Learning a Language, Finding Cheap Rent... and Accidentally Becoming a Writer

Note: This post follows an earlier post, which I recommend reading first.

The first hard truth about making a career out of any type of art is that it's an uphill battle. Even when you've established yourself, it's still an uphill battle, because the remunerations for art are a pittance compared to... well, just about anything.

The second hard truth is that despite all this, it's worth it.

Today I wanted to share a bit more about my own journey toward writing. This follows my blog post "I Went to Vietnam to Learn the Heart's Tongue," which I recommend reading first if you're interested in the full story. (But no problem picking it up from here.)

Learning a Language

The taxi driver I met in the airport was named Nam. He was married with kids, around my age. About my height, too, but thinner, like most Vietnamese. He was friendly and smoked 'em if he had 'em.

Nam paid the gate fee and drove me from the airport. We wound through the streets toward District One, the heart of the Saigon. Even before dawn, each neighborhood we passed felt like its own little world. The one thing that seemed to patch the whole city together was the ubiquitous advertising style. Street signs in Saigon are all obnoxiously bright and multi-colored and written in all-caps, same as a lot of parts of South East Asia. The visuals are basically Microsoft word art and clip art. I've grown to love the sincerity of it — the directness and lack of artifice and marketing science. WE CUT HAIR for a barbershop, AUNTIE'S SANDWICHES, and so on.

The ride from the airport to District One was long by motorbike and even longer by car, even when traffic was light. I spent the time thinking, since Nam and I couldn't really shoot the shit. The big thing I mulled over during the taxi ride was what I needed to do to really learn Vietnamese. Obviously, study the southern accent, but I was in Saigon and I was certain that knowledge would come with time. But the more important question was what would my long game be?

My reading and writing skills were all right given I'd only spent a few months learning. I wasn't worried about pronunciation or speaking, either — I'd always had that specific sort of courage necessary to embarrass yourself deliberately, so I felt comfortable making the verbal mistakes (and receiving the verbal corrections) necessary for fluency.

My listening skills were the real problem, as demonstrated by my first meeting with Nam and his buddy taxi driver. If there's one thing you can't fake when you're learning a foreign language, it's listening comprehension. Your ability to understand what you hear is always factored by the time you've actually exposed yourself to that language. Crash courses, immersion, and talent can quickly inflate your reading, writing, and speaking abilities, but improving listening skills is like weightlifting. Ultimately, there's no getting around the time effort required.

I wasn't sure how I was going to do this; all I knew is I wanted to improve faster than I had improved my Russian. Since I'd heard about a university program in Saigon for foreign students at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, I figured I should look into that. I also had another bonkers idea: I'd just walk around Saigon, chatting with locals, getting into trouble.

Nam suggested we grab food. He brazenly parked right outside an eatery selling a soup with rice vermicelli noodles, bún. The shop was same as all the local places: stamped steel tables and stools on the mopped bottom floor of a box-house. The walls were immaculate white tiles. Flurorescent lights glared from a drop ceiling overhead. Dishes with fresh chilis and jars of garlic were on all the tables. I couldn't have been happier.

When we were done eating, Nam bought some smokes and shared. I decided I'd get some practice in. I asked him about an old Vietnamese proverb — Làm trai cho đáng nên trai. Lên đông, đông tĩnh. Xuống đoài, đoài yên. I asked him what he thought of it.

Old proverb, he answered. People don't really say it anymore.

That was unfortunate, because I'd spent a lot of time studying Vietnamese idioms and proverbs to get a sense of Vietnamese values. All that effort had suddenly become irrelevant. But I loved the nugget of virtue built into this proverb: To be a man, a man must be worthy. When he goes east, the East becomes tranquil. When he goes west, the West is at peace.

The old Vietnamese ideal, I suppose: Good men are good. Where they go, things get better and not worse. That was a gender expectation I could get behind.

