The Man I Killed in Vancouver in Vietnam

Becoming a Vietnamese Driver

Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash

April 28 to August 19, 2019

I went to his house at four in the morning and dragged him out of bed after I gagged him with a smiley-faced yellow ball. His wife lay sprawled out in a flower-patterned night garnet that suited the curlers in her hair. She didn’t hear a thing as he kicked and squirmed. Whatever sleeping pills she was on should be illegal. 

The hardwood floor made it easy to pull him through the hallway. When he reached for the door to his right, his eyes reddened; it was almost as though they were going to bulge out of his head like one of the rubber stress dolls. Maybe his six-year-old kid was behind that door, but I didn’t have time to think about that. Soon, the sun would come up, and people would rise with it. 

Thud, thud, thud, thud, his body went down the spiral. It made no sense that an admissions advisor afforded a house with such opulence, but it made my decision a little bit easier. After seeing the giant portrait of a greyhound wearing a bow tie plastered to his wall, I knew I was making the right decision—the douchebag should die. Would the jury see it that way, though? 

I don’t remember the drive, aside from the fact that we went through the UBC campus. For some reason, I drove up the stairs and through the hallway of the building that belongs to the Department of Education admission team. Nobody was inside, so there would be no witnesses aside from the camera, but the license plate didn’t belong to me anyway. Who did the license plate belong to? Probably some drunk sucker who left the keys in the ignition. The truck had chrome rims, so I didn’t feel too bad about stealing it. 

The Boston Wailer was waiting for me at Arcadia Beach—a beach a few hundred meters from Wreck Beach. Wreck Beach was usually home to a lot of leathery penises and sagging breasts, but this early in the morning, the old hippies were generally in their RVs parked in abandoned lots. It was summer, or so it seemed, and the chance of witnessing young, perky breasts and unweathered penises was unlikely. After scanning the beach for people, all I saw was an old man banging on a djembe, but he was too busy getting in touch with Jah to notice the guy I had managed to carry down a few hundred steps. 

Once we made it to Arcadia Beach and past the heroin-addicted graffiti artists having sex while inhaling the fumes from their spray-painted portrait of Muhammad blowing Jesus, I searched for the keys to a Boston Wailer. I never purchased one, but there were two ninety-pound dumbbells inside, so it must have been mine. Who else would have anticipated a weighted workout during a fishing trip?

I dragged the admissions advisor into the boat, tied his hands together with a fishing rope, and drove toward the middle of the Georgia Strait. Once we were out far enough that nobody could hear us, I took the gag out of the admissions advisor's mouth. 

“Who the fuck are you?” he screamed. 

“Nolan Yuma Janssens,” I said.

“Who?”

“You should know. You rejected my application.”

“What?”

“Did you read my application?” 

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“So you obviously didn’t read it carefully. It was amazing.”

“Just tell me what you want!”

“Well, then. Let me jog your memory, motherfucker. I’ve got a 4.0 with over four hundred hours of related work experience.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I spent the last four years of my life wanting to become a teacher, and you ruined it with one simple click of a finger.”

“I’ll get you into the program! I promise. Just—”

It was too late. I stuffed the gag back into his mouth, tied the weights to his feet, and threw him overboard. The last thing I ever wanted to be was a murderer, so instead of watching his body drift down to the bottom of the inlet, I looked out toward the coastal mountains and inhaled the fresh ocean air.

“Fuck you, UBC.” I woke up screaming this phrase after waking up from that dream—well, I guess it was a nightmare. My girlfriend, Siena, and I were staying in a studio apartment on West Lake, on the northern side of Hanoi, Vietnam. I tiptoed into the bathroom so that Siena wouldn’t hear my sobs. After a few minutes, I wanted her to comfort me, but I didn’t want to be obvious about it. Instead of crawling back into bed, I went to the kitchen table that was just far enough to seem as though I respected her sleep. 

“Nol, are you okay?” Siena said, half asleep.  

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I said. 

“Come here, babe.”

“No, I’m good.”

Siena got out of bed and sat next to me at the kitchen table. It would have been one of the perfect cinematic moments to look out the window with a sombre, lost stare, but if I did that, I would have been staring at the apartment across the narrow alleyway. Sometimes a Vietnamese woman would pray in her household shrine next to the laundry, and I didn’t want to be distracted. I wanted to complain. 

