Motorbike Haiku in Vietnam: unJammed

The recent traffic congestions from the East Bay into SF have triggered certain memories of my stay in Vietnam. The culture of transportation (van hoa di chuyen) in most areas of Vietnam boasts several millions of motorbikes in a city the size of Saigon. Owning a motorbike or a vespa is necessary, and some folks have multiple bikes like they do cars, and since each of the 8 million inhabitants of Saigon and the surrounding provinces owns a bike, well, you have about 8 million motorbikes -- excluding the landrovers and SUVs (there are enough automobiles that I'm amazed that they are able to actually drive on the streets), taxis, and buses. (By the way, the 10 months that I was in VN, I saw 1 hummer.)

The swarm of motorbikes during traffic jams is incredible. The staggering vision of bodies metallic and flesh squeezing into the tiny intersections plays itself over and over. As I peer down into the streets from the tall buildings, I can't help but wonder how these drivers remain upright on their motorbikes. One inattentive, accidental kick from someone stopping too quickly at the back of the line will knock over another motorist who is caught unawares, and dominoes fall. It is absolutely stunning.

What you see here are views of the road taken by yours truly -- mostly on a whim -- just b/c it felt so important to capture the essence of being a part of the masses and not quite.

Saigon: motorbikes
jammed at stoplights, exhaust fumes
scattering insects

The haiku describes my imagination of what it feels like to look at the hundreds of motorbikes zoom away. But in fact, in reality, once the stoplight turns green, the droves of bikes move as a unit gushing forward like a dam. And because these are all individual motorbikes, the effect is much more breath-taking and more insect-like than if you were looking at "xe bon banh," the automobiles.

On the eve of the Lunar New Year, Tet 2005, everyone drives to the river to see the fireworks. In the dark, standing on the roof of my cousin's house (nha cua anh Loc va Thao Trang), the feeling was just as this image portrays. We just finished watching the fireworks display, and now that everyone was riding home, it was a different sort of show. The
bright lights, the fast-moving bodies weaving through the dark air -- the rush, the exhilaration, all that movement of individual pieces of metal and sparks of energy and gas fumes converging together into this one image -- glimpsed by me, captured but lost.

The feeling of watching traffic is not unlike the image of this young woman stopped at the light. The sense of being her, parked in anticipation of moving forward towards something, someplace, someone -- that sense that stays with you as if you too are merging and joining with something larger even though you are a smaller part, an insignificant unit perhaps. It wasn't until I was in riding on one of those new-fangled motorbikes with my hair blown every which way that I recognized, and understood, this feeling. Perhaps it was b/c I didn't have four metal walls protecting me from the elements. My arms and legs were dangled out there without seatbelts or safety nets. Winding up and down the mountains in Dalat, I could essentially reach out with my arms and pluck a leaf or a flower or even touch another motorist -- and I did, too -- with nonchalance, as if yeah this was nothing new. I'm riding a motorbike like the rest of the Vietnamese population, actually doing something the locals are doing, being a part of something larger than me. Stuck in traffic or not, parked in a lot or soaring down a mountainside, it seemed like I was actually transported somewhere, scrambling without knowing the exact mechanisms of the thing, without knowing the exact directions of the place... but it felt right. It always would.