I didn't shoot the shit any more with Nam after that. I wasn't sure if I felt guilty. Who was I, asking him what it meant to be a man? Was I the one who would judge him if he hadn't made the East tranquil or brought peace to the West? But he seemed like a good man. Had a wife, had a family. Saved my dumb ass at the airport.

I treated him to breakfast. The meal set me back something like $3. We kept driving. Driving, until the sun crept up and poisoned the sky gray. In a traffic circle, a motorist crashed into Nam's taxi. He stopped in the middle of the circle, angry, then got out and examined the dent. I felt bad for him. We checked out a few hotels, but all of them were booked up.

After twenty minutes, Nam tossed his hands. "I think this is it," he said. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

"What?" I said. "We still haven't found a place."

He tossed his hands again. "They're all booked up. And I'm off my shift."

I blinked at the guy, at a loss for words. "You said you'd help me find a hotel. I don't know where I am."

He tapped his watch. "I know, I know. But it's the end of my shift. I really think this is it."

I looked around the street. I really had no damn idea where we were. District One, clearly, but no hotel in sight. I know I couldn't blame Nam for my lack of planning, but this dude was really trying to dump me here? Surely this wasn't any better than cowering at the airport.

I could have farted around on my phone to figure something out. I could have sucked it up and walked around until I found a hotel — the area looked safe. But I was so damn tired. "Nam," I said. "You won't help?"

He gave me a hard look. Look of a father who wanted to be with his kid, a husband who wanted to be with his wife, a dude who just wanted to sleep. He had been up all night. He put his car into gear and we rumbled onward. He gave me a cigarette. I accepted.

We found a hotel at about 7:30am. The security guard explained that a room would open once it was cleaned in about 30 minutes. It was far more expensive than I had wanted — $35 a night, which seemed unsustainable given my budget — but I could manage a few nights of it. And it was better than the airport.

I paid Nam, gave him a generous tip. I thanked him. "It's nothing," he said, before eagerly putting the car into drive and joining his taxi to the growing stream of motorbike traffic.

Inside, the hotel I let my bags down and sat. A manager brought me iced tea, which I was not expecting. The Vietnamese, I learned that day, are great hosts. I waited around bit, then got antsy. I walked up to reception, asked if I could practice speaking with them. We had a good chat, and I got some phone numbers. We agreed to hang out in the evening.

When the room was ready, I went up. The furnishings were worn, but the room was fantastic — a suite, really. The AC was absolutely frigid. I threw my clothes off and blasted myself with scalding water in the shower, then rolled up in the white sheets and dicked around on my phone.

Reflecting on the day, I realized Nam had never even asked my name. Actually, he had been kind of rude — rude the way brothers can be, and friends. Whatever, though, it didn't matter. That morning he came into my life and by the time he had left things were better and not worse.

Finding Cheap Rent

Jet lag being what it is, I woke up that evening at the crack of dusk. Outside my suite's enormous window, District One was beginning to come alive with foot traffic. Motorbikes with laughing locals, expats jaunting out with tank tops and sandals. The city skyline was multicolored. Brilliant.

I made some calls, got dressed and left. Stopped for something to eat, where I practiced Vietnamese. Then went on a walk and practiced some more. I had missed the folks on reception, who were already off, but we ended up going for coffee in the days that followed, or grabbing bites to eat, chatting as we could.

A few days, this continued. Me, wandering the city in my spare time, practicing Vietnamese. Getting into trouble, practicing Vietnamese. I wanted to learn Vietnamese as the Vietnamese spoke it. I was uninterested in literary Vietnamese; my primary goal was understanding others and being understood. I did this for the rest of the weekend.

The second pillar of my learning strategy — formal training — required structure and preparation. On Monday, I made my way to the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Behind the university's gates, there's a massive courtyard, a parking area, a study area, an open-air university bookstore, a cafeteria, and the offices for foreign students. Despite the modern construction material, the campus felt kind of like the courtyard of a medieval castle.

Behind those gates lay Saigon's University of Social Sciences and Humanities (source)

I made my way through the university. I met with the office consultants, who explained I could take one-on-one courses or group courses. The only group courses available were intensive — four hours a day, with homework. That worked for me. I'd planned my budget for this, and I wanted to learn with fellow students.