“I failed at acting. And that includes doing commercials. I’ve never been able to sell one of my scripts—not even to a washed-up local producer.”

“You’ve had more works published this last year than ever before.”

“Teachers. People who can’t do teach. That’s bullshit—well, I hope it is, because apparently I can’t even be a public school teacher! A middle-class job, Siena. I’m less than a person with a middle-class job.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know.”  

“Nol, your students at the college loved you. Your online students love you. I mean, I don’t know why you got rejected. Nobody does.”

“Maybe I just wasn’t meant to teach in British Columbia.”

“Just keep trying.”

“All I do in my life is try. For once, I just want to succeed.”

“You’re successful to me.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I love you,” Siena said after a pause. 

“I love you, too.”

“Let’s go back to bed. You’ve got a whole day of teaching online ahead of you tomorrow.” 

Teaching Chinese children English via a webcam-based platform had not only allowed me to make money while travelling, but it had also given me a newfound respect for the proper use of the present continuous tense. “I am do homework” was the second most common response when I asked, “How are you today?” A less common reply, but a more accurate one was “I am homework,” because if one is to define themselves by what they do, then a Chinese child is most definitely homework.

When the unit on careers arose, the students would often say things like “I being big boss” or “I is go to do business.” Keep in mind that the majority of my students are under ten and have a better understanding of supply and demand than I did at twenty-one. “Twenty bananas and five buyers means cost is go down, teacher.” 

After a few weeks, I had already received over fifty five-star ratings, and I was no longer feeling sorry for myself regarding the rejection letter. Instead, I got angry.

The gym was ten minutes from our apartment by motorcycle. When you drove in the shade, the temperature was a humid forty degrees Celsius (that’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit for you Americans). Still, on the highway—which we had to take to get to the gym—the temperature increased to pizza-baking temperatures.

The fumes from trucks and mobs of mopeds filled your lungs while the smell of melted rubber and vehicles that never had an oil change clogged your nostrils. Hanoi men dealt with their clogged noses by growing a long pinkie nail that resembled what we in the West would call a cocaine fingernail. But instead of putting things in your nose, they used their nail to get whatever lived and died in the Hanoi air out of their noses. Instead of growing long pinkie nails, Siena and I used masks, but after a few weeks, we threw them in the garbage (otherwise known as West Lake). 

If Vietnam taught me anything, it’s that Darwin didn’t need to waste his time analyzing birds to figure out evolution and adaptations. All he had to do was see what happens to a white person in Vietnam.

In less than a month, Siena and I had utterly new intestinal walls that were scarred and tough enough to withstand whatever we were eating off the street, whether that be mystery pork, sunbaked beef, mutant fish, or whatever else was deep-fried and covered in dozens of exotic and delicious spices. The DDT that was used to preserve the vegetables and fruits also preserved our insides and mutated our DNA to resemble the most formidable people on Earth—the Vietnamese. 

After a month and a half, the heat-sucking, pothole-ridden asphalt highway was no longer a problem. We joined the mob of mopeds and worked as a team as we crossed four-lane intersections during a red light. We had learned the rules of the road. Green meant “go.” Orange meant “go faster.” Red meant to proceed with caution or as a conglomerate of motorcycles.

Even though we didn’t master the art of texting and driving a motorcycle like the Vietnamese, we could finally honk instead of cry every time two buses touched either side of our moped’s handlebars. We had learned that in Vietnam, right or left didn’t matter. Road is road.

The families of four that sped through the traffic on a rickety motorbike were no longer a reason to worry about an infant's safety. The adrenaline that once coursed through my veins before the gym had been clogged and calmed by pollution. But then came the rejection letter.

The four-storey gym without proper air-conditioning was one of our greatest luxuries in Hanoi. It even had a steam room. Why anyone would want to subject themselves to a humid room in Hanoi is beyond me, but Vietnamese men seemed to love it.

After each session, we’d go to a three-dollar all-you-can-eat vegan buffet. We would eat all the rice, oven-baked fries, okra, seaweed soup, steamed vegetables, vegan phō, and a variety of tofu dishes along with the other ex-pats. 

