Poverty in Paradise

I biked south from the small town of Hoi An along the main road—two unpaved, unmarked lanes. After an hour I spotted a curious net supported by two pieces of bamboo resting just above the short tree line on my right. A narrow dirt path led towards it. I veered off the main road to investigate. Bushes invaded the path along the first two hundred yards before opening up into a clearing. Chickens scattered before me in a cooing flurry of feathers.

On my left stood a small wooden house with a wooden awning on one side. Four bicycles were parked beside it. On my right was a creek, and beyond it were many small rectangular ponds about forty feet long and twenty feet wide.

Up ahead was the fishing net that I had come looking for. A small frame with an overhang and a large crank supported two pieces of bamboo which stretched out over the water holding the net. Beside it a boy was standing in the shade watching me approach. He wore jean shorts and a Dave Mathew’s Band t-shirt. As I rode towards him taking in the sights, the path suddenly turned from dirt to sand, and I decelerated quickly. I didn’t fall over, but the awkward landing was enough to get a laugh out of the boy. As I got off the bike and popped out the kickstand, he approached.

“Watees yaw nam?” he asked.

His accent was so thick when he spoke that I did not even realize that he was speaking English at first. Once I had deciphered what he said, I told him that my name was Kirk. He tried to repeat it but was far from mimicking the correct sound.

“Yea, that’s it,” I told him anyway. “And what is your name?”

“Sang. Where you from?”

“From America.”

He was excited to hear that I was from the US, because he was learning English and this was the first time that he had ever talked to a native speaker.

“How long have you been studying English?” I asked.

“One year.”

This answer caught me by surprise, because after speaking to him for several minutes I could see that his vocabulary was large. He did not attend normal school though. Instead he worked at home with his father and three nights a week he attended a special English language class.

“I am very lucky,” Sang told me. “My teacher is very nice. He know that I am very poor and not make me pay alot.”

While Sang’s vocabulary seemed large his pronunciation was terrible. It took a lot of concentration to understand even the most basic things that he said to me, and even then I had to ask him to clarify a lot of his words. This did not mar our conversation though because any time I could not recognize a word that he was saying he simply wrote it in the sand.

This was not too difficult for him because the Vietnamese alphabet uses Roman characters. When the French began colonizing Vietnam in the 1800s the Vietnamese did not have a written language. French scholars created a written language for the Vietnamese using a combination of Roman characters and accent marks in order to account for the 9 different tones in the Vietnamese language.

Another boy walked over and stood next to us. Sang introduced the boy as his brother.

"Hello," he said, in a much clearer accent than Sang.

“Do you speak English also?” I asked him. He looked at me, puzzled. Then Sang turned to him and said something in Vietnamese. I assume he was translating.

“I spoke Englit alitabit,” Sang’s brother answered proudly.

I smiled and complimented his accent. Afterward Sang ignored his brother and began to ask me questions about school.

“How many friends you have?” He asked.

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” I said, fumbling with the strange question. “I have a few closer friends that I see every day, and others who I only see sometimes.”

“My friend live over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby house.

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen. Same as me.”

“And there are no other boys around here who are the same age as you?”

“No.”

“Do you hang out with your friend a lot?”

“Yes, but he not very reliable.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, his family very poor like me, and he not reliable.”

“Oh, you mean with money?” He nodded.

“But we like to play with soccer a lot. We have field over there.”

“Do a lot of kids come out and play?”

“No. Just my brother and my friend.”

“Oh.”

“My brother never like be on my team. I do not know why.”

I laughed. “I think it’s because you’re his brother that he does not want to be on your team. So is it always two against one then?”

“Yes, my brother play on same team with my friend, but I always win anyway.”

I laughed. Sang’s brother, unable to speak English, was in no position to object. I turned to the large fishing net dangling above the surface of the water—the object whose attention had initially lured me in the first place.

“How does this work?” I asked.

He pointed out a light bulb that was also hanging above the water alongside the net.

“We put net in water at night, and turn on light. Fish come view light and we lift net and fish inside. But does not work now.”

“Why not?”

“The net broke, but I will fix with my father tonight.”

After several more minutes of chatting Sang invited me to come over to the house and sit down. When I agreed, his expression of happiness was as dramatic and genuine as I’ve ever seen.

We sat down outside at a table beneath an awning. Chickens scattered from beneath the table as we sat. The house was about the size of one large family room in a single family home back in the States, but it had been divided into three sections. The only reason that I was able to see this was because one of the four main walls on the outside of the house was not built.

“What happened?” I asked Sang.

“One year ago a storm blew over our house. Now we must build new one. It taking a long time.”

“Does your family have to pay for it?”

“Yes, but government give us a litibit.”

“It must be hard.”

“Yes, but I like having new house. Our old house have leaks in the roof. We have to wear raincoats to sleep when it rained.” Sang laughed casually as he told me this.

I began to ask Sang questions about his family and what they did for a living. They had quite a few different means of sustaining themselves. They raised chickens, which roamed freely about the property, and shrimp which were kept in the rectangular ponds that they had dug out. And, as I had already seen, they caught fish.

“You want me to tell you a Vietnam legend?” Sang asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said enthusiastically.

“Once there was fisherman and schooler. One day, the schooler ask the fisherman ‘Do you know about mathematic?’ The fisherman say no. Then the schooler ask the fisherman if he know about science, and the fisherman say no. The schooler ask if he know anything about geology, history, and other field of study. The fisherman say no to all of these. Then one day comes a large storm. The seas rise, and the land floods. The fisherman turns to schooler and ask ‘Do you know how to swim?’ The schooler say no, and then he drown.”

“Now will you tell some legend from America?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know of any legends that are from America,” I said “but I will tell you a story that I heard growing up.” I paused to think of one and then did my best to retell the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.

