...The Quiet, Confused American

[contains graphic content.] A few weeks ago, I was driving my motorbike along a major downtown thoroughfare, and came upon a man face down on the road, his scooter laying on top of him. The man had fallen on the most famous street in Saigon - known today as Dong Khoi but called Rue Catinat in colonial times - right in front of The Continental Hotel, where Thomas Fowler was sitting in Graham Greene's "Quiet American" when a Viet Minh bomb went off at the Opera House across the street. The street is lined with a unique blend of high end boutiques, tourists, beggars, peddlars, local Vietnamese and curious people.
His head was turned at too sharp an angle, his body a little too motionless. I pulled over to the curb, and left my motorbike idling, and helped pull his bike off his body. He was not moving or making any noises, face down on the asphalt. The sea of scooters parted around us - us being a few other worried-looking people who had stopped, the man lying there, and I. One rather gristly looking man rode by, called out to me "chet roi" which means "he's already dead," let out a loud laugh, and rode on. Looking at the man face down,I tried to remember my CPR training, but my mind went blank. A man reached down and flipped him over. I expected to see a bloody mess but his face was eerily without cuts or scrapes. His eyes were half open, but white and lifeless. One of the men standing next to me took a pulse and shook his head in that very understated but serious Vietnamese way.
I wanted to call 911 but did not know who to call, not to mention how to explain what I was seeing in Vietnamese. I was overcome with a sick and helpless feeling. Looking at the security guard standing on the sidewalk next to us, he deliberately looked away, as if to say, don't look at me, you are own your own man.
At this point two or three men reached down and carried his body like a sack of potatoes to the side of the curb. I could not even get myself to reach down and grab his feet, as my desire to help was overcome by a kind of horrible repulsion. (So much for years of bodhicitta practice.)
By now, the guests walking out of the Continental were gathering, treated to the macabre scene, staring in confused shock at the drama in front of them. One of them was taking pictures. Vietnamese on-lookers, were also gathering, but without the same shocked look on their faces. This was not something new or particularly unusual to them.
I must have looked entirely confused, because local Vietnamese were offering a bit of comfort. One man made the universal sign for drinking liquor, tilting an imaginary bottle up in the air, as if to the say they guy was drunk and fell of his bike. Whether that was meant to mean he was dead or not I am not sure. Then, with a surprising urgency, person after person came up to me and told me take off and get out of there, again gesturing politely, pointing down the street, as if to say, you don't want to get involved with this situation any more.
Something in me found the idea of leaving the scene of a probable death unpalatable. Even more local people came around me now, telling me to leave with great urgency, and I was becoming more the center of attention at this point, which was acutely uncomfortable. So, against my better judgment, I went around the corner to what I had intended to do in the first place, buy some dollars on the black market.
I called a friend later to explain what happenned, and she told me that this was actually a common scam in Vietnam, and that I was lucky not to have lost my motorbike. One guys "falls" of his motorbike. Concerned passers by stop to help, leaving their motorbike idling by the side of the road, at which time the accomplice jumps on the idling motorbike and heads for the pawn shop. The passers by may also put their shoulder bag down on the pavement to help, at which point they lose that as well. My friend scolded me for being a little naive: I had left my motorbike running, but luckily, I had not put down my bag, which had a month's worth of earnings in the form of cash.
Be that as it may, I decided that this was not in fact a scam, for a number of reasons. First, the man really looked dead. Very dead. Second, my idling motorbike was still there idling ten minutes later when I got back on it. Third, the concerned pleas of the local Vietnamese to get the hell out of there told me that it was something more serious and that I did not want to get involved in.
This was not the first time I had stumbled upon a corpse in Vietnam: two years before, when visiting here, a dead body was spotted floating under the bridge I cross on my way to work. A few days later, a second washed up nearby. All of this morbid story telling is a reminder that even here, in the heart of the "economic miracle" unfolding around us, poverty still reigns, as does what comes along with it, suffering.
As we say in the Kwan Um School of Zen, Ji Jang Bo Sal.