didn’t show any signs of leaving. She didn’t seem to see anything immodest in it, so I took my cue from the rest of the passengers and we stretched out in my bunk head to toe, quite cramped, and I slept fitfully, trying to keep from falling off the edge.
Starting with dawn the next day, our cabin steadily degraded into a soup of spit out fruit pits, spilled milk and dropped rice grains. The girl across from me at one point threw up in her mother’s lap and bounced back fast, eating everything in sight after that. Later, while her mother napped, she amused herself by taking sips of water and spitting them on the floor. At one point, my bag of groceries became fatally contaminated, and I abandoned it to the elements and hauled the rest of my luggage up into the bunk with me. Above us, the two parents, one of them sick, juggled their three youngest back and forth across the aisle, and when one parent had to go to the bathroom, the oldest sister, who never stopped smiling the whole trip and never said a word, held on to a couple of her siblings to make sure they didn’t fall off.
We pulled into Saigon Station at 9 p.m., only 10 minutes late, thank goodness, and I asked Suzie to translate while I made a big speech about how glad I was to meet them all and good luck and so long. I about broke my back helping Suzie haul all her fruit out to the taxi queue, and after my own short taxi ride, I was never so glad to see the business-class hotel that had seemed so cramped when we first arrived in Saigon.
At my 1 p.m. departure from Hanoi, I was the only person in my cabin, and I started to think that was preferable. On the way up, because absolutely no one else spoke English and my cabin mates were kind of cold fish, it was a little awkward the whole time. I wanted to experience life in Vietnam, but I also thought 30 hours to myself to watch the scenery and read my ragged copy of Jane Eyre would be fine, too. Reader, I did not have the cabin to myself.
After a few local stops, I got my first cabin mate. She sat in the opposite bunk and didn’t say a word and didn’t look up enough for me even to nod hello. I thought, “Here we go again.” It was really hot, and she was obviously distressed from getting her luggage on, burrowing in her bag for tissues to mop her brow. I kept sitting there grinning at her, waiting for her to look up so I could say, “Xin chow!”
Then, when the porter came by to tell me something about my dinner order, she popped out with a translation in excellent English. She said she hadn’t said hello before because she was embarrassed by how hot she was. We got to talking and became friends, and I depended on her for conversation and translating the rest of the way. She was super nice. She goes by Suzie with her English-speaking friends.
Suzie grew up on a lychee farm in a province near Hanoi and had gone to college in Saigon and is still living there, studying banking and working for an import/export firm. She was returning from a visit home, weighed down with fresh-picked fruit from the family farm, a pile of which she promptly made a present of to me. (Delicious!)
One funny thing about Suzie is how preoccupied she was with her cell phone. At one point it stopped working for some reason, and she could not let it go. She would put it away in her bag and then every five minutes get it out again and examine all the buttons and say, “Oh, I’m very worried about my phone.” Like it had a high fever or something. She eventually got it working and she had a massive collection of photos, home videos, and pop tunes stored on it that she used to entertain the other passengers.
Suzie had ridden 50 kilometers that morning on the back of her uncle’s motorbike with all her luggage to the train station and waited four hours for a train and had gotten on this one without a ticket. The porter (who I suspect was running some kind of side business selling empty seats and SRO rides) had sold her a ticket for a coach seat and told her to rest on an empty berth in my cabin until the other ticket holders got on.
Next, the passengers in the opposite bottom bunk arrived—a mother and her five-year-old daughter. Suzie sat with me to pass the time, and we got to know the others. I was carrying a package of Pokeman cards to offer as a gift, and I got a big kick out of it when the girl replied politely, “Xin com on, bac”—Thank you, uncle—and she spent several hours playing with those.
A boy in the cabin next door spotted the cards eventually and asked for some and kept trying to get in my backpack to find more. He was a bully and a show-off who wasn’t much fun to be around, but he attached himself to me for some reason and I couldn’t shake him. He had a horrible rash on his leg that made me desperate to keep him out of my bunk without being rude, but no luck. I eventually distributed out to him and several others all of the Werther’s butterscotch candies I had with me, and kids were carrying fistfuls of them around the train the rest of the day. I found several of them stuck to my luggage on the floor at the end of the trip, spit out down there whenever a meal time came.
Finally, the occupants of the two top bunks showed up—two parents with four kids under seven. When they appeard in the doorway, Suzie said brightly, “Much luck, much children,” which I took to be a translation of an ironic expression about the coincidence of good fortune and large families. Judging by the sounds in the bunk above me during most of the trip of the mother retching into a bucket, I suspect more luck was on the way.
So that made nine ticketed passengers in the four beds in our cabin, plus Suzie, plus frequent visits from the Pied Piper next door and his growing parade of followers. Eventually, night set in, parents and children piled together family-bed style, the lights were dimmed. Suzie couldn’t find the porter who sold her the coach ticket, and she didn’t show any signs of leaving. She didn’t seem to see anything immodest in it, so I took my cue from the rest of the passengers and we stretched out in my bunk head to toe, quite cramped, and I slept fitfully, trying to keep from falling off the edge.
Starting with dawn the next day, our cabin steadily degraded into a soup of spit out fruit pits, spilled milk and dropped rice grains. The girl across from me at one point threw up in her mother’s lap and bounced back fast, eating everything in sight after that. Later, while her mother napped, she amused herself by taking sips of water and spitting them on the floor. At one point, my bag of groceries became fatally contaminated, and I abandoned it to the elements and hauled the rest of my luggage up into the bunk with me. Above us, the two parents, one of them sick, juggled their three youngest back and forth across the aisle, and when one parent had to go to the bathroom, the oldest sister, who never stopped smiling the whole trip and never said a word, held on to a couple of her siblings to make sure they didn’t fall off.
We pulled into Saigon Station at 9 p.m., only 10 minutes late, thank goodness, and I asked Suzie to translate while I made a big speech about how glad I was to meet them all and good luck and so long. I about broke my back helping Suzie haul all her fruit out to the taxi queue, and after my own short taxi ride, I was never so glad to see the business-class hotel that had seemed so cramped when we first arrived in Saigon.
In all seriousness, there is something special here about the intimacy and companionship between parents and children, which Ilene and I have noticed before. It was lovely to see it up close during the train ride—how comfortable everyone is in their skin, how little scolding the children need, how infrequently they get crabby or act out or demand amusement. There is much bad luck here for some children--begging on every street, horrible birth defects, primitive supports for handicapped children, limited opportunities for all the recreational and social activities we assume are necessary for healthy development. But I hope I'm not romanticizing that poverty when I say there are other gifts most families have here that we lack. It’s something I've been trying to put my finger on, and I'll continue trying to describe as I give it some more thought.
-Robert
