Rather than a normal entry, here is an excerpt from the book I just finished "Catfish and Mandala" by Andrew X. Pham. The scene is a backpacker's ghetto in Hanoi, but it could just as easily be Phnom Penh, Bangkok, or anywhere else:
"No-name is a ten-year-old street boy. A deaf-mute who spends all of his time hanging around the foreign-tourist district. He befriends the tourists and tails them around town. His tourist friends don't know where he lives. No one on the streets seems to know anything about him. I could only trace his lineage as far back as a month before I met him. A German couple, on a brief three-day tour of Hanoi, had befriended him. They introduced him to a French girl who, before her derparture, acquainted the boy with Steve, an Aussie. Steve took the boy to dinner with a group of tourists and introduced him as No-name. The name stuck. Steve bunked in the same dormitory as William. When Steve left on a train to Saigon, he entrusted a map of Hanoi and No-name into the care of William, who wanted desperately to know more about the wordless boy. So I came into the picture, the next foster brother.
No-name's gift is a room-splitting grin, his curse a continually runny nose which he drags on the sleeve of his sweater. he is the magic of the streets. You could be walking, shopping, dining anywhere within the ten city blocks of his stomping grounds, and suddenly, he materializes out of nowhere walking beside you, standing at your elbow, or making faces at you through restaurant windows. He moves with you as though not a single beat has passed since you were last together. But he is no Oliver Twist who picks your pocket. He is much more dangerous. He steals your heart, and when you leave, your heart breaks as roundly as his.
I find myself lingering in Hanoi because of him. When I tour the city on my bicycle, he hops on the rear bike rack for a ride, laughing his mute laugh: Ackackackack ack ack! I carry him, my silly monkey, my little brother. We point to sights we know nothing about and smile at eachother. Then he's off to some other part of his domain. Perhaps to visit another tourist. Perhaps to go home--wherever he lives.
He is a soloist, a pariah among the children in the area. A scrappy bright-eyed boy, the runt of the litter. Kids are cruel as only kids can be, and No-name always seems to be ducking from the pranks of one tormentor to the blows of another. They resent his easy camaraderie with the fair-skinned foreigners. These kids are decently dressed, fleshed out, and scrubbed clean, the stamp of children with homes and family. No-name is somewhere along the side, on the edge. He bears the earmark of a child relinquished into the care of a lone grandmother or a kind but poor aunt.
I zealously nurture a morning coffee habit and No-name often pays me a visit during my grumpiest hour. An orange juice for him. An espresso for me. Toast, butter, and cheese all around. He only lets me treat him half of the time. He pays his share with a greasy fist of dime-bills. The waitresses used to shoo him out, but once seven tourists, with me as their translator, assured the owner that if she ever mistreated No-name, we would never eat at her cafe again. Other tourists would hear about her cruelty. These businesses rely heavily on tourists' word of mouth and so she took the message to heart. Now, every other dawn, No-name sits next to me, contemplating the dust universe in the sunbeam angling through the window while I read the newspapers.
One morning, he signs me a question in his personal language. He doesn't read or write. Hands out, face turning about, looking; fingers touching hair, hands far apart; index finger to the sun; hands about knees, describing a garment: Where's sun-bright long-hair girl? I shake my head, fingers walking away. Gone, gone. I say, and he turns from me. I see tears rimming his eyes. He burrows his head into his folded arms on the table. When the waitress comes with his juice, he flees into the street, his breakfast untouched.
I know that when I go, I will leave as silently as Jen did. One morning he will come and I won't be there with my paper and my espresso. And some morning, somewhere a world away, I will look at the sun angling through a window and I will think of a boy called No-name."
Tears came to my eyes when I read this passage on a bus yesterday as I left Sihanookville. It still gets me every time I read it. So many fleeting acquaintances... so many children. I feel like I'm doing something good by befriending them and shedding the warmth of my culture on the poverty and squalor of theirs. But I always leave. Am I just assuaging my conscience? My guilt at being born into an infinitely more-priveledged world than they? It's easy to block-out questions like these. Easy to be firm and indignant with beggars out of a lofty sense of social-morality. I try to be compassionate and beneficent, but really I just gape with awe at their poverty along with everyone else. What am I doing here?
Tomorrow, Vietnam.