Hitchhiking
Vietnam
By
Karin Muller
The Central Coast, Vietnam
I had been scouring the official bookstores for
days, looking for a trashy English novel to reward myself after
months of tedious grammar texts and pocket dictionaries. I had
come across nothing but a Vietnamese translation of Jack London's
stories, and had spent a sweltering week on the beach, adding
snow bank, sled dog, and icicle to my already lopsided vocabulary.
Western books and magazines, I was told, were a disruptive and
potentially corrupting influences on the national psyche and therefore
banned to the public. I resigned myself to a few more months of
barren reading and returned to my dictionary, opened to the letter
R.
Once again the indomitable Vietnamese entrepreneurial
spirit rose to the occasion, this time in the form of a little
old man with a tattered handbag and a big floppy hat, plodding
slowly down the beach.
He paused at my towel and offered me an elegant
bow. "Excuse me," he said in almost perfect Voice of
America, "would you be interested in a novel or two? I have
titles in several languages..."
Unconstrained by the finer points of social decorum,
I almost toppled him in my haste to get inside his bag. Danielle
Steele, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Follet; he had them all, and a healthy
dose of Danish and German works as well. He spent his days wandering
the beach, buying, selling, trading and reading the worn paperbacks
he garnered from sun-baked travelers. He had followed Dante through
the Inferno, shared thirsty days and nights with The Old Man and
The Sea, and was hoping to someday come across some of Orwell's
works, to understand the mysterious references to Big Brother
and the Savage.
After much coaxing he sat on the edge of my towel
and related his own history, a story worthy of Dickens at his
best.
It began in the South Vietnamese Army, and followed
a path depressingly like Tam's, though with a different ending.
He had, in the years since the war, been an itinerant sign painter,
a balloon seller and popsicle maker. "That was the job I
liked best," he said with a chuckle. "Riding my bicycle
around the city, blowing my horn. The children were always so
happy to see me..."
He looked back over the city and smiled for a moment
in private reminiscences, and told me without rancor that there
was hardly a menial job he had not been forced to take since the
defeat of the South. For fifteen years he had listened to the
American broadcasts in secret, and smuggled censored Western books
into his tiny shack. When the government finally relaxed its restrictions
on foreign contact, his secret hobby become a vocation. He had
been roaming the beaches ever since, finding joy in every new
title that came his way.
The books had brought him more than a love of Shakespeare's
sonnets. His language skills had blossomed while others were busy
forgetting their Western ways. He now spoke a haunting, lyrical
English that rivaled some of his most cherished authors. I wondered
why he didn't migrate to Saigon, and accept one of the sought-after
positions as translator for the burgeoning foreign firms.
He shook his head without the slightest hesitation,
and directed my gaze out over the frothy white surf and cloudless
blue sky. He was quite content, he said, and enjoyed the freedom
of working to his own rhythm and in his own space. He seemed sincere,
but a lifetime of diet books and car commercials had made me suspicious
of such pure and unambitious contentment. There must be something,
I insisted, that he wished for but did not already have?
He hesitated for a fraction of a second. "A
house perhaps?" I prompted quickly. "A small motorbike?
A steady income?"
He shook his head. "A library," he said
softly. A place where everyone was free to browse, to sit and
read and perhaps drink a cup of tea. It had been his dream for
years. Lately he had even found the perfect space for it, above
a tailor shop and overlooking a tiny corner of the harbor.
He cocked his head and smiled again. For now I was
welcome to borrow any of his books, he said, and could even return
them by mail from Saigon or Hanoi if my travel plans took me elsewhere.
We spilled his bag onto the sandy towel and I listened while he
put a gentle finger on each crumbling binding, and explained why
one was good, the other not. Eventually he rose to continue on
his pilgrimage, leaving me with four of his favorite titles and
the feeling there was more to life than making money, and that
he had found it somewhere between a child's hopeful smile and
the pages of Shakespeare's greatest works.
___________
To purchase the one-hour PBS special Hitchhiking Vietnam ($12.95), please visit Japanlandonline.com
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