Mr. Lee

This story is a retelling of something that happened to me a few years ago.

It is autobiographical in nature, making it hard to claim any journalistic integrity to what you are about to read. Those few days are composed of experiences that have already mostly been forgotten; save for a few disconnected images, smells, and feelings, the thing I remember the most is the story I tell to others. At the time, I ordered and filtered those experiences into an engaging narrative for my listeners’ pleasure, but now - as memory lies by omission and the experiences associated with these words have faded - even I start doubting if this story is real, believable, or even, if it is something that can actually happen. However, this is a topic out of my jurisdiction - so, let’s begin.

Day 0

One night, in Saigon, I had decided to go for dinner when a man approached me. He was skinny and short and the clothes he wore barely fit him; he had a baseball cap turned backwards and he could’ve been older than my dad. After some time traveling, you become completely desensitized to these types of characters. As soon as he tried to open his mouth, I shook my hand nervously and said: “No, no, no.”

He ignored my rejection and started walking beside me and started asking questions about my life; I absentmindedly answered them while trying to find a place where I could eat and get rid of him. After being interrogated for a while - for some reason still unknown to me, maybe out of boredom - I asked him if he knew a good place to eat. Of course, he did, a very nice place, he said in what seemed a perfect American accent.

We got there after a 15-minute walk and it was indeed a very nice place. I asked if he wanted anything; he said he only wanted a coke. He recommended a dish and told me to eat it with my hands and so I did. At the table next to us, some tourists were eating the same dish and were loudly talking - they were eating with chopsticks.

I started asking him questions.

He told me his name was Lee. He told me he didn’t have any family. He told me he hadn’t gone further north than Da Lat, but he wished someday to travel all over his country. He would sometimes grab something from my plate and eat it. I sometimes would catch a glance from someone from the other tables; maybe, it was how loud Lee spoke or how he looked or how I looked; maybe, he was a regular there and would bring random tourists to scam, but people were looking down at us.

The questions he had asked me before probably had been repeated a thousand times to hundreds of tourists, because, as soon as he deviated from script, his accent no longer seemed American and his English was actually broken.

I don’t remember asking more questions but he continued to speak. He spoke of an English guy he met once, Dave - here I have to admit with some embarrassment that I no longer remember the guy’s name, but as this is all make-believe anyways, let us all believe that it was Dave. They met on Dave’s first day in Vietnam; he was sitting next to an ATM and couldn’t get any money out and Lee helped him. Later that day, Dave asked if he knew a place to live. He and Dave lived together for four months in an apartment. He told me that Dave smoked a lot of weed and had dreadlocks and that he was a crazy funny guy.

Later in the dinner, I asked him if he could get me something to smoke. I paid for the dinner - there were no special prices, no scams, no surprises, so I started to trust him. We went to a place he knew, I gave him money and he told me to wait. At this moment, I thought that maybe he would just leave with my money and that was the scam, but he came back with what must’ve been three grams of weed.

We smoked in a makeshift roadside coffee shop with small plastic tables and chairs. He told me that he was a motorbike taxi driver; he had a problem with his bike and to fix it he had to pawn it to get the money for the repair, but now he didn’t have enough money to get it back from the pawnshop. He didn’t ask for any money, and I didn’t offer. He asked me if I wanted to join him on a rented motorbike the next day and that he would show me around.

I lied and said yes.

I went back to the hostel high and asked myself if I would actually join him. If he wanted to scam me, he would have already; however, his English wasn’t that good and I was wary of having to put up with him for a whole day. I had already gotten a bag of weed and a nice dinner. After a lot of mental back and forth, I decided to go, based solely on that it would be a good story.

Day 1

We met in front of my hostel and went to a scooter rental where I gave my passport and ten dollars for one bike. He drove me around several Saigon districts and talked about them - nothing particularly interesting. We went through a specially dirty road and he - intermittently looking at the dirt around us and my eyes through the bike’s mirror - said that I was lucky to be born where I did and that five dollars for me weren’t much. He said that he didn’t do anything to be born where he was or to be as he is. I didn’t know what to say.

