After a particularly infuriating interaction with a drunk parking lot attendant who tried to confiscate my motorbike for lack of a parking stub (which I eventually found), I was driving home across the Saigon bridge, heading for the swimming pool, and a much needed cool down. I was amped up in a nervous kind of way, and as I motored across the bridge, I glanced out over the river, and noticed two people wading in the water, chest deep, next to a small wooden boat. My love for all things related to fishing (crabbing, scalloping, clamming, etc.) kept me focused for a split second too long on the scene below. When I looked back at the road, I was three feet away from a cyclo (pedicab), which was traveling about as fast as you would expect a cyclo to travel up a steep bridge (slowly). I was going a lot faster, about 30 k. p. h.
I missed the driver’s body but ran pretty much full on into the back left side of his bike, hurling the bike and the driver over to the right side. He stood up, shirt spattered with blood, holding his thumb. His face was grimaced in pain. As is normal here, and as I have seen at other accident sites, the protagonists in an accident tend not to scream at each other. He squatted down, clutching his thumb, and kept repeating “dau, dau, dau,” which means it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.
I looked at this thumb, and to my inexperienced eye, it looked quite crooked and broken. At home, we would call 911 (Second time I have wanted to call 911 here. See post.), the police would come, maybe an ambulance for the injured man, we would exchange license plates and insurance numbers, and the rest would be handled by lawyers and insurance companies. That, clearly, was not going to happen. In fact, as most Vietnamese would advise, the last thing you want is to get the police involved. It can be quite expensive, and not necessarily just. (See post.) It was a situation where I believed I needed to come to some determination on my own, and I had not a clue what that meant.
During the time this was happening, hundreds of motorbikes had passed by. Most were beeping their horns in irritation, some were shouting at us, some were laughing, and some look genuinely worried. Out of nowhere, however, one man pulled over (“the samaritan”) and began to help. The samaritan tried to help me calm the driver down and communicate with him. For some reason, when I spoke to the injured man, he could not understand me. (Could it have something to do with my own version of Vietnamese?) The cyclo driver was mumbling in pain, holding out his bloody thumb. The samaritan pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. What a strange time to light up, I thought, though I could not blame him. He took out a smoke, unrolled the paper, and applied the ground up tobacco it to the man’s thumb. I was not sure what this accomplished, because now the man was holding out a bloody thumb wrapped in tobacco, saying “dau, dau.” Someone told me later this is a way to stop bleeding.
The cyclo man asked for money. I offered 500,000 VND to calm him down. That was clearly not going to be enough when all was said and done, but it got the ball rolling. Problem was, I had no cash on me. The samaritan, who for some reason did understand my Vietnamese, explained to the cyclo driver that if he wanted money, he would have to travel with me to the ATM machine so I could “rut tien,” withdraw money. The look on the face of the cyclo driver at this point was memorable: should he get on the back of a motorbike with a guy who just smashed into his cyclo? He clearly had mixed feelings. After a bit of cajoling, he agreed to come along with me. I thanked the samaritan (alot) and we drove off the bridge.
In my mind, I had already decided that we were going to have to make a visit to the hospital, but I decided to go the ATM first, and give him money first to put his mind a bit at rest. We stopped at the machine next to An Phu supermarket, where all the rich Vietnamese and foreigners buy their food. I pulled out the money and gave him 1,000,000 VN dong. ($60.00)
For the jaded hospital staff at the hospital we stopped at next, the site of a 6’5″ American in a Lauren Polo shirt and Gap shorts walking into the hospital with a bloody 5’2″ (???) cyclo driver whose clothes were so ragged they barely clung to his body was nothing out of the usual. They did x-rays, which were negative (I guess he just had a crooked thumb.) But they said he had a deep gash on this thumb, that would require care to avoid infection. The prescribed five drugs, two of which were administered on site, three of which we purchased. Hospitals are cheap in Vietnam, the drugs and care coming to a total of 500,000 VN dong.
One annoying thing about Vietnam, at times, is that in my view, at least, Confucius won out over Buddha and Lao Tzu. This is unfortunate. What it means is that in Vietnamese society many people still see themeselves and others as part of a social hierarchy in which status is extremely important. Trying to get a cyclo driver help in a hospital, you can see this very easily. While the doctor was extremely helpful, one of the nurses was clearly struggling to keep the hippocratic oath with a character who probably lived well below the poverty line (which, in Vietnamese cities, is 260,000 VN dong per month – or about $15). And the pharmacist, completely unable to overcome her high class status behind a glass window, wrote out his dosages in an indecipherable scribble that this probably illiterate man would surely find useless.