The course didn't start for a week, though, which gave me some time to find a cheaper place to stay. The university staff offered to take me around the neighborhood to see if there were any places open in the nearby lodgehouses. Everywhere we went looked so cool and novel to my American eyes — imagine bed-and-breakfast inns in busy alleys filled with students and opportunities to practice Vietnamese. We were in the middle of the school year, though, so they were all booked up.

We had to take a car to the last place we went. It was in a neighborhood called Le Thanh Ton, the "Little Japan" of Saigon, about a thirty-minute walk from the campus. The establishment was called the Navy Guesthouse, which was operated by the Vietnamese Navy. They had an opening, and I got a room for about $190 a month on the fourth floor. The room was nothing crazy — two full beds, a simple bathroom, an old TV, an electric kettle. I was most excited about the staff, because they were Vietnamese sailors. I had a blast talking to these dudes and ladies whenever I went downstairs to read the paper or have a smoke. We had a good-old time while I was there.

Accidentally Getting Started Writing (Again)

One night, sleepless from jet lag and lonely, I found myself laying on a mattress at 3:00am, awake. The university course still hadn't started, so I began scrolling through reddit. I actually hadn't been a reddit user for long — I'd stumbled on the website while Googling answers to my questions and realized the content tended to be higher-quality than other search results.

One subreddit that always caught my eye was r/WritingPrompts. When looking at my reddit feed, I'd seen the posts there before and thought the stories were absolutely incredible, even if I never understood why they were so short. It took a while before I actually understood the subreddit was a platform to help writers to hone their skills.

Many of you are really going to hear me when I say I've always enjoyed writing. It's in the blood for us, it's in the bones. When something hurts, we write. When life is good, we write. When we feel nothing, we write. We are who we are because we write. I had always been passionate about writing, especially after my English Literature teachers in high school had inculcated the power of fiction into me. Perhaps more importantly, Warhammer novels had always inspired me: I started reading Warhammer stories when I was thirteen, and the ending of Graham McNeill's Storm of Iron had stayed rent-free in my head since I was twelve.

Before that night, I'd never thought too much of the writing prompts I'd seen on reddit. Often, the responses were damn good. Nothing I could ever do, surely.

But that night, one of the prompts captured my imagination. Sudden inspiration bloomed in my head, and I decided to give it a try. (Note that I've since deleted my reply from the thread to protect my writing from AI-scraping, so you won't find it in the original post.)

[WP] On everyone's 18th birthday at noon, one word appears in their skin, depicting their career or purpose in life. On your birthday you're staring at a clock showing 11:59am, family and friends gathered around for your reveal. Survive We had mostly run out of ideas about what my conviction would be, so by 11:00 we had started talking about everyone else's reveal parties. Uncle Jay mentioned drinking beer all night and all morning until his reveal. According to him—and this was confirmed by Mom—not one person in the family was surprised when messy scrawl reading BARMAN clawed out across his left forearm.

"When your father saw his conviction, that was something," Uncle Jay said. FATHER was a rare but happy conviction, he said. Most union men have children, but few are destined for it to be their purpose.

Mom knew better than I did. “Father first. Army man second. He'd be proud to see you now.” Her eyes moistened, happier times remembered behind them. She and Uncle Jay raised a toast in his name.

When Jess started about her reveal, she couldn't stop. She started her academic career at the university by 16, earning a deferment on the union’s mandatory term of service in the military. SCHOLAR wasn’t surprising at all.

"I wonder, sometimes.” Jess had a way with words. Like they always do, everyone stopped and leaned in to listen. "I wonder if the convictions are real, or if they’re just random. Maybe we read them and we see a potential that always existed within us, with or without the revelation."

That prompted some oohs and thoughtful silence. I don’t exclude myself from that. When the convictions appear on our arms, who’s to say what fate really wants us to do with them? Who’s to say anything about them at all?

“Dad always thought you would get a good conviction.“ Jess nodded to me.

