The Boy and The Coconut Tree

I visited Vietnam in February 2011 and took a train from Saigon (HCMC) to Hue. The journey was 20 hours and I shared a berth with 3 locals. One of them was Dang Ngoc Hieu a 24 year old shopkeeper from Tuyen Quang. Only one person in the berth could speak English so using my phrase book and drawings, we chatted. For 20 hours I was overwhelmed by a sense of being the centre of attention in the most innocent way. This boy from Tuyen Quang had never met a foreigner; he lives in a small village, an 8 hour drive north of Hanoi, closer to China than Hanoi.  He asked for my phone number and in rough English asked me to visit Tuyen Quang province if I ever returned to Hanoi.  A totally innocent experience that felt like my first ever crush and so hard to put into words.  Our lives are very different.  And the coconut tree? Hieu was delivering it to his village from relatives in Saigon. He carried it almost 2000km by the time he reached his home in Thuong Lam village....

And as I settled into my job as a kindergarten teacher I found myself with 2 more student, very different from the toddlers at Queensland Kindergarten. I had advertised myself as a private English tutor on a local website as soon as I arrived and waited for the emails to roll in. Within 1 week of placing my advert I had been contacted by 4 locals, 1 a recently graduated law student and the other a Malaysian banker who needed a tutor for her son. I met with the law graduate, Long, in one of my favourite cafes, Highland Coffee, overlooking the Hoan Kiem lake and I became his English tutor and friend very quickly, he was my first Vietnamese student who I could actually have a conversation with an didn't need an afternoon nap or his nappy changing after class. The location of my first class with Long Long proved to me very smart, his English was very good and he really only needed practice and some wider vocabulary. We agreed to meet at least once per week. Long will get...

I visited Vietnam in February 2011 and took a train from Saigon (HCMC) to Hue. The journey was 20 hours and I shared a berth with 3 locals. One of them was Dang Ngoc Hieu a 24 year old shopkeeper from Tuyen Quang. Only one person in the berth could speak English so using my phrase book and drawings, we chatted. For 20 hours I was overwhelmed by a sense of being the centre of attention in the most innocent way. This boy from Tuyen Quang had never met a foreigner; he lives in a small village, an 8 hour drive north of Hanoi, closer to China than Hanoi.  He asked for my phone number and in rough English asked me to visit Tuyen Quang province if I ever returned to Hanoi.  A totally innocent experience that felt like my first ever crush and so hard to put into words.  Our lives are very different.  And the coconut tree? Hieu was delivering it to his village from relatives in Saigon. He carried it almost 2000km by the time he reached his home in Thuong Lam village....