When I finished, Sang was a little confused.

“I like it very much!” he said through a broad smile. “But what do you learn?”

I paused to think for a moment. It never occurred to me before to consider the moral significance of the story. First Jack is given an errand to run by his mother, but he directly disobeys. This is a significant misdeed, particularly in Asian culture, where adherence to parental authority is far stricter. Yet in the end it is this disobedience that allowed Jack to become rich. I never noticed the stories western propensity to emphasize Jack’s independence and wealth over everything else. Sang did not quite know what to make of it.

“I don’t know what you are supposed to learn from this story,” I finally confessed. “I don’t think it has a moral.”

Sang’s father woke up from an afternoon nap and joined us outside, followed later by Sang’s mother, aunt, and sister. We all sat there together exchanging questions about one another’s culture. None of them could speak English, but Sang was able to translate for all of us.

“Do Americans eat rice?” His mother asked.

“Sometimes, but mostly we eat bread.”

She nodded pleasantly. “It is good that you eat rice.” She paused to think for a moment then asked “Do Americans cook with salt?”

“With salt?” I repeated with some confusion.

“Yes.”

“Well of course we cook with salt. You can’t live without it. If anything we probably eat too much of it though.”

His mother looked surprised. “I thought that Americans only cook with grease,” she said sincerely. At first I could not imagine what she was talking about, but then I realized that she had probably inferred this from the stereotype that Americans are fat.

After talking for several hours, I was beginning to feel cramped and a bit tired. I told Sang that I was going to head back. He asked me where I was going, and I explained that I had to catch a bus out of town later that evening. I initially intended to go by myself, but I saw how anxious he was to join me, and how shy he was about asking.

“Do you want to come?” I eventually asked. “Yes! Thank You!” He exclaimed. Sang’s family had four bicycles, and none of them looked like they were in good shape. I was surprised to find that they did not own a motorbike. This might not seem like a strange occurrence, but in Southeast Asia, and in particular Vietnam—which seems to have the greatest density of bikes per person of any other country in the region—this is truly a sign of poverty. I had just come from Hanoi, a city of 4 million people and 2 million motorbikes. Sang’s was the only family I had seen in Vietnam that did not own a one.

Sang chose the only one of the four bicycles that did not appear to have a flat tire, and then followed me up the path I had arrived on.

“How often do you go to the beach?” I asked casually.

“I don’t go.”

“Why not?”

“We are not supposed to,” Sang explained. The hotel nearby owned the land and it was reserved for paying tourists. Sang pointed out the hotel further down the road.

As we passed by, he confided that his dream in life was to become a receptionist at a hotel in Hoi An. With this job he would earn enough to support his entire family, and pay off their debts. His biggest dream was to work in the one here by his house. It was lavish from the outside and larger than most of the building in the main city.

“But it very difficult to get job being receptionist,” he explained, “because the government hotel require that receptionist have English certificate.” But this was not easy. An English certificate requires 4 years at a university, and money that his family did not have.

Some days he would just wait and watch the receptionists as they left work in the afternoons, dreaming about the day that he would join them. I encouraged him to try and befriend them, and to enquire about how they got their jobs. He was coming at it from a completely disadvantaged position, and had little practical knowledge about how to actually go about getting the job in the first place.

His stories were quaint, but disheartening. Looking at his situation I could see that his odds of ever landing the job were slim. The way that he was learning English was hard, and his pronunciation was not good enough to work as a receptionist. And getting an English certificate was not an option. On top of that, his father was opposed to him learning English in the first place. He wanted Sang to stay home and help out with other work like fishing, and tending to their livestock. Still, I gave him the best suggestions that I could and encouraged him to be persistent.

As we neared the city I inspected a few of the roadside restaurants. Most of them consisted of a large open room covered by a wooden roof that attached to the back of a house. Fold out tables and plastic chairs decorated the dining area. I stopped at one of them and hopped off my bike. Sang pulled up beside me. He looked a little uneasy.

“Let’s get something to eat here,” I said.

“I cannot,” Sang replied.

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, knowing that he had not brought any money “I will pay for you.”

He shook his head.

“Come on. It’s okay.”

Reluctantly he followed me over to a table. After sitting down, he shyly confessed that he had never eaten at a restaurant before. I was surprised but made sure to receive all of his comments with an air of nonchalance. I did not want to make him feel embarrassed, or reluctant to tell me more about himself.

When the waitress came I ordered shrimp with rice noodles, tomatoes, and onions. I told him that he could have anything on the menu, but he was reluctant to pick something, so I ordered a second of what I had. After the waitress took our orders, Sang continued to look through the menu.

“Is there anything else that you want?” I asked.

“No,” he said quickly. “I am look at the price. I want see how much things cost.”

“Is this restaurant expensive?” I asked, knowing already that its $.50 meals made it among the cheaper restaurants in the area.

“Yes, very expensive.”

When we finished Sang told me that he wanted to see me off when my bus arrived, so we both biked back to my hotel. I asked him to wait out front while I went to pack up all of my stuff.

I sat down on my bed feeling an awkward combination of gratitude and sadness at the day I had just gone through. I could only admire Sang’s strength. He was growing up in one of the poorest families I had ever seen. His home was missing one of its main walls, and still he was able to laugh about it. Yet the paradise that surrounded him and the modest future that he dreamed of were both beyond his reach. In the last few minutes that we spent together Sang thanked me repeatedly for everything that had happened that day. Each time he did it only made me feel worse.

Soon the bus arrived and it was time to leave. As we exchanged goodbyes I blinked repeatedly, trying to stay composed. I shook his hand then stepped onto the bus, and into a world he could not follow.