“We raised a good boy and girl,” Mom said. “Tom knew it.” She stroked the faded lettering on her left arm. My mom was the oldest of seven siblings in a poor family. After her parents died in a bombing raid, she spent her entire early life as a surrogate mother for her brothers and sisters. SELFLESS always seemed like a reflection of her past more than a prediction for her future.

Noon approached. We talked less and less. My eyes constantly wandered to the clock counting on the wall.

11:43. 11:55. 11:59. My family encircled me, and I rolled back my sleeve. I took a deep breath and lay my arm across the table.

12:00. 12:01. Nothing, yet. Uncle Jay said something snarky.

"Shush," mom said. It's always late. You know th—”

The skin on my left arm muddled into a pool of inky gray. Emerging underneath, a bold black. It wasn't the chicken scratch on my uncle's arm, nor the clean, serifed characters on my sister. A stencil print, austere, and clean.

SURVIVE

I thought, hell, dad, what do I do with this?

The next day the Herro attacked our frontier at Lathel. A conscription summons arrived in the mail with my name on it. I registered without chance of deferment.

I hit publish. Boom: upvotes. People liked it. Redditors enjoyed what I had written. In fact, they asked for more – so the next evening, I wrote more:

Born to Die Wasp and Tooth leaned back against the dugout, trying their best to dodge the bullets of rain. In either direction the trench was clear, save for a pair of lookouts and a corporal of the guard roving between posts.

Wasp unsheathed a cigarette from his case. He took another and gave it to Tooth when his comrade eyed him sourly. As they were lighting their smokes a chorus of cheers began echoing down the trench.

"Hooyah!"

"Here he is—!"

"The champ, in the flesh!"

"Here to smoke 'em for us, boss?"

Wasp poked his head into the drizzle. Surly Sarge was coming through. The rank and file cheered him from their hooches.

"Move over," Wasp told Tooth. Rain pelted against his helmet, annoying, so he took it off and let the water dampen his hair.

Sarge sat down between them but refused the cigarette Wasp offered. He removed his coat, revealing arms, neck and shoulders stitched with soldiers' graffiti. It was tradition in the 'Hated 8th' regiment to get a tattoo after every engagement a soldier survived unscathed. This man was covered in them.

BORN TO DIE

RECKLESS A.F.

HE CAME FOR YOU

KILLFACE

H8TED FOR LIFE

THE SPOON IS YOU

And so on, big and small, pretty and ugly, faded and fresh.

"Word, boss?" Tooth asked between drags. Sarge didn't answer at first, instead staring out of the dugout and past the trench into the gray sky. Then:

"1500 departure time, rain or shine."

Wasp cursed and threw his cigarette into a footprint-shaped puddle beyond the cover of the dugout. He peeled back his stinky, sweaty sleeve, examining his conviction:

WRITER

But in what life would he write? In what story did he make it out of the Sendis River campaign alive? Who's story was that?

Sarge's, probably. The bastard was lucky as all hell, surviving every scrape the Herro had thrown at him, taking a few heads to boot.

It could be worse. Tooth's 'affliction' was ADDICTED.

Wasp rose and crouched at the edge of the dugout, using the rainwater to rinse his hands. He glanced at Surly Sarge, Empty Eyes, the Killer, who was fingering the bandage covering his conviction arm, as he always did before an assault. He claimed the arm had been burnt so badly a year ago that he'd been forced to wear a bandage ever since.

That was bullshit. Despite his reputation and their friendship, Wasp had no doubt that his conviction was probably KILLER or something he didn't like.

"You worried there, Sarge?" Wasp asked.

Those empty eyes looked at him, and back to the gray sky. The corporal of the guard came by and told them to be at the assembly area in forty minutes.