For lunch, we belonged to the Hanoi vegan peoples.¹ For dinner and breakfast, however, I turned into a carnivorous beast with a need for iron and savoury goodness. While I had no problem snacking on Vietnamese beef jerky in the morning, Siena often made the same breakfast as she did back home—avocado toast with an egg (her favourite breakfast, along with every other North American white girl following the West Coast living doctrine).

When we wanted to save money, we ate bánh mì, a one-dollar sandwich. I would usually get the alleged pork pâté, and Siena would get the free-range chicken (free-range meant let loose on the street).

Each sandwich came with cucumber slices, pickled carrot, onion, and radish, cilantro leaves, and spicy sauces no Westerner should try to emulate. For those of you who have been to Saigon, you’re probably wondering why I missed the main ingredient: butter. But this was Hanoi, where ex-pats and locals alike (aside from Koreans) didn’t spend money on such lardaceous luxuries. Finding different foods had become part of our daily routine. Phở bo (Beef soup) with its several dozen spices was our staple. Still, we never turned down a chance to eat trout with copious amounts of dill or bun cha (the juicy bbq pork meatballs and vermicelli noodles that fill your nose with aromatics created from the fish sauce, oyster sauce, and sugar). We ate and drank our way through the city, and that’s something locals love to hear. 

The manager of our apartment building invited us out as soon as he discovered that we didn’t judge him for getting drunk. He knew that we were “foodies” and brought us to his favourite, Bia Hoi (beer hall). We arrived around seven at night, and the outdoor patio (which was the entire restaurant) was filled with Vietnamese men and the occasional child and woman. One of those women was his wife, a woman who had no problem throwing back several Tiger beers, and his son, a child glued to his phone who had a tremendous appetite for pork.

Even though everyone was drinking a beer a minute, the entire parking lot was filled with motorbikes. Yes, we all had to drive home after, but it didn’t take long for us to learn the Vietnamese drinking chant.

một, hai, ba, dô (1, 2, 3, cheers!)

hai, ba, dô (2, 3, cheers)

hai, ba, uống (2, 3, drink!)

We repeated the phrase several more times, and as I quickly learned, Vietnamese men don’t drink alone. Every time the building manager wanted to have a drink, we needed to have one too. At first, we went through the formal small talk.

“So, what do you do here?” the manager asked in broken English. 

“I work as an English teacher like every other ex-pat here,” I said.

“And you?” he asked Siena.

“I don’t do anything here. On holiday, I guess,” she said. It didn’t sound like a bad position to be in, but her expression said otherwise. 

“She’s been volunteering,” I said. I thought that was more impressive than letting him know that she had managed to watch ten seasons of Modern Family, two seasons of  The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and several reruns of Friends in a one-month period—which, come to think of it, was also quite the feat. 

“Oh, I just did some good things with my business. We had a charity event. Lots of poor children here, and so we raised money with beer.”

“With beer?”

“Yes, all the money we spent on beer went to the children.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, we called it DFK. Drink for Kids. We’re going to do it again next month because it went so well. But what do you do for volunteering?”

 ”I’m walking stray dogs,” Siena said.

“You’re what?” the manager asked as his small brown eyes opened wide. 

“I’ve been walking dogs near the old quarter. There’s an organization that helps the sick dogs around town.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “You need to take me there.”

“Sure,” she said, even though we had found out the manager disapproved of black people almost as much as he did communists.

Driving home surrounded by drunk Vietnamese men on motorbikes was not nearly as terrifying as the Ha Jiang Loop. In Hanoi, our manager assured us the men were very well trained at driving drunk and that the police wouldn’t bother us as long as we had ten dollars in cash. But during the Ha Giang Loop, we had no confidence boosters; we only had each other on one semiautomatic Honda Blade. The websites warned us that people die on the mountainous motorcycle tour every year, and you should use an easy-rider (a tour guide to hold on to).

We didn’t.

The rest of the story is available in my semi-autobiographical collection of stories Living with the In-Laws.

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1. The Hanoi vegan peoples consist of a diverse group of ethnicities that migrated to Hanoi from regions such as Sapa, Há Giang, Canada, South Africa, and, unfortunately, Holland and Australia. They are quite easy to spot in a restaurant—many white men with dreadlocks, women with hairy armpits, health fanatics in gym clothes, and Vietnamese Buddhists in robes.