The Accidental Temple
It was midway through my first bowl of pho in Ha Noi that I realized why I was so scared on my first day in Vietnam: It was the motorbikes.
Not the cyclos, the tricycle taxis that tourists take, but the scooters, the working bikes that hurtle from home to job to temple, often with a family of four atop, or a huge basket of lilies, a mountain of green papayas, a pane of glass.
Stepping out of a taxi across from my hotel, I was nearly mowed down by an old man balancing a load of goldfish in plastic bags. I gaped and reached for the door handle, but the taxi was gone. Goldfish? They were gone, too. There was nothing to do but move, and hope that the motorbikes would spare me.
They did. As I learned over the next few days, crossing the street in Ha Noi is what Martin Luther King, Jr., called a faith act: You take the first step without seeing the whole staircase, the whole street. But somehow you make it across. And that was a good thing, because the motorbikes were like a bad Zen koan: Wherever I went, there they were, hundreds of them, whirring and buzzing and nipping at me without mercy. The symbol of Vietnam, I knew, was a stork balanced atop a turtle. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out which one I was.
But after a few days, with every faith act and every crossing, I became stronger. Dodging bikes and darting between cars, I found a physical confidence I’d forgotten in 12-hour days at my desk. I learned that the only thing to do in the maelstrom was to move, and if you did, the motorbikes, like a school of fish, would simply flow right around you. It helped to chant: “God don’t let me die, don’t let me die, don’t let me die,” I’d mutter, and my daughter Claire would just roll her eyes, but we always made it.
Surprisingly, it was in Vietnam that I rediscovered the joy of prayer. Not the self-centered pleas you make at midnight — please, God, let me finish that project or pay this bill — but the kind of meditation and contemplation inspired by being thrown into a deeply religious country. In Ha Noi, there seemed to be a temple at the end of every street; in every shop, no matter how humble or trendy, there was a shrine with joss sticks and hard boiled eggs, fake money and flowers.
At Ha Noi’s famed Temple of Literature, I watched for an hour as people approached the shrine of Confucius and prostrated themselves, bowing again and again, oblivious to the tourists filming them. Their piety brought me to tears. Days later, entering a small temple near my hotel, I instinctively genuflected and made the sign of the Cross, for apart from the photo of Ho Chi Minh, and a gilt Confucius flanked by offerings of Heineken and Diet Coke, it felt just like Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, the votive candles flickering in the dark quiet.
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Worried that I’d offend, Claire reached for me: “Don’t do that!” But I looked up at the woman in charge of watching the shrine, and she just smiled.
A few days later, we headed out of Ha Noi to Ha Long Bay, the seventh wonder of the world, and a place that many Vietnamese consider sacred. The trip took four hours by van, and everywhere was evidence of how quickly Vietnam is moving towards its future.
Over and over, we saw tractors and backhoes, and heaps of sand and tile. Across a river, concrete pilings rose from the velvet green, two and three stories tall, a man-made stork-bridge that could change everything.
But equally evident was old Vietnam, the turtle: Streaks of black mold rising up the walls of an abandoned house, wind blowing through empty bedrooms. Buddhist shrines shrouded in fog. Oxen drifting lazily onto the road. Pink and yellow bags of garbage piled up on street corners. It was all oddly beautiful, but so unfamiliar that I had to close my eyes at times to take it all in.
Suddenly, our van slowed to a crawl: Moments before, a gravel truck had collided with a motorbike, and a dozen more had stopped to investigate. Women in straw hats gathered to watch, squatting in the street and pulling children close.
Our van crept by. There was a clearing. I saw candles, a straw mat, a woman crying. Then there was the body of the boy, laid out tenderly on the mat and covered with a burlap rice bag.
Here in this place, this accidental temple, the motorbikes had stopped. People had gathered to do what tradition requires, to speak the prayer that prepares a soul to ride on to the next world. Silent now, the bike lay on its side exactly where it fell, cherry-red handlebars askew.
It was an accident, it was not uncommon, it was a life, it was a death. It was a moment for a faith act. I went to Catholic school; in my heart, I could hear the Kyrie. As our van picked up speed and pulled away, I bowed my head. I knew just what to do.
