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dangerous to you?” It did look dangerous, but I had to admit that she was right. I sighed, defeated, then put my hands on the handlebars, my legs on the pedals, and shoved off.
    My first collision occurred only a few blocks from the house. Few Hanoi intersections have traffic lights, or even stop signs, so vehicles cross without stopping, just slowing down or speeding up to propel themselves through without hitting one another.Not knowing that the fundamental rule is “Keep going,” I wavered at the sight of a cyclo crossing in front of me. Had I simply slowed down, I could have put my bike into holding position, treaded water while the cyclo passed, and continued on my way. As it was, I swerved to avoid the cyclo and was rammed by a motorbike coming up from behind me.
    The crash threw me off the pedals, but I caught my balance. I turned to look at the motorbike driver, a young man in a business suit. Before I could say a word to apologize, he sneered at me, jerked his front wheel out of the spokes of my bike, and sped off. Now I was stuck alone in the intersection, and when I looked up I saw a large army truck barreling toward me. At that moment, another bicycle was moving slowly past in the same direction I was going. I jumped back on my bike and, maintaining the exact speed of the other cyclist, managed both to let that rider run interference between myself and the truck and to rely on her experience in making the split-second decisions required to cross the street.
    My second collision came about a half mile farther down the road, also at an intersection. When a motorbike seemed about to cut across the path in front of me, I tried the treading-water maneuver to let it pass. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet perfected the technique of slowing the bike and pedaling in place, and so I lost my balance. This time, I swerved into the rear end of a large Caucasian pedestrian, who extricated his legs from the front wheel while yelling what sounded like obscenities in German. My pleas of “I’m sorry!” did not move him and, as his anger showed no sign of abating, I opted for the less intimate dangers of the street and plunged back into traffic.
    By the time I got back to Tra’s house, my entire body was shaking and I was desperate to tell her about my brushes with death. But, apparently unconcerned about my fate, she’d alreadygone out for the day. I took the bike and slowly began to walk it toward my house.
    Maneuvering a bicycle between Tra’s house and my own wasn’t a simple task, given the peculiar geography of Hanoi. Over the centuries, Hanoi’s commercial streets had developed a tradition of specialization. In the city’s Old Quarter, for example, the merchants on Silk Street sold silk and the ones on Silver Street ran jewelry stores. Not every establishment on Cha Ca Street sold the famous fried fish specialty chả cá, but if you wanted to eat that dish, you only had to name the street and any Hanoian would know your destination. Though the Old Quarter streets were the ones famous for carrying the names of what was sold there, the entire city followed a similar organizing principal. Shopping in Hanoi was like navigating oneself through a citywide department store. You’d go to one street to buy paint, another for toys, and another one if you were in the market for a Western-style toilet.
    Although my street, Tran Phu, was named in honor of one of Vietnam’s famous revolutionary martyrs (who was, incidentally, a relative of Tra’s), I called it Dream Street because of all the Honda Dream motorbikes cluttering its sidewalks. Of course, there were other kinds of bikes parked there as well: lots of Honda 50 and 70ccs, Chalys, and Russian Minsks. But Dreams were the coveted vehicle of the day, the bike to buy if you had money. Unlike the clunky-looking older-model Hondas, the Dream was sleek and elegant. One long smooth line glided back from the handlebars to the rear edge of the black leather seat. It was the