Saigon Storms

Hiding underneath my driver’s rain poncho, I can’t see anything but the road directly beneath me, so it comes unexpectedly when we are suddenly driving through a veritable river in the road, the tires splashing muddy rain water all over my feet and legs. My previously red canvas sneakers are brown with mud at this point, and my socks have adopted that uncomfortable mushy feeling after being soaked through. At least I’m wearing shorts. My skin will dry faster than fabric, if I ever get to my destination.

I can’t believe I’ve forgotten to bring my own raincoat, in the middle of rainy season. Crouching behind my driver with the back of his coat draped over me like a makeshift tent, I feel like a child. This is, after all, how children often ride in the rain, arms wrapped tightly around their mothers, easily sliding into their protection under the back of their coat. But when you’re a fully grown adult woman riding on the back of a stranger’s Honda cub, it hits a little differently. There’s a musty smell, probably of mold from the coat always being stuffed back into the storage compartment under the seat after each use. All I can see in front of me is the green uniform of my drivers back, everything shrouded in the red hue cast by our nylon covering perched over my helmet. With nothing of the road visible before me, I have to put an inordinate amount of trust in my driver. It gives me a little motion sickness too, not being able to anticipate the twists and turns of the road or the movement of the bike.

In moments like these, I wonder what I am doing here on the other side of the world. Back home, if it had started raining like this while I was en route somewhere, I would be comfortable in my car, probably listening to some music perfectly matched to complement the sound of the pattering on the windshield. If the rain got too heavy, I could just pull over and relax for a bit. If I wanted to keep driving, I could turn the headlights on, put the windshield wipers at full speed, and not worry about getting wet.

Still, there was a complacency in my life back home that I had escaped by moving to Saigon. It was easy to keep trucking along with my satisfactory job and great social life in the States, but it was a dead end. I didn’t want to wake up ten years later still doing the same job, living paycheck to paycheck, going to the same bars for $2 whiskeys and free drinks from skeevy guys, and wondering where my life had gone. When I moved, that nagging feeling that I should be doing something more exciting or ambitious with my life had been replaced by a new, simpler feeling-constant confusion.

In Vietnam, I never knew where I was going, literally or metaphorically, but least of all when hiding under someone else’s raincoat during the daily afternoon storms. I had failed spectacularly at learning the language, and was confused by even the most basic of interactions. Luckily, these motorbike taxis could be ordered through an app, bypassing the need for conversation. Often they would still call anyway, treating me to a long stream of rapid Vietnamese, leaving me bewildered as to how they could possibly have so much to say to me given all the information already provided in the app.

“Uhhhhh . . . ở đây? Hai phút, okay?” here? Two minutes.

Not having enough words in my arsenal to really engage with the drivers or decipher what they were actually saying, I would usually opt to throw out one or two of the phrases I knew and hope that they would suffice.

An awkward pause.

“Yeah, okay, okay,” the driver would usually simplify at that point, realizing that I was somehow completely inept in the language of the country where I lived.

The rain is starting to grow lighter now. I think that maybe I can venture out of the raincoat and take a look at my surroundings. Feeling like a groundhog peering out of his hole, I carefully duck my head out from under the red tent, trying not to drip the water all over me as I remove it. It’s only misting now. The deluge of rain hits harder than anything I’ve seen elsewhere in the world, but it’s usually short lived.

The sky overhead is still grey, and the road is a minefield of deep puddles ready to send up a wave of grimy street water. The bikes around us whip past with the usual dizzying speed, completely unaffected by the adverse weather conditions. The man driving next to us pulls his knees up to his chest, propping his feet up on the seat to avoid the splash as he drives through a puddle. He looks like a cartoon character. To my other side, a family of four sits crunched together on one bike: the man driving, the woman practically dangling off the back, with two small children sandwiched between them, only visible for how their little legs stick out from beneath the raincoat tent formed over them by mother and father.

A vague sense of loneliness hits me whenever I see the physical closeness of families and really feel my isolation here. I have no family on this continent, something I’m often reminded of by my mother, who worries about me being all alone. She makes me feel guilty sometimes for being here. She doesn’t mean to, she just misses me and doesn’t understand the compulsion to travel the world and live a completely different life from the one you were born to. Honestly, I don’t understand it either, only that there is some drive that grabs me by the gut, pulls, and insists that I follow. I must go, even if it means that on days like this there will be no one waiting for me if I want a reassuring hug after messing up all day. 

The sun is starting to peek out from behind the clouds. I recognize the road we’re on. Almost to the roundabout with the statue of the warrior pointing accusingly from atop his pillar. The bank tower is just beyond there. It’ll be cold from too much air conditioning; my wet clothes will have me freezing and I can already hear the squish of my soggy socks mushing into my shoes with every step. Hopefully I can at least see someone and get my card sorted out. There’s always something not quite working, something I don’t quite know how to fix, making life here just a little more difficult. I wonder how long I can stay here, not knowing what comes next or where I’m going. For now, I still enjoy the novelty of hopping on the back of a motorbike with a reckless driver, even when I forget my raincoat.