VN 20: And Now for a Digression

There are very few almost-solo photos of me in Vietnam. One is of me on the back of a motorbike driven by a Vietnamese friend, and the other is with an American friend who was my upstairs neighbor when I lived at Kien Giang Community College. Both were taken in the Mekong Delta. When I find them, I'll add them and tell their stories.

And then there is this one, which I have only as a computer-printed one, now scanned. This is from 2003: I am wearing my first ao dai,  the Vietnamese national dress, the one my student friend Cindy Xuan took me to buy. She chose the fabric over my protests; I had had in mind something less funky and flashy. Something with far less horizontal movement to it. (But the fabric would have looked good on Cindy Xuan who, she told me when I asked, already had about twenty ao dai.) And then after we bought the fabric in the market, she took me on her motorbike to the tailor so I could be measured. "You must wear big underwear," the tailor told Cindy Xuan to tell me.

I came to think of it as my country-western ao dai. A month or so later, the women in the college bought me fabric for what for what I think of as a much more tasteful gentle peach color ao dai. That is, when I wore than new peach one (no measurements required since they were recorded in a notebook already), I felt a little bit--a little bit--less like a water buffalo compared to the petite and sylphlike Vietnamese women.

My helmet I bought from the local Harley-Davidson dealership before I went to Vietnam,  the dealership as foreign to me in some ways as the tailor in the Mekong Delta. I wore it even though in 2003 there was no law mandating helmets--in fact, only recently had a law passed mandating at least one mirror on the handlebars of motorbikes. These days helmets (and many seem to be more like bike helmets to me) are required by law, but even so, one mother told me that helmets are not good for babies' heads.

My helmet was hot and it made it difficult to hear what the driver was saying. Riding on a motorbike is cool just because and because it generates a breeze--except for around my head inside the helmet.

So in a city of 200,000 in the Mekong Delta, I was the big American regularly enough on the back of a motorbike as I made my way around the city. To the locals, I was told, I looked like I had a rice cooker on my head.

Well, it was hot inside the helmet.