A New Perspective

It had become completely natural to me, the feeling of whizzing through the tepid, heavy air, surrounded by lights, chatter, and so much late night traffic, in what I’d been told was a quiet Vietnamese town. I had been working at a school in Biên Hòa, a small city in the Ð?ng Nai province of South Vietnam for three months, and as always, gaze longingly as we pass the animated night markets alive with students and the scent of foods, familiar yet unidentified. The back of a scooter had become my seat of choice, perched behind a friend who I trust wholly, knowing that on the tightly packed and buzzing roads, the Vietnamese are in their element. I observe the drivers around us as one might a tiger prowling the jungle: slightly warily but with sheer admiration of their movement. I jump off instinctively as we pull into a petrol station and a huge yellowed grin (with a withered but able elderly man attached), moves towards us waving a fuel pump. He converses rapidly with Thoai in Vietnamese as he fills the tank. I nudge Thoai enthusiastically when I hear a word I know: Úc', meaning Australia.
“He asks me where you from,” Thoai explains patiently to me, her faithful English teaching assistant, and student of Vietnamese, “and I tell him, Australia.”
She speaks to him again, and he replies, shaking his head, and chortling at her words whilst rubbing a grease mark into his cheek.
I nag Thoai to translate, wishing I could communicate directly.
“He wonders why you leave Australia to come here. He thinks you very lucky to live there. I tell him, don’t worry. You just here as volunteer, you go home in some months.”
I’m not taken aback, having sadly become used to similar comments. My response is automatic.
“Tell him that to me, he’s lucky! Tell him I love it here. Please tell him I feel at home.”
Thoai does this, and wheezing and grinning he claps me on the back as I climb onto my perch, and waves as we zip off into the street, back into the enduring rhythm of Biên Hòa.