IAmJacksUserName
Bluelighter
Jason stirred in the bed of his crummy backstreet guesthouse. Since arriving in Hanoi, that room had been the nucleus of his existence. From the center interior of the building, the sounds of Hanoi’s busy Old Quarters were shut out, and the only sound to disturb Jason as he woke up was the creak of the revolving ceiling fan. The windowless walls were painted a kitschy pink and white, topped off with a neon-colored Titanic movie poster that hanged over the bed.
Jason’s bag sat on the bed next to him, his possessions sprawled across the linen. The room’s only luxury was the small TV that Jason used occasionally to watch Discovery Channel documentaries and MTV Asia music videos. He didn’t travel with much; a few changes of clothes, a copy of Dispatches by Michael Herr, the Vietnam Lonely Planet, a bottle of clear rice whiskey he occasionally took swigs from. Traveling light was vigilant, and vigilance was key to keeping your head above water. Jason always kept his eyes peeled, his vulnerabilities always guarded; he had been mindful and uncomfortable when the receptionist took his passport (as required by Vietnamese law), for instance, and he kept a wad of U.S. dollars and Thai baht stashed in the bottom of his duffel.
After throwing on a clean t-shirt, Jason emerged from the room to begin another day of exploration by himself around the Vietnamese capital. He hadn’t counted the exact number of days he had been doing this, but it must have been close to two weeks already. It didn’t matter where he ended up, and getting lost wasn’t something Jason wasted time worrying about. After all, he had nowhere to be, no one to find, and nothing he had to do.
Jason was young; having dropped out of his lifeless high school, he had set off to revel in the far off land that was Indochina. It was the ultimate expression of self-centered teenage rebellion. That had been almost a year ago, and here he was now on an indefinite holiday in Vietnam. Having started out in the far south of the country, the weeks of his solo traveling had brought him by bus and train to the northern tip of the country. In that time, he barely made time to acknowledge anyone but himself.
His guesthouse was located in the heart of Hanoi’s Old Quarter on one of its many sprawling backstreets. As he emerged from the lobby (or what there was of one), he was bombarded with the sights, smells, and feelings that made Vietnam enigmatically fascinating. Ladies in conical hats carried baskets of fruit and bread over their shoulders, hawking their wares in their harsh, toned voices, while shopkeepers kept busy churning out bowls of their noodle soups. Everywhere Jason looked, the Vietnamese were always bustling with something.
The color of urban Vietnam never ceased to capture Jason’s attention. There weren’t many tall buildings, but the old French architecture survived, and trees had been planted all along the sidewalks. At night, young Vietnamese men would collect at street side Bia hoi places, where they’d sit on plastic lawn chairs drinking a sour-tasting beer that sold for $.25 a liter.
The narrow downtown streets were always clogged with motorbikes. To cross the street, you didn’t wait for the traffic to clear, you simply started walking. As long as you maintained a steady brisk pace, the bikes would maneuver around you the way river water washes over a rock.
One afternoon, Jason had been standing at an intersection waiting to cross, when he noticed a motorbike with a colossal stack of fully inflated beach balls on the back. They were loosely netted together in a pyramid about ten feet into the air, causing Jason to wonder if it would hit the traffic signal. He watched as the driver gracefully careened onto the sidewalk to avoid the low-hanging pole, careful to avoid hitting pedestrians and the shops’ awnings. He pulled it off perfectly, and smoothly returned to his niche in the traffic flow.
Jason’s unmapped walks took him all over the city. Occasionally, he’d find an actual tourist attraction to visit, such as Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, where Ho Chi Minh’s corpse was on display 40 years postmortem, or the infamous Hanoi Hilton, but Jason was mainly interested in exploring Hanoi’s many nooks and crannies. For hours at a time, he’d wander aimlessly around the city, stopping only occasionally to rest with a bottle of Fanta or a cigarette. Getting lost was part of the game for Jason.
On that particular morning, Jason found himself at Hoàn Kiếm Lake. The large body of water stood in the center of Hanoi, and attracted many Hanoi residents for its tranquil ambience in the middle of that chaotic city. In the center of the lake stood a short, stubby stoned tower that stood against the bushy green trees along the shore. At the northern end of the lake was another island with old Confucian temple, connected to the mainland by a wooden bridge painted red.
