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wasn’t some show that I’d seen on TV as a kid, and I wasn’t even sure that it was over yet.
    I stood outside for a long time. One by one, the lights went out in the nearby windows. In the distance, I could see a lone pine tree towering like a great leader against the sky. I leaned on the railing of the stairway and took a deep breath of enemy air.
          I tried to remind myself that I was making progress. I’d even started to do something I never would have expected from myself: I was using a bicycle to get around Hanoi. For another American, riding a bike in Vietnam might not have been such a big deal. But I was always the kind of rider who rode on the sidewalk, then stopped and walked whenever I had to cross a street. I wasn’t very brave. I wouldn’t have been crushed to learn I’d never ride a bike again. But in Hanoi, I didn’t have a choice. My other options were worse. Cyclo drivers not only demanded exorbitant prices of foreigners, but they also had the confounding habit of insisting, once we reached our destination, that I pay them even more. An American lawyer who lived in Vietnam later explained this phenomenon to me in terms of cultural differences in contract theory. While Westerners consider contracts the final phase of business negotiations, Vietnamese view them as a starting point, a basis for further discussion. Thus, when I agreed to pay a cyclo driver five thousand dong, I expected to pay five thousand dong. The driver, however, would, after completing the trip, take into consideration the difficulty of the route, his fatigue, and the estimated size of my wallet, then give me an updated price. The extended process of negotiation may have made sense to him, but after a while I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t rely on walking, either. Central Hanoi didn’t cover a lot of territory, but on foot I would have had to spend two or three hours a day making my way across it.
    The obvious solution was a bicycle, but I was nervous. A few days after I first moved into my house, I had spent a morning on my balcony. Observed from above, rush hour alone was enough to give me a terror of riding a bike. Set against a symphony of noise, with motorcycle horns supplying melody and mufflerless engines carrying an insistent beat, my street was a stage for an anarchic dance of buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, cyclos, andmotorbikes, each vying for its precious meter on that narrow space of road. I had watched a boy on a bike glide in a casual diagonal across the street, moving out of the path of a honking bus a split second before it flattened him. A tiny orange Honda Chaly motorbike, carrying a sandwich of three teenage boys, swerved around a slow-moving cyclo, drifted into the opposite lane of traffic, then, after nearly colliding with an oncoming truck, carelessly slid back to its own side of the road. It looked like the death-defying circus act of a trapeze family that, with each progressive trick, moved closer to disaster. I knew that, eventually, someone would miss, and a fractional miscalculation of speed or distance would leave some sad soul sprawled and bloody in the middle of the street. General Westmoreland’s much-criticized comment about Vietnam that “the Oriental doesn’t value life the way we do in the West” had begun to sound less like a racist slur and more like a clear-eyed assessment of fact.
    I had tried to explain my fears to Tra, but she wouldn’t listen. In one of my earliest encounters with bossiness, a quality I would find endemic in Vietnam, Tra insisted that I had to ride a bike. One morning, standing in the courtyard of her house, she pushed one in my direction. “If you want to live in Hanoi, you have to ride it,” she’d said. When I refused to take it from her, she walked it out to the street herself. Then, pointing at the passing traffic—a grandfather wheeling a small child to school, two teenage girls riding side by side, holding hands—she asked, “Does that look