Again, more requests. And again, I wrote another part:

Tell Me "You always look at me like that. I'm sorry. You know I don't usually run late. I was on my way here when your friends in Habbekah started shelling us. I had to head to a shelter, briefly. You understand? Ah, you heard it, of course. These mining shafts look nice but they are old. I can't swear on their stability under sustained artillery fire. We had a collapse the other day. Killed a whole section of commissary staff. They hadn't even earned their conventions yet. 'Conviction', right. I always confuse those two words. My god, is it stuffy in here or not? Let's see if we can get this fan going.

"Ah—yes, my apologies. I forgot you don't smoke. You don't mind, do you? I've always found your people to be impeccably well-mannered. So different from us Herro. We are rather to the point, sometimes impatient. It is a flaw.

"Of course, you already know that. I read your case file. You have been rather roughly handled at points. I will put an end to that nonsense, don't you worry. You are safe with me. I find that a handler who maintains a constructive relationship with his client often produces better results for both handler and client.

"Where was I, now? Ah, yes, you and your people! You know, I studied in your capital for some time, so… right, you remember. I've told you, haven't I? Let me tell you about your language, then. It's beautiful, if not simple. From the point of view of inflection. Your pronunciation is rather difficult, but a foreigner can stumble his or her way to comprehension with a little persistence.

"You see, I've always been fond of linguistics, and particularly semantics. Let us take into account your conviction. What does 'SURVIVE' really mean, anyways? It's a verb, you know. Why is it not 'SURVIVAL' or 'SURVIVOR'? Is the cosmos implying something? Maybe it's a matter of aspect. Perhaps your destiny is simply to attempt survival. Perhaps your lot is to master it. Wouldn't it be so much easier if the universe simply included footnotes with these words? If only it all fit on our arm!

"Herro, of course, makes some semantic distinctions here. It would be impossible for any Herro to have a conviction as vague as yours. Take mine, for instance. Do you know what that means? I'm not an interpreter, but I would translate this as 'He who has conquered,' with the emphasis on the completion of the conquest, and the speaker looking back on the conquest from a position of continual advantage. Isn't that nice? And all in one word! So, you see, I've known exactly who I would be for the last sixteen years. When this appeared, I marched right to the recruiter and asked him to sign me up.

"Naturally, this isn't a suitable subject for serious conversation or study. We all know that there is no right answer here. We don't know where convictions come from, or what they really mean, or why they lace our arms and not, for example, the paws of our dogs. It is easier to dissect all the quantum secrets of the universe. No serious researcher will ever solve the questions written beneath our skin. How would one even approach the problem?

"I suppose your situation is rather similar. That is to say, equally hopeless. You've been here for a month, which—believe me—is not yet a long time. I've seen prisoners here longer who still cracked. By the end of it, they were often too weak and broken to recover. I am looking after you, don't worry, but my superiors need to see that I can get results, or else they'll switch me out with one of your previous handlers. Do you follow me? You understand?

"I think I like you. Honestly, I hope you learn to like me. I know we wear different fatigues, we swore loyalty to different flags. I get it. But you and I both know we are soldiers! And we are brothers in a way that—let's say Herro civilians, even—could never understand. You and I, we want the same thing. We want this damn war to end. If you can only show me on this map where your guns are south of Habbekah, I might even be able to move you to a surface cell. You'd have a window!

"Is that so? A shame, really. I do like you, you know. Remember what my convention means? I will get what I want before the end, brother. I think, soon enough, you'll tell me everything I want to hear. Until next time."

All until I closed out the little story loop in a fourth installment:

Daystation Late evening. I lay the book down gently.

A Day in the Sun: Surviving the Sendis River Campaign. Written by Wesley 'Wasp' Westend.

We'd written back and forth a few times before the publication. At this point, he knew all my stories better than I did. I wasn't the focus of his memoir, but he'd mentioned me quite a few times. I was in many of the pictures in the middle of the book.

He was lucky to get a hold of me at all. After the war was lost and they let me go, I found out home was gone. My sister taught at the new National University. She was just a mouthpiece for Herro governors. I left for the Lundjen Waste after a month of fruitless search for the rest of my family.

I am nobody. A cripple with a beard and a platoon's worth of soldier's graffiti, who speaks accented Herro and has no papers for work. This is barely life, but at least I’m not dead.

