LEAVING VIETNAM

(from The Slow Boat to Phnom Penh)

Our boat chokes past floating villages; houses lashed to canoes, oil drums, and each other. Where tiny mud islands emerge from the river, thick bamboo poles sprout from the soft, brown muck to support stilt houses. Albino cattle, with their high shoulders and skin clinging to their bones, pace, eternally imprisoned by their narrow strips of raised earth.

What happens when the river rises?

Naked brown children wave from rattan balconies; a shack with bomb casing flowerpots; smiling young faces bobbing in the water; clumps of foliage, garbage, and scum floating by. A group of young women wash their hair with buckets full of the river, their straight black tresses snaking over delicate honey-skinned shoulders; their sarongs plastered tight and wet against their narrow hips and small breasts. We putter on.

Every so often I see a satellite dish haphazardly dangling from a palm-thatched roof, always accompanied by the hum of a nearby generator. Television is the ultimate status symbol and the only hint of modernity in the otherwise ageless world of the Mekong.

Old women paddle canoes loaded high with vegetables, wearing wide conical straw hats that hide most of their worn, lined faces; but not their scowls as they rock in our wake. Men, young and old, trail fishing nets from thin boats powered by long-tailed propellers rigged to wheezing, old tractor engines.

I watch as our wake rips full-bloomed lotuses from their moorings, the flowers drowning as we chug past.

The ground on our left begins to solidify and soon I see a small settlement and the yellow star of the Vietnamese flag flying high over a concrete bunker: we have reached the border.

Our boat ambles up to a bamboo dock and all the passengers disembark. I grab my bag and follow them into a palm-hut café, my empty belly rumbling at sight of sliced papaya and the smell of mystery noodle broth. As soon as I sit, a soldier in an olive-drab uniform with red star epaulettes waves for me to follow him into the bunker. It’s cool and dark inside and it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust. Behind a wooden table, an old grey-headed officer sits stroking his wispy Ho Chi Minh beard while another soldier stands erect in a corner cradling an automatic rifle, a cigarette dangling from his thin brown lips. A large map of Vietnam is taped to the cinderblock wall and a plaster bust of Ho Chi Minh on a pedestal watches me from behind a screen of incense.

“Hello!” the officer says, gesturing for me to take a seat across from him.

“Xin chào,” I say.

“Ha! You speak Vietnam language?”

“No. Only, ‘Hello’. I can also say ‘thank you’ and ‘how much?’”

“Ah, good. Vietnam language very easy.”

“Maybe for you. I think English is easier.”

“Ha! You very funny. Passport please.”

I fish it out of my money belt and slide it across the table.

“From Canada? Canada very good country.”

“Vietnam is a very good country too.”

“How long you stay in Vietnam?”

“About two months.”

“Very nice. You go Hanoi?”

“Sure. From North to South. All over.”

“I from village near Chau Doc. I never go Hanoi: only Ho Chi Minh City, one time. Very expensive to go capital, but maybe one day. I want to see Ho Chi Minh, where he dead,” he says, wistfully looking at the cheap bust of his leader. “You see?”

“I did,” I say, remembering the white-clad honour guard and the waxen features of the long-dead revolutionary bathed in orange light where he lies in state in a glass sarcophagus within his granite mausoleum in the capital.

The officer stamps my passport and hands it back to me.

“Okay, we finish. Come back Vietnam some time. Goodbye.”

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Shawn Otis