I have a confession to make: Having been living in Hanoi for over 30 years, I\'m still terrified and shake to my bones every single time I have to walk cross a street.
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| This woman must be as scared as I am when I cross the street |
The first time I crossed a street on my own was when I was just over 3 years old. A few minutes before that, my 6-year old cousin had walked me to the other side of the street to buy some sticky rice. The whole family trusted her. I had confidence in her, as she seemed so mature and had crossed the street many times. After all, on Tran Xuan Soan Street during those years, there was hardly ever a day that went by where I couldn\'t count the number of bicycles that passed by with my fingers and toes. I had never seen a motorbike, and I might spot a car once a week, maybe twice if I was lucky.
Anyway, while my cousin was buying sticky rice, I got bored. I yawned. And I decided to come back. After taking a few steps on the road, I got nervous that I started to run. I tripped. I fell down. A Russian-made car braked so hard it caused a piercing sound and stopped about 30 centimetres from me. The whole street was in a commotion. My family poured out from the house in terror. My cousin got one hell of a scolding that day.
After that incident, no doubt, I was never allowed to cross the street on my own again. That is, until I was 6 years old and started going to school. Like all other kids in my family, in my neighbourhood, all kids I knew, I walked to school, and wandered around everywhere with my friends. Needless to say, I crossed the streets thousands of times. I had no fear at all.
But I can\'t tell when the fear started to creep back in. Perhaps it was when I started riding a motorbike at grade 12; or maybe a bit after that, when millions of motorbikes and thousands of cars seemed to get imported into Vietnam overnight. The streets got more crowded, and drivers\' common sense decreased at the same speed. I just know that the fear is still here, every time I have to cross the street.
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Foreigners to Vietnam often make the comment that Vietnamese people seem to cross the street very comfortably, with little or no reluctance. That\'s horse crap! It\'s just that these foreigners are too scared themselves to realise the fear (perhaps a bit less than their own) in Vietnamese faces. Or maybe because they have never seen me crossing the street.
Of course, there are some Vietnamese, and some foreigners who have lived here for a long time, who are not scared of crossing the street. Those people often give a piece of advice to the chicken-hearted: If you want to cross the street in Vietnam, look straight ahead, keep a stable pace, no sudden movements, vehicles will swirl around you. Horse crap again! I say if you want to cross the street in Vietnam, you must have your eyes wide open; your head must work at the same speed as Chess Master Le Quang Liem, at roughly 102 calculations per second; you have to calculate whether that car is to spurt past you, or you can charge in and force it to slow down; you have to spot that guy on the motorbike who has his eyes on the house numbers, and doesn\'t bother to look ahead, or that girl whose sight is blocked by another vehicle, so that she can\'t see anything until 2 seconds before slamming into you, etc... All in all, it\'s a nerve-wracking battle that always horrifies me.
Since I understand the terror endured by pedestrians, every time I can, I stop my vehicle to let them cross. But by myself, I can only create a very small space. Moreover, I regularly get honked at repeatedly from the back, and get cursed for stopping on the street. So, occasionally, when traffic is too bad, or when vehicles are moving so fast that if I stop there\'s high chance that I\'ll get hit from behind, I\'m forced to speed past these terrified faces. But whenever the situation allows, I give way.
To ask all motorbikes to start giving way to pedestrians over the night is impossible, because there are too many of them, because each of them can give only a very small space, because it would require the riders to put their feet on the ground, etc. So for now, all I humbly ask is that cars and buses and truck drivers, whenever there is a person trying to walk across the street, just move your right foot by 2 inches to the left, pressing that pedal called the brake. Just by doing that tiny little thing, you are helping us, the poor pedestrians, cross a quarter, a third, or maybe even half the way. Or if you can\'t do that, at least while passing us, please don\'t honk your horn and flash your headlights hysterically to add to our extreme terror.
