“You just need to take a leap of faith,” Brad said, coaching me on how to cross the street in Hanoi.
We had heard before coming to Vietnam that crossing the street would be one of the more memorable parts of the trip, and it couldn’t have turned out to be more true. Despite the presence of - or lack of – a crosswalk, the only real way to get from one side of the street to the other was to simply step into traffic, like stepping into a rushing river, and trust that the universe would provide for you.
Hanoi is not a very loud city, but it does keep a steady pulse. Standing on the corner while waiting to – or trying to – cross the street, you could close your eyes and hear the soundtrack of the city in surround: distant honking, beeping, the Doppler whirr of a rusty moped passing. Even the prickly rain hummed.
We found ourselves several times standing on the same corner, directly beneath Ben Reich’s brother-in-law’s café on gallery row, just down the street from the Opera House and around the corner from the painfully posh Metropole hotel. On one such occasion, we witnessed a collision between two mopeds. It’s surprising we didn’t see more in all our time in Vietnam, considering the density and intensity of the traffic. But in fact, we only saw this one accident. The two parties engaged in a silent argument, which escalated to one of the drivers kicking the other in the stomach. Neither one of them said a word. When the kicking was finished, each driver picked up their motorbike, mounted and drove on.
The day before, at the café overlooking that same corner, we sipped fresh fruit juice and watched the ambulance try to negotiate with an unmovable current of cars and bikes (as Amanda already mentioned). Ben, Brad and I talked about the nature of work. Brad – who spent much of the trip ruminating about Kafka On The Shore, the first book he downloaded onto his new Kindle - was clearly affected by Murakami’s inventive surreal tone. He said, “I’d love to write, and I think I’m a good writer, but if I couldn’t be as original as Murakami, I wouldn’t want to do it.”
Ben replied, “You just have to take a leap of faith”.
There you have it, I thought. Crossing the street and finding your creative voice are the same. You just have to do it.
Ben Reich, a New Yorker raised on the upper west side, attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn and then the University of Wisconsin, where his freshman roommate was a classmate of Amanda’s at Fox Valley Lutheran High School in Appleton. He came to Hanoi for the first time in college and fell in love with the place, and with a beautiful girl named Thao who worked in a record store.
She told me, “He came in to the store all the time but never bought anything. That’s how I knew he liked me.” After college Ben returned to Hanoi and he’s been there ever since.
Visiting a new city, especially one as exotic as Hanoi, improves considerably when you have a native to guide you. It improves completely when you have someone as connected to the place as Ben, but who also totally understands where you are coming from. Eating in a restaurant, taking a cab, or even crossing the street – everything changes when you have a guy on the inside.
The Hom market:
On New Year’s Eve, we met Ben, Thao and Hosea at their fantastic house. The cab ride from the hotel took over an hour, most of which was spent in motionless gridlock.
Eventually we turned off a regular road, down an alley, and then down another alley. Ben was waiting for us in a dark corner of the labyrinth. He led us even further into his hidden village, which we would have never even known about without him. As it turns out, much of Hanoi is hidden in plain sight – little towns and neighborhoods bustling behind the main streets, down tiny lanes barely big enough for a bicycle to pass through.
We celebrated Stephanie’s birthday with cake and a rendition of Biz Markie's “Just A Friend" by Hosea.
When we eventually ventured back out into the night, finding a cab was a challenge (after all it was New Year’s Eve). Finding two was impossible. The girls went ahead in one cab, and Ben, Brad and I tried hopelessly to flag another. Eventually we started to walk in the direction of the restaurant, which Ben said was about 4 kilometers away. But, as they say, in Vietnam the kilometers are longer.
Anyway, we got about a block and a half in 15 minutes, and found an old lady who seemed to be acting as a de facto dispatcher for makeshift and impromptu taxis. Ben said something to her in Vietnamese and she disappeared into the shadows, returning a moment later with a man in his 40s, a young girl of about seven, and an older man who looked to be in his 70s.
The next thing we knew, we were all piling into the man’s car: the man, his daughter, his father, his wife, Ben, Brad and me. They drove us to the restaurant out of the kindness of their hearts. Ben gave us a running play-by-play of the conversation. The man worked for the State on water purification issues. They were on their way to a party. The wife had her own business. She handed us her card. Her company was called Phuc Dat.
These people didn’t have any reason to take us. They didn’t know us, and I suspected that our restaurant was not on the way to their party. They did it out of kindness, “an auspicious start to 2010,” Ben said. I saw it more as a kind of leap of faith.
Appropriately, we counted down to midnight sitting in a cab in traffic.
