Lộc

I met a xe ôm (motor scooter) driver the other day while commuting to my internship. The cheapest, fastest way to get around Sài Gòn is by hopping on the back of a motor scooter, though negotiating with them can be frustrating if you're in a hurry or you don't know where you are going. The driver's name was Lộc - the same as my Vietnamese name.

The usual question I get, if not preceding my name, is what country I am from. I am neither indigenous looking enough nor fluent enough to pass as a local, so I've learned to be comfortable with admitting that I'm an American studying in Vietnam for the summer. The next question is usually about my parents, ie. when they left the country and what cities they were born in. While some may take this as communist paranoia, it's actually an attempt to figure out your accent. So far, I talk like someone from the 70s because the language has changed tremendously since my parents immigrated.

On the day that Saigon fell, while my parents where climbing on the boat that would take them to America, Loc was a soldier in the South. He wasn't in Saigon at the time, but he remembers seeing people climbing onto boats and attempting to flee the country. People left their cars and belongings in the road and there were looters everywhere. Loc took the opportunity to joy ride around in these cars until they ran out of gas, at which point, he would find another car and repeat the process. He was still young at the time, and had he known any better, he would have gotten on the boats too, except he just didn't know why people were fleeing in such a rush.

When asked if he saw dead bodies and carnage lining the road, he simply replied, "Có thấy, nhưng mà còn trẻ, chưa biết sợ." (I saw it, but I was still young enough not to understand what fear meant.) The next two decades were spent living in poverty, with barely enough rice to eat, if only that. These days, he drives a motor scooter that doesn't even belong to him. He told me that if his scooter breaks down, then that's it, he'll have to find another way to survive.