Not that hospital work in Vietnam would be easy. While I am waiting for the driver to be taken care of, another man walks in, his shirt also splattered in blood, his face obscenely swollen and lacerated, which was either a really bad beating, or from the impact of a motorbike accident. A woman comes in on a steel gurney, semi-conscious, gasping for breath, probably also knocked out by a road accident. I have an extremely low tolerance for this form of human suffering, and I soon felt very nauseous. Luckily, we were just about done with the cyclo driver’s paperwork and headed out.
I took him back to his cyclo on the bridge, and tucked his medications, and his x-rays into the back of his cyclo. (Thinking to myself: would negative x-rays of a non-broken thumb be of any value whatsover once he arrived home?) For the first time, I could look over the cyclo closely to see how badly it was damaged. Sadly, the bike was so old, and in such bad repair, it was impossible to tell what was damage from this accident and what was just an old cyclo. The seat, covered with a plastic bag, was severly tilted to the right, which would be in keeping with the impact I had made. But the cushions and rims and wheels and foot stand and were a kind of museum of worn, tarnished and tangled cloth and vinyl and metal. At that and other moments, I sincerely hoped that the money I had given him could buy him another cycle.
We unlocked his bike, and were starting to put it back on the road, at which point he turned to me and held up his thumb, now neatly bandaged. As hundreds more motorbikes whizzed by, with quizzical expressions, the cyclo driver groaned in pain, providing the same – and I hate to say this – slightly put-on sad face that one sees with the shoe shine kids and beggar children (which have recently been remove from the downtown so as not to trouble tourists.) He kept gesturing at his cyclo, as if to say he could not drive it in his current state. At this point, for the first time, I was getting frustrated. What was the problem? Was the cyclo broken? Was his thumb too badly hurt to drive it? Was he holding out for something?
I considered my options. I could drive the cyclo off the bridge myself, though the thought of me trying to control a runaway cyclo barrelling down the far side of the bridge was enough to nix that idea. I had ridden skateboards down hills in school, with limited success. (See photo right of downward slope of bridge.) I thought about giving him more money.
Just at that moment, as the motorbikes passed by, two young guys came up the bridge pushing a broken down motorbike. Luckily, I had recently learned the word in VN for “repair” (sua) and these two guys, as their shirts attested, worked for a “Sua Xe,” or motorbike repair company. Talk about good timing. I told them I would pay them some money to help the driver to get his bike going again. They looked over the cyclo, and said the cyclo was OK, and didn’t want any money. They told me to give the driver some money. I told them I had already, and that we had gone to the bank, the hospital, the pharmacist and so on.
The repairman, perhaps satisfied that some strange form of justice had been done, whispered something into the cyclo driver’s ear. Whatever he said seemed to put the cyclo driver at ease. The boy told me to “di.” Take off.
Again, I was not happy with having to leave this man alone with his bike. I decided to do the following: I would drive off the bridge, exit at the bottom, make a U-turn and come back the other way to see if he could get the bike going. Oddly, when I was getting on my bike to do just that, the cyclo driver looked at me. He looked quite a bit like a child to me. He waved and even let out a wan smile of what I would like to believe was gratitude.
I turned around at the bottom of the bridge and followed the off ramp around 180 degrees back onto the highway traveling in the other direction. At this point, I was overcome with a strange feeling. I really wanted to see the cyclo man again. I wanted to see him pedaling. I wanted to see that he was OK. I wanted to know where he was going to go next. I even wanted to follow him home.
To my amazement, when I passed heading the opposite direction from where I had left him, he had vanished. There was no trace of him at all. I looped back around on the other side of the bridge and stopped at the spot where the accident had happened. The only trace of what had happened was a brown, square cushion that his passengers sit on. It was resting on the pavement, up against the bridge rail. Why had he left it there? It was in relatively good shape. How had he managed to take off so quickly? Where had he gone?
I rode back down the bridge up the highway a stretch past where he could have pedaled in such a time and he was gone. There were other cyclos, and other men, similary dark-skinned, and ragged, but he was gone. (The morning after, I woke and realized my mistake. (Or at least one of them.) I should have gone ahead only 100 yards or so after I left him, just out of his sight, to see what he did next, and then followed him home.)
So now, when I drive around my neighborhood, I look at all of the cyclos, the motorized ones, the man-powered ones, and I look at the drivers. I wish I could find him. I would like to visit his house and check up on him. Bring food or make sure his bike is OK. This is perhaps out of guilt, but also a kind of urge to care for a man that seemed helpless. My VN teacher says I may see him again, and I do hope so.