We found a makeshift coffee shop below a bridge on a highway and parked there. We sat there to drink iced coffee. A Cambodian man approached us and started mumbling in a combination of Vietnamese, Khmer and English about the USA being number one and other nonsense. Lee tried to translate what he was saying but most of it was lost in translation. The man gave me a bracelet that I lost some days afterwards.

Lee asked me what did I want to do next. I told him there was a temple a few miles away from Saigon that I would like to go to. He said that there was a mountain near that temple and on top of it a Buddhist monastery. He would like to go there, since it was Tet, to wish good luck for the new year.

We rode for five hours, stopping every now and then to get some iced coffee. The land was mostly flat and the sunset reflected on rice fields. As we started to get closer, the road started to get busier. When we finally saw the mountain, it was night, and the road now was full of bikes to the point that to move meters took minutes - the smoke and heat were unbearable.

We parked the bike outside and went inside the garden leading to the stairs to the temple. Thousands of people were there; music was blasting from random speakers and sometimes fireworks would go off. There was a cable car to go to the top of the mountain, but I didn’t have enough money and no ATM worked. We climbed thousands of stairs and I could see that Lee was struggling to keep up. The temple was even worse; it was impossible to move - a sea of sweaty bodies touching and pushing and shoving. The smoke of burning incense was suffocating. People were lying on cardboards around the temple, ready to sleep there. I was the only foreigner and I could see people questioning why I was there.

We went around the temple and did rituals that I did not understand.

When Lee was done, we searched for a place to sleep. We found a couple of big rocks near a small shrine close to the temple and decided to sleep there. We could see the Mekong Delta and, on the other side of the river, Cambodia.

We started smoking. He rolled the joint and took three desperate large puffs as if he was suffocating before and now he could finally breathe - half of the joint was done, I finished the rest.

I didn’t have anything to say; to a certain degree, when you are always quiet, your silence is an empty page, and maybe out of compulsion, people feel the need to fill it with something - maybe to doodle a bit, to write a few disjointed sentences, to say some troubling thoughts.

And so he started to speak.

He told me the past year he hadn’t met any good people and hoped that he would have good luck this new year since he came here. He started to talk about Dave again and how he missed him. Every now and then, his voice cracked; he would pause and breathe and look into the distance to a place so far away that only existed in his memory.

He told me about how Dave wanted to help him financially and that they decided to buy cocks from the countryside and sell them in Saigon for cockfights. He told me about how they once stole cocks from a house in a village; the owner, finding them leaving his house, started chasing them with a machete on a motorbike. He told me that when the owner got close to them, Dave kicked the owner’s motorbike and the owner fell and they managed to run away.

He told me about how once on the motorbike he previously owned, Dave wrote “I love cocks” when Lee only knew one meaning for the word cock. Oh, Dave, what a funny dude. He told me that Dave would come back one day to see him again; Dave had promised so, he would come back and would help him. He had met Dave two years ago.

He told me that he used to sleep on his scooter, but since the scooter was stuck in the pawnshop, he was forced to split a room with a friend. The police wouldn’t let him sleep on the street because they wanted the streets clean for the tourists.

He told me to turn around and to see the teenagers behind us. He told me that those teens had a pipe and were probably doing meth. He told me that kids these days were lost. He told me that once, his roommate found two naked prostitutes running through their apartment hallway. He told me that were a lot of bad people in this world, a lot of bad people.

We slept on cardboard.

Day 2

We woke up at around 6 am and went to wash our faces in the temple’s bathrooms and went to eat. We ate the food offered by the temple. We got the bike and went to the other temple I wanted to see initially.

Lee asked me if I wanted to see the Cu Chi tunnels since they were along the way. I asked Lee if he wanted to go inside; he said that place brought bad memories of his country. He decided to sleep on a bench nearby and insisted that I would go and learn about his country’s history.

The only way to visit that place was through a tour. I was the only person there, so I had to wait for more people to show up. When those tourists arrived, they came from another tour. As I was standing there smelling of weed, sweat and dirt; with clothes full of dust, an unkempt beard and oily hair, and looked at those clean-looking tourists with oxford shirts and chinos; and thought of Lee sleeping outside, I felt disgusted. I didn’t want to look at anyone in the eyes.

