Heart of a Living City

To this day I never fail to finish my food. As a child, my mother would always admonish me when even a spoonful of my dinner was left in my rice bowl. She would say that she and her family were so poor back in Vietnam, that they would eat rice and fish sauce as a meal. On special occasions, her mother would buy little sardines and give her children the body while she ate the less appetizing heads and tails. “I want to bring you and your brother over there so that you can see how lucky you are,” was the imminent warning my mother would say when she believed my younger brother and I were acting ungrateful.

This March, I finally met my fate and travelled to the motherland. Everything I ever imagined about Vietnam was true: it was hot and humid, with the warm air enveloping my body into an encased containment, every breath shared the dense musk of cigarettes, the streets were flooded with motorbikes which seemed to ebb and flow like mechanical waves crashing into each other, yet streamed steadily back into every street and alleyway of the five way intersection. In this moment, among the thousands of blood cells that pumped through the heart of Ho Chi Minh City, I realized that I too am just a grain in the world’s rice paddy.

Ironically, all this was familiar. The tales my mother would tell about her home were never far from the truth and while I did not eat sardines on my trip, I did consume a fair amount of snail dishes. The food dishes were familiar, just as my grandmother would cook them, but unacquainted spices gave my insides a spin on the wheel with every visit to the hole in the ground (AKA the toilet). There was a paradox of everything I knew, in an entire community I had never set foot upon. No amount of vacation time could suffice to explore the ever-changing organism that is the city life, however, stick me back into the mouth of the dragon, and I would do it all over again. Anytime.