Wide

        The amount of English spoken in Saigon was, as expected, diminutive.  I had gotten by on make-shift sign language and charades, both of which had, at times, made me feel I deserved awards for “most touristy foreigner” and “biggest idiot”, but you do what you have to do to communicate. Crossing the street in a country where lines on the road might as well have been nonexistent turned out to be the easy part, a nonverbal communication.  It was all eye contact. Eye contact with each of the forty pairs of eyes that belonged to the Vietnamese people riding their motorbikes directly through the crosswalk as if their brakes were broken. Take a deep breath, step off the curb, and don’t break stride until you reach the other side, I would think to myself. Whatever you do, feet, don’t run. It was the equivalent of covering your eyes with your hand or walking blind. At least, the odds of making it across were the same.

        There were the people who knew English, and then there were the people who thought they knew English, who made your brain work three times as hard to interpret what they were trying to say. They said they wanted to practice English, but some I just wanted to give the comic section of the newspaper, wish them well, and turn in the other direction. Sometimes it’s the annoying ones, though, who turn out to create the best stories.

        After a few hours of rooftop restaurant hopping at places we couldn’t afford, six of us wandered the sidewalks of the city, stopping at small street food stands to test the local cuisine and kill time. It was late, but skyscrapers stood on either side of the street, bright lights illuminating the black, cracked pavement beneath our feet, no need for a flashlight, and no dark ally in sight. The thick, dirty humidity of the daytime had gone, and was replaced by a breeze that smelled of car exhaust and cigarettes. As we walked, car horns honked like they were going out of style. The locals we passed stared and kept staring, until their necks wouldn’t allow their heads to turn anymore.

        We passed the beige brick steps of the Opera House, with a rotunda that could provide shade even to the taxi that drove nearest to the sidewalk, and stumbled upon the Womens Photography Exhibit, three rows of both black and white and color pictures, taken by photographers in the area, and protected like a subway map in a plastic display case. I, at the time, was walking in front of everyone else, and as we began to drift down the first set of pictures, a man stepped in front of me.

        “Hello!” he said. “Where you from?” He was shorter than me, and the teeth he had left were yellow and rotting. He wore a tattered flannel button-up shirt and raggedy brown sweatpants, and his once black hair, now streaked with gray, was messy and cut unevenly. “We’re from America,” I said as two of the guys from the group walked up behind me. “Oh! Americans!” he said with the same aw everyone else seemed to have. We were like celebrities here. Sure, our toilets are porcelain and not holes in the ground, and the water that comes out of our faucets is drinkable, but in our book we were nothing special. I smiled and nodded, turning away and down the row of photographs, looping around at the end and coming back down the other side.

        “So, leader,” the man started again, popping out from behind the last case in the row, “do you like pictures?” Leader? This guy was full of it. “Yes, they’re very nice,” I replied without looking at him. “They’re very creative.” He nodded quickly in agreement, still beaming from ear to ear. I wandered down the next isle and came up to the last one, this time expecting the man to be there waiting like a little puppy, tail wagging and ready for a treat, panting and hopping from side to side.

        “Leader! Leader!” he called from under a tree near the second row of pictures. The two guys from our group had caught up to me, and we met the tiny man at the end of the third and last row. “You like the women in the pictures? They are ver-y beautiful, yes?” “Yes, yes,” we shook our heads. I turned around to check on the other people in our group. Lagging behind. The three of us were ready to leave this guy. “What kind of women do you like? Yellow hair like Leader,” it was more of a statement than a question. I guess I knew his choice. “Yellow hair is nice,” he continued, “and good for marriage. Good for cooking.” Oh no, he went there. The guys started to laugh.

        “Do you like wide?” he asked next. Wide? Wide what? He made a gesture with his hands that meant nothing to us. “Wide? Like big? Fat?” I asked. “A wide woman?” The guys shook their heads. “Nah, we don’t like very wide women.” What strange questions he was starting to ask. “No, no!” He began shaking his hands and head. “Wide. Wide. Wide!” I wanted to tell him no matter how many times he repeated the word “wide” we still wouldn’t know what he was talking about. He read the confusion on our faces and pulled out his phone, using the keypad and text box to type w-i-d-e. “Wide! Wide!” He continued to repeat. “You know! Like mary-jay-wana!”

“OH!” the three of us shouted in unison. “Weed!”

“Yes, yes! Wide!” the man relaxed a little, happy to get his point across. “You like wide?”

         “It’s called weed,” I said, typing the letters into his phone to show him. “Ahh, I see,” the man replied. “I was talking to Italian on the street. He tell me this how you say it. I understand now why no one buy from me!” “That would definitely be your problem,” I said as we tried to hold straight faces. “Now you’ll be able to sell plenty.”

         The three photography-appreciators caught up to us, judged the looks on our faces and automatically knew they would be hearing an interesting story soon. We asked the “wide” man for directions to The Apollo, the club where we were supposed to meet our friends later that night, and then said goodbye as we walked carefully across the street, avoiding oncoming traffic casually now that we were used to it.

        “Leader!” the man called one more time as the group walked down the well-lit sidewalk. I turned to acknowledge him, no longer annoyed by his persistence or bad English. “Thank you for teaching me today! Because of your help, I will now make more success in life!”

        “No, thank you,” I said loud enough for only myself to hear, waving and smiling as he turned from the corner and began to walk back towards the photographs and the bright lights of the city in front of him.