Jason sat down on a bench next to the lake’s edge. He came their often; it was a nice place to rest away the solitary days. For hours he stared over the lake, zoning out to the music from his iPod as he sat with a head full of thoughts and a mouth devoid of words. He rarely talked to people; he even ignored the pretty Vietnamese girls in school uniforms who wanted to practice their English with him. As a lone white stranger in the middle of the Orient, he imagined that most people who had any inclination to make conversation were after his money anyway. Most people wanted whatever they could get from you, he reasoned. He hadn’t much patience for being taken advantage of, so he kept to himself. It had been weeks since he had had a real conversation with anyone, but that was the way things had to be. Rather than growing lonely or despondent, Jason taught himself to cut off his feelings. Emotions, he had discovered, could be severed from the mind like branches from a tree.
As Jason sat on the lakeside with his earphones plugged in, he jotted down little notes and poems in his Moleskin notebook. It didn’t matter how cryptic they were, or where in his head they came from. All alone in the middle of Vietnam, Jason didn’t see the need to answer for his thoughts.
The tortoises hide
Man’s heights reflect off green depths
Occidental awe
Absolute taboo
Yet the warden is at home
Thus I boldly dine
He had pushed himself into a cave. There was no past for him; the memories of the first 17 years of his life existed nowhere but in his head. Nor was there a foreseeable future, as he could conceive of none. And there was no present either. He was in a dream, his self pinned to a particular place in a particular time with no bonds to anything else. Nothing to feel, nowhere to strive for, no one to love. None of it seemed any more real than the most fantastic hallucinations.
The days melded together. Jason had no plan of how long to stay, or where to go next. To the north of him was China, and to the east of him was Laos, but what was left there for Jason to discover? He had been living in his own head, peering out at a world that grew increasingly blank. There was no more mystery in discovery, no more curiosity; all he could do was keep his ego from collapsing. The same way a thunderstorm is boringly unpredictable, Jason’s wanderlust had been reduced to nothingness. What had once been the other side of the world for Jason had become his lonely reality, and without the gumption to go on, Jason walked to the train station and bought a ticket back to Saigon in the far south, where his depersonalizing tour of that surreal country had begun.
Jason’s bag sat on the bed next to him, his possessions sprawled across the linen. The room’s only luxury was the small TV that Jason used occasionally to watch Discovery Channel documentaries and MTV Asia music videos. He didn’t travel with much; a few changes of clothes, a copy of Dispatches by Michael Herr, the Vietnam Lonely Planet, a bottle of clear rice whiskey he occasionally took swigs from. Traveling light was vigilant, and vigilance was key to keeping your head above water. Jason always kept his eyes peeled, his vulnerabilities always guarded; he had been mindful and uncomfortable when the receptionist took his passport (as required by Vietnamese law), for instance, and he kept a wad of U.S. dollars and Thai baht stashed in the bottom of his duffel.
After throwing on a clean t-shirt, Jason emerged from the room to begin another day of exploration by himself around the Vietnamese capital. He hadn’t counted the exact number of days he had been doing this, but it must have been close to two weeks already. It didn’t matter where he ended up, and getting lost wasn’t something Jason wasted time worrying about. After all, he had nowhere to be, no one to find, and nothing he had to do.
Jason was young; having dropped out of his lifeless high school, he had set off to revel in the far off land that was Indochina. It was the ultimate expression of self-centered teenage rebellion. That had been almost a year ago, and here he was now on an indefinite holiday in Vietnam. Having started out in the far south of the country, the weeks of his solo traveling had brought him by bus and train to the northern tip of the country. In that time, he barely made time to acknowledge anyone but himself.
His guesthouse was located in the heart of Hanoi’s Old Quarter on one of its many sprawling backstreets. As he emerged from the lobby (or what there was of one), he was bombarded with the sights, smells, and feelings that made Vietnam enigmatically fascinating. Ladies in conical hats carried baskets of fruit and bread over their shoulders, hawking their wares in their harsh, toned voices, while shopkeepers kept busy churning out bowls of their noodle soups. Everywhere Jason looked, the Vietnamese were always bustling with something.