For all the others had died. Lieutenant Lessor was dead. The Heardy boys and their guitar music were dead. Six of the girls from the laundry section were dead. My mom and uncle were, in all likelihood, dead. Tooth was dead, but that was his fault.

Yet here I was. A ghost, a specter of the war.

A trio of Lundjen natives slammed the door to Sand's Bar open. Two ethnic Herro girls accompanied them, far too clean to belong. I don't hate the Herro, but I resent them. It wasn't the fighting or the torture. They turned my people into squatters on their own land. We were exiled from our villas, evicted from our estates, reeducated in our own academies. Perhaps we deserved the war, but when would it end?

"Two for the price of one," one of the Lundjen said. I took my book and limped to the door. Glad Wasp did good for himself. He was a writer, clever enough to write for our people while dancing through the censors’ black tape.

"You want them, man? I can't take these two back to the mainland, they'll wrap me up and hang me. You ain't gonna see Herro patrols out here. I swear! Okay, ugly. Keep walking then.“

I let the door close behind me. Gently.

#

The three Lundjen didn’t find a buyer but they still got piss drunk before they left. The first pushed the girls out and waited for his friends to step out. They stopped to look around, briefly disoriented.

"Where's the bikes?“

A pipe smashed into first’s face. He crumpled to the ground, unconscious. The second tried to fend off their assailant with a knife, but it was wrested from his hands and inserted into his neck.

The third had enough time to draw his weapon. He fired, but the girls were quick. Seeing their opportunity, they kicked the man in his secret space and slapped the burner from his hand, piling on in a frenzy of teeth and nails.

They began and finished their work as angry people do, repaying all the stresses of their captivity on their captor. When they were done, they looked up at the ghost still standing behind them.

"I have their keys,“ he said. “I'll take you as far as Daystation. I can't go any further than that."

#

The girls helped me bandage the gunshot wound. Nothing too bad. We used the rotting linen I kept over my conviction. Then we let the windows down and drove all night into the morning, feeling the dry, cool wind in our hair.

"Is it true?" One of the girls reached over and traced the letters of my word with her finger. "I got mine three months ago. Has yours been true for you?"

I looked over at her, back to the road. No accent, so she was born in the occupation. "What’s yours?“ I asked.

She rolled back her sleeve and showed me. LIBERATOR, in calligraphic union script. I nodded and didn't say anything for awhile. The sun was rising but the roof of the vehicle gave us shade, and the air was still cool. I swallowed the dry lump in my throat.

"It's as true as you make it," I said.

“Yours is so... strange," the second girl chimed in. “Are you good at it? Making fires and fishing with shoelaces and all that?"

I saw Daystation on the horizon, a glint under the desert sun. Two hours distant, tops.

“I didn't survive. Not in the way people are supposed to." I looked back at the second girl, motioning toward her conviction arm.

"Not yet. I get it today.“ The three of us peered at the clock. 10:39 am.

I stopped the wagon and the three of us sat in the back together, drinking water and talking about the past. By 11:00 we'd mostly run out of ideas about what her conviction would be, and we started talking about our reveals instead.

I put up my tablet after this one. I had some great feedback from the redditors there but didn't really think anything more of it. It had been fun, to stretch the mental muscles. Surprising, to realize people liked it.

It wasn't until weeks later, when someone messaged me to tell me how moving and impactful the story had been for them, that I realized the significance of what I had done. This user complimented my writing, saying that my pieces had been the most cohesive and skillfully done — and most importantly, that they had walked away from them with feeling something, something important.

I can't emphasize enough how encouraging this was, nor how frightening. I'd never received any form of feedback on my writing from anyone, save one close friend.

Apparently, I was good. A thought began to whisper itself in my head. What if I could be a writer? Like — what if I could really do it, make it work? The way I had studied foreign languages. The way I had done everything since I cared about.

The takeaway, I suppose, is that feedback is important. Because later that year, in mid 2017, I decided I would write and publish a book.