Dung and Nguyet

I met Dung (pronounced Zung) and Nguyet my second day in Hanoi. I was walking in a park when he ran up to me, girl in tow, to announce that they were English students, looking for someone to practice their English with.

“Hello, where are you from?”

We chat for fifteen minutes before they converse quickly in hushed Vietnamese and resolutely ask me if I would like to have lunch with them. As I’m hungry, and they are locals, I instantly agree.

It was Dung and Nguyet who really taught me how to cross the street in Hanoi. It’s a scary thing, stepping out into an orgy of ungoverned motorbikes. There are no real rules to road travel in Vietnam. Everyone just sort of evades everyone else in a mad dash to their destination. To cross as a pedestrian, you take your life in your hands every time you step into the street.

The key is to walk slowly and deliberately, without changing pace, looking into the oncoming traffic, making sure that they see you. The tide ebbs and flows around you like an active river or a school of fish. You become a moving sedentary object, just another thing for a driver to weave around.

Gut instinct is to run quickly. This is bad; it gives the diver much less time to react to your presence. Until I met Dung, I had just been waiting till there was as little traffic as possible and jetting across, or else choosing which roads I crossed based on the danger factor. Whole neighborhoods were cut off due to fear.

So when Dung and Nguyet pointed across a 6-way intersection of motorized chaos to the Pho restaurant we would eat at, I tried to shut off the fear valve and followed as close as possible to my guide. Slowly, almost nonchalantly, we strolled through the streets, as if the sidewalk wasn’t there and the motorbikes were invisible.

At lunch, I actually get to know my new friends beyond the staple coutesies. Dung is more excited, excitable. He’s the louder of the two and seems irrepressibly happy. He has a permanent grin slapped across his face that displays a set of stained, crooked teeth. He is contagiously optimistic, and when he insists on something you find yourself nodding easily.

Nguyet is quieter, and in my mind, smarter. But she is also less sure of herself and her English, even though it is better than Dung’s. She is also shockingly pretty, with a face you can stare at for a long time without realizing it. At lunch, she offers to bring me to her hometown near the Chinese border. The three of us can go and check out the Ban Gioc waterfall, one of the largest in Vietnam, which apparently looks like this:

Dung orders the food for us, asking me if I would like chicken or beef in my soup. I especially like the way he says the word ‘beef’. It’s the epitome of his tectonic translation of English words. It starts with a slow building crescendo of pressure – static flexing of his diaphragm as his lips puff out ever so slightly, preparing to unleash.  His eyes have a fervor, they cant’ wait to release. With a ‘pop’ – more P than B, he lets loose a tonal approximation. BEefff. The short but intense vowel sound descending along distinctive, familiarly pronounceable tonal lines. He finishes with a long, drawn-out breathy FFFFFF, almost twice as long as the rest of the word. It is a strategic blast, a tactical nuke of Vietnamese inflected wordage.

He and Nguyet get pho ga to my pho bo.

“I like chicken,” he says sheepishly, with a very weird smile. I laugh, feeling like a friend, while Nguyet smiles at both of us.

We end up spending close to two hours together that afternoon. After lunch they help me buy a Vietnamese cell phone – a task I monumentously mistook for being doable by myself. Without them it would have been impossible. We even go so far as to meet up at night for drinks at Dung’s favorite café. We sip on juice and crunch sunflower seeds for most of the night and make plans to do it again. They are my first Vietnamese friends.