Another Vietnamese Moment: Napping

I'm sitting at a restaurant with co-workers and representatives of the local government. After one woman, a manager in the the Vietnamese army, explains how romantic her husband was in asking her to marry him (these stories are much too common), I somehow mention how tired I am. I say this in Vietnamese, which of course elicits laughter from everyone at the table. It was Saturday, about 35 degrees in the Mekong Delta, and I woken up at 5am that morning.

After lunch and the many questions regarding the reasons I was not yet married, she invited all of us to her home.

I suppose she had seen that I was, in fact, quite tired because upon entering her house she pointed to a hammock set up in the middle of her kitchen. I had about an hour to kill before the next workshop and she insisted that I sleep there until then.

So there I was, rocking slightly back and forth in my dark pin-striped slacks and button-up shirt tucked in, curled up in the fetal position in a complete strangers kitchen in the Mekong Delta.

Her mother would come into the kitchen every now and then and tidy up or perform some other domestic chore. She was not paying much attention to the napping white boy.