Strawberry Girl and the Beast

Every morning I go to the café and sit in the luxurious sofa chairs outside near the busy street, under small black pipes that blow a fine mist of Saigon tap water, gently into my coffee. Every morning, a young girl on a motorcycle delivers strawberries to the café. She wears a candy pink jacket, zipped right up to the throat and beige gloves that cover the full length of her arms. She rides a white motorcycle that looks like a Vespa but is not, and looks to be about twelve, though it is equally possible that she is 30. She carries her two plastic bags full of bright red strawberries into the café; I call her Strawberry Girl, not to her face; just to myself. She never looks at me. She just carries her two clear plastic bags of strawberries into the café, her expression saying nothing. Is she happy? Does she like strawberries? Does she have dreams of one day carrying other fruit? It is impossible say, but, I would say, if I really had to lay my cards on the table, I would say that her poker face leans more toward the sad end of things. But, then again, with the Vietnamese, you can never be sure. Maybe that’s why they like playing card games; they are the ultimate poker faces.

Every morning I order the same thing: hot Vietnamese coffee with hot fresh milk. I hear you thinking to yourself, dude, it’s a latte so just call it a latte. It’s not a latte. To make a latte, they use different milk and different coffee. This is a drink that isn’t actually on the menu and it is my way of getting a latte for half the price of a latte that’s on the menu, though I have to mix it myself at the table; it also confuses the hell out of the staff. The Vietnamese are still trying to get their heads around lattes, perhaps they’re all lactose intolerant, that is, not tolerant of lactose. Perhaps, to the Vietnamese, a latte is like some strange exotic bird exuding all manner of foreignness. Then again, the same could be said of Melbourne, when observing some Aussie blue-collar worker ordering a latte, suddenly draped in the finest Milanese cloth. One morning, at my café, I ordered a latte, only to be told, sorry, but we are out of lattes. When someone says something like this to you, it’s best not to ask any questions. If the Vietnamese say they are out of lattes, then they are out of lattes. You just have to keep the faith that they know what they’re doing.

A mere ten steps from where I sit, with a Bukowski in my hands, there is chaos. It is a river of things that move, like soldier ants. When I first arrived in Vietnam, the traffic reminded me of schools of fish moving as one, swimmingly. Oh, how my mind was coloured, hued with the delightful visions, romance, filled with the themes of A Quiet American, of opium dens and concubines and golden black hair the length of a river, somehow absorbing, somehow reflecting the sumptuous glow from a red Chinese lantern. I could almost hear the movie soundtrack in the background as my black-haired girl relit the opium pipe for me, me too whacked to move my head from the square wooden pillow and the rain came in sheets, thundering onto the iron rooftops above the pots of frying oil and the poverty. Though the fish metaphor still holds some water (excuse the pun), I now see the traffic more as a stream of soldier ants (mostly on Honda Dreams, though a Vespa is just as deadly) that will be stopped by nothing. The determination of the traffic is bewildering, it is a living determined organism, and like all organisms, it refuses to lie down and die. As the government continues their raping and pillaging of the roads - construction and obstruction - the organism will find ways around, through, over, under, across, destroying the sidewalks; scalding metal exhaust pipes touching skin, a choking fumy chrome, rubber and plastic entanglement, at all costs, the beast will forge its own path.

And, every morning, with her arm-length beige gloves and candy-pink hued jacket, fragile strawberries delicately balanced, every day with a resigned look that could be mistaken for - and may very well be – sadness, Strawberry Girl wrestles with the beast, so that, someone like me, with a Bukowski in their lap, nestled in luxurious sofa, can drink from a tall glass, a strawberry frappe made with fresh strawberries whose unmarked skin belies the hardship of their journey.