while

purchasing my 17 cent sugar cane drink in a plastic bag, the sugar cane lady began to ask me a series of questions in Vietnamese:


Where were you these past few days?
Oh, I was in Hue and Da Nang.
Ohhhh okay, when will you go back to America?
In another year or so..
Do you have a husband or kids?
No.
Oh no wonder, that's really good...


Now I suppose I can let a little conversation like this go unnoticed and unmentioned as many other details in my life. But let's dissect this together shall we? Sometimes when my mind wanders as I am biking and the sun is baking, I like to think how strange it would be if I was born here. How the things I see would not be out of the ordinary but rather normal, that this would of been my way of life, and instead of biking to Vietnamese class, I would be biking home to my house to help my mom cook dinner. Or I could be biking to the river to go fishing. Or biking to go to the local noisy market where I can pick and touch raw meat and I would still consider it to be clean and sanitary. But as a turn of events, I don't see it that way. Instead I am an outsider protected by my skin, only when my tongue reveals itself do I get exposed. It is a funny feeling that I cannot really describe too well. My vocabulary and diction cannot began to describe what is feels like to "come back home" as many have put it, but for home to not really be your home anymore, and that the experiences that you've had outside of home have somewhat marred you in a good way. I escape.

Now back to this small conversation on a day the sun decides to beat. She sits outside with her dark aged skin, but rather round opal like face with heavy eyelids that sleep above her eyes. She runs this little sugar cane cart through out the morning, by the late afternoon she disappears and makes me sad. Because only she would press fresh sugar cane would be, the other lady does not, and takes it from a cup in the icebox.

[as I am writing this I lightly say hi to a woman who has taken care of her 4 nieces and nephews with her husband leaving her because he couldn't handle all the kids. that is for another time.]

Now where was I, oh yes the cold icebox. I'm not sure if you understand how an icy chilled fresh squeezed sugar cane drink feels on a sweltering sweaty exposed day where the sun decides to take over. Maybe, perhaps it can be comparable to the time you notice a stolen glance.

No wonder she says. As if to explain why a 22 year old woman like me had dedicated two measly years of my life to Long Xuyen, Vietnam. Because a child and a husband would be the two things holding me back, like it holds back many women in Vietnam. Just reminds me of the sacrifice and dedication women have to their families, unknowingly sacrificing their freedoms because this is all they see in front of them.    There is no sacrifice for the women who have children and husbands. Your life changes when that happens. I've seen it many times in and out of Vietnam.

My mind it wanders again, while I am on a bus sneezing through the molded holes of dusty roads and open living rooms, people in pajamas and kids too small for their bicycles riding it like there is no end. I think about future travels, how beautiful it is that my eyes are witnessing things that they've could of seen. My mind escapes, knowing full well it has the ability to do so.