The color of urban Vietnam never ceased to capture Jason’s attention. There weren’t many tall buildings, but the old French architecture survived, and trees had been planted all along the sidewalks. At night, young Vietnamese men would collect at street side Bia hoi places, where they’d sit on plastic lawn chairs drinking a sour-tasting beer that sold for $.25 a liter.
The narrow downtown streets were always clogged with motorbikes. To cross the street, you didn’t wait for the traffic to clear, you simply started walking. As long as you maintained a steady brisk pace, the bikes would maneuver around you the way river water washes over a rock.
One afternoon, Jason had been standing at an intersection waiting to cross, when he noticed a motorbike with a colossal stack of fully inflated beach balls on the back. They were loosely netted together in a pyramid about ten feet into the air, causing Jason to wonder if it would hit the traffic signal. He watched as the driver gracefully careened onto the sidewalk to avoid the low-hanging pole, careful to avoid hitting pedestrians and the shops’ awnings. He pulled it off perfectly, and smoothly returned to his niche in the traffic flow.
Jason’s unmapped walks took him all over the city. Occasionally, he’d find an actual tourist attraction to visit, such as Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, where Ho Chi Minh’s corpse was on display 40 years postmortem, or the infamous Hanoi Hilton, but Jason was mainly interested in exploring Hanoi’s many nooks and crannies. For hours at a time, he’d wander aimlessly around the city, stopping only occasionally to rest with a bottle of Fanta or a cigarette. Getting lost was part of the game for Jason.
On that particular morning, Jason found himself at Hoàn Kiếm Lake. The large body of water stood in the center of Hanoi, and attracted many Hanoi residents for its tranquil ambience in the middle of that chaotic city. In the center of the lake stood a short, stubby stoned tower that stood against the bushy green trees along the shore. At the northern end of the lake was another island with old Confucian temple, connected to the mainland by a wooden bridge painted red.
Jason sat down on a bench next to the lake’s edge. He came their often; it was a nice place to rest away the solitary days. For hours he stared over the lake, zoning out to the music from his iPod as he sat with a head full of thoughts and a mouth devoid of words. He rarely talked to people; he even ignored the pretty Vietnamese girls in school uniforms who wanted to practice their English with him. As a lone white stranger in the middle of the Orient, he imagined that most people who had any inclination to make conversation were after his money anyway. Most people wanted whatever they could get from you, he reasoned. He hadn’t much patience for being taken advantage of, so he kept to himself. It had been weeks since he had had a real conversation with anyone, but that was the way things had to be. Rather than growing lonely or despondent, Jason taught himself to cut off his feelings. Emotions, he had discovered, could be severed from the mind like branches from a tree.
As Jason sat on the lakeside with his earphones plugged in, he jotted down little notes and poems in his Moleskin notebook. It didn’t matter how cryptic they were, or where in his head they came from. All alone in the middle of Vietnam, Jason didn’t see the need to answer for his thoughts.
The tortoises hide
Man’s heights reflect off green depths
Occidental awe
Absolute taboo
Yet the warden is at home
Thus I boldly dine
He had pushed himself into a cave. There was no past for him; the memories of the first 17 years of his life existed nowhere but in his head. Nor was there a foreseeable future, as he could conceive of none. And there was no present either. He was in a dream, his self pinned to a particular place in a particular time with no bonds to anything else. Nothing to feel, nowhere to strive for, no one to love. None of it seemed any more real than the most fantastic hallucinations.
The days melded together. Jason had no plan of how long to stay, or where to go next. To the north of him was China, and to the east of him was Laos, but what was left there for Jason to discover? He had been living in his own head, peering out at a world that grew increasingly blank. There was no more mystery in discovery, no more curiosity; all he could do was keep his ego from collapsing. The same way a thunderstorm is boringly unpredictable, Jason’s wanderlust had been reduced to nothingness. What had once been the other side of the world for Jason had become his lonely reality, and without the gumption to go on, Jason walked to the train station and bought a ticket back to Saigon in the far south, where his depersonalizing tour of that surreal country had begun.
