This morning, I walked from my bedroom into a painting. It could have been the sudden humidity, or my unprocessed jet lag, or something in between, but either way, what I’m saying is this: the door from my bedroom into the hallway was a portal into another world.
That portal led to a staircase, and the staircase led to the first floor, and the first floor led me to a table where strangers sat—strangers who soon (so wonderfully soon) will be friends. Those strangers led me to a large, muggy lake, and then to the fifth floor of a cafe shop, and while we were waiting in line to pay, one of them said, “oh, don’t worry about it” and bought me coconut water, and afterwards they asked me about all the things that mattered to me and my life. And what I’m trying to say is that these strangers, and these friends, and this humidity, and this jet lag, and this joy—they are all pulling me further out of my world and into another one. They’re pulling me so far that even now, as I return to my room after 15 hours of rediscovery and wonder, there is no returning to the old door. The old door is gone, actually.
What I’m trying to say is that over the past 15 hours, I’ve become a different person—grown into a different person. Or maybe I’ve just grown more myself.
I am thinking about how people slip into our lives like an accident, and how they stay with such purpose that they help us find our own.
Yesterday, I wrote that I’d let this year guide me. Today, I realized that this year won’t guide me so much as the people in it will. Today, I let myself be pulled into a walk along the lake, a walk back to the hotel, a walk to hunt down an ATM and, along the way, a vegetarian buffet. I gave myself over to the smell of smoke and nước mắm, to the generous beeping and buzz of the street. I bought my stranger-friends water (“oh, don’t worry about it,” I had learned to say earlier), and in return they bought me coconuts and avocado ice cream, and together we ate bún chả Hạ Nội on little plastic chairs, and we scuttled across the street for cà phê sữa đá, only to get drenched in the pouring rain, nearly slipping into a puddle, catching ourselves, one person’s left shoulder wet, the other’s right shoulder wet, sharing an umbrella far too small for two bodies, using broken Vietnamese and a soggy couple bills to buy another one.
Today, I told stories about myself, and my father, and my mother, and everything and everyone that mattered to me. I listened to stories about re-education camps and hostel stayers and how trying to recover family history feels like reaching for something you can’t ever touch. I dipped fried lotus root in a tangy, pink sauce, and my stranger-friend—mostly friend now, I think, said—I’m sorry, I just don’t know what to say. Thank you for telling me this. I just don’t know what to say. I have chills right now.
Later in the conversation, I said, we have to talk more about this later. And in an entirely different conversation with an entirely different stranger-friend, I was told, we have to talk more about this later. I guess it’s true. We have to talk more about this later, even if there is always so much more to talk about, and too little laters.
I feel like a miracle. This is what I said today to a stranger-friend, as I swirled egg noodles onto my plate. For real, I said, when he looked up from his plate-swirled eggplant. For real. I actually feel like I am a miracle.
Here’s the thing: there are so many ways I could have never existed. My mother could have died of that illness, back in 1979. My grandmother could have left my mother at home; she could have said, Sister, take care of my child. I don’t think she’ll last the boat ride.
My mother could have been the sick girl tossed off the side of the ship, the news of which returned to my grandmother’s Sister (my great aunt) and my great grandmother. They wept. They did. But here’s the other thing: my mother did not die. She lived.
I know I’ve written about this before, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It is the miracle of my mother’s existence that makes the miracle of mine. So here it is again:
I am in Vietnam, and there are so many ways I could have never existed. My great aunt’s father could have never fallen sick. He could have lived. The fortune teller could have never flirted with her mother, especially not so soon after the husband’s passing. My great grandmother could have never had an affair with the village fortune teller. They could have never loved each other.
And then my grandmother could have never been born. Even if she had been born, she could have drowned the day her older brother left her by the water to join the Việt Minh and their nationalist movement. My great aunt and their mother could have returned to that hut a couple minutes too late. That crying baby—my grandmother—could have never been rescued. She could have drowned that day, tied with a rope to the rickety bed.
Here it is, again and again: there are so many ways I could have never existed. And there are so many ways, even if I had, that I could have never ended up back here, writing this essay from a bed in Vietnam.
There are so many ways you could never be reading these words. There are so many ways you could have clicked on anything else. But here’s the thing. I am writing this. You are reading it. We are existing like this, through these fragile paragraphs, touching each other.
There could have been so many ways the world spun in a different direction, and yet, out of the billion ways our lives could have tumbled—and our grandparents’ lives, and our parents’ lives, and our stranger-friends’ lives—yes, out of those billion, trillion paths: this is the one we have tumbled into. This is the door. This is the portal. This is the only reality, despite all the ways we could have been denied entry. Yes.
This moment is ours. It is sparkling so bright, slipping into our hands like a series of heavy raindrops, one after the other. It is slipping into our unworthy hands not because we asked it to, but because that is simply what rain does.
So here’s the thing: there are so many ways I could have never existed. But here’s the other thing: I’m walking the rain-kissed streets of Hanoi, a silly grin on my silly face, a puddle of sweat painting my back. I’m sharing this tiny umbrella with a stranger-friend, and I’m talking about all the ways I’ve become who I’ve become. As we chatter and gossip and jump out of our socks from the sudden car honk, we wonder about the way this world has turned. It has turned for us, we realize, and for this moment. Yes.
The world has turned in this one particular, precious way—and it’s all we have to hold. I want to cup my hands and hold it gently, this life, this world, this turning. I want to say thank you. Just: thank you.