What were those people doing here - what was I doing here? I am a complete intruder; the only reason to travel is out of selfishness. These war tunnels and their history are being sold as entertainment to people who couldn’t care less; the money doesn’t help people like Lee. My motivations were completely corrupted. Even agreeing to let Lee drive me around was only done because of the “story.” As a tourist, the country becomes a zoo, the people completely dehumanized, their only worth seemingly reduced to an experience. The life of this man was more entertainment than reality. As I was listening to his stories, it is as if I was both the protagonist and the spectator of the future story I would tell other people. Every word he said and every action he did was always weighed on the scale of narrative quality.

I couldn’t focus on the tour at all, it ended and Lee was still sleeping outside. We left back to Saigon. I was sunburnt and hungry, and I didn’t have any money left with me, so we were on the lookout for ATMs.

The ride home felt particularly hard. The reality I lived in and the reality Lee lived in finally started to settle in my mind, and I felt that my reality shouldn’t belong to me, and it belonged to me for no reason at all other than randomness had ordained that I was born there and not there. Sometimes, when we stopped at a red light, Lee would ask me if I was okay and I would stutter a yes.

We arrived in Saigon and drove around some of the districts I hadn’t seen yet. He showed me some of the rougher districts where he told me that these were the places where drugs from Cambodia were stored and sold. I tried to help him with his phone the whole afternoon, as the phone he had - bought by a German tourist from a pawnshop - was locked and he couldn’t log in.

It was the last night and the day after, in the morning, I had a bus to Da Nang. We went to return the bike and I paid for the remaining days and got my passport back. We smoked and Lee talked about his bike and that he really needed money to get it back. I noticed that the blunt was particularly strong this time. Eventually, I decided to help him. He showed me the pawnshop paper and how much he needed and I went to the hostel and gave him the money. He hugged me and he told me that early morning, he would get the bike and take me to the bus station.

Day 3

I woke up, packed my stuff, and went to meet Lee. I couldn’t find him, my heart sank and I suddenly realized: was this the scam? Of course, he told me some sad sob stories and got money from an unsuspecting tourist. But why take so long? If I were to scam someone, I would’ve been more impatient, not hang out with the victim for three days - maybe that was his tactic; he would spend time with you so that you would get emotionally invested in his lies. So, that’s why the blunt was so strong; it was to cloud my judgment.

Somehow, I still hoped that it wasn’t a scam, so I waited a bit more. I waited and waited and eventually, an old man showed up; it was his roommate - Scooty. He approached me and asked if I was Alex and gave me a piece of paper from Lee. In that piece of paper, in broken English, it said that the pawnshop was opening later than usual that day due to Tet and that he was sorry that he couldn’t make it, but he wished me good luck and wanted to see photos of the rest of the trip.

As soon as I got on the bus to Da Nang, I wrote Lee an email:

Hey Lee, I am sad we didn’t say goodbye today, but I hope you got your scooter back. Just wanted to say that you’re a good man and I will never forget the time I had with you, you had a big impact on me. I will send some pictures from the north of Vietnam to you. I wish you meet a lot of good people this year. If I ever come back to Vietnam, I will try to meet you again. Goodbye and good luck, A—

Those last days constantly lingered with me throughout that 16-hour bus ride to Da Nang.

Aftewards

I remembered I had access to his email during the ride because he once had logged in on my phone. I went to his email account (I know zero respect for privacy, but you have to understand) and found a reply in his drafts; maybe Lee didn’t know how to send an email, or maybe he had forgotten. I no longer have access to his account, so I can’t tell you what the messages in the drafts were.

I sent him another email, replying to the email in his drafts:

It’s okay, I am glad you got your phone working. Tell me when you get scooter back!.

He left another message in his drafts, and I replied again:

Hey Lee, How is everything? I am going to Cat Ba today.

He didn’t say anything more.

I know that Scootty showing up doesn’t mean anything; it could still be a scam. Everything Lee told me could be true and it still be a scam. Maybe, it wasn’t that expensive or the pawnshop paper was fake or whatever. Sometimes, I wish those stories were all lies and it was a scam and Lee had a better life, but, sometimes, I wish that it was all true because I don’t want to think I would be stupid enough to fall for it.

One month later, while already in China, I got an email from Lee, it said:

Yo bro how r u where. You now’s you good there.

I hope he got his scooter back.