by Nguyen Bich Lan
Lam Anh, my best friend, worked in the advertising department of an Internet service provider. He told me that his daily task was to speak eloquently and make his message agreeable to the ears of the company’s potential customers, to give a succinct speech promising the Internet will bring the whole world right to their room.
"Bringing the whole world to your room, oh, yes, let’s assume that it’s true, but after bringing the whole world to your room, what are you going to do with that world?" – I asked him.
"Just swim in it, swim in it!" he answered.
Lam Anh gave me a secondhand laptop as a gift he had bought in a Singapore curiosity shop. He spent three days during the holidays giving me my first computer lessons. After that, besides the computer handbook that had come with the machine, I had to teach myself how to swim on the Internet. I did swim everyday in that sea of multi-form and multi-language information. I read everything and searched anything. I read the websites of poets, child prodigies and patients suffering from, cancer and AIDS. I swam deep inside news pages, forgetting the truth of my life: that I spent all hours of the day waiting.
I began this wait when I was 16 years old. I still remember the day the doctor at a famous hospital said to me: "You are showing signs of muscular dystrophy. But only one out of a million people get this disease. Scientists still haven’t found a way to treat it. Wait and see though!" When I heard this, I still could not imagine how my expectations would be fulfilled. But I did believe I should wait with calmness and steadfastness. But I was wrong. Waiting was a sophisticated art, where overconfidence was easily dashed.
I did not cry when they ran a pin through my spine to get bone marrow for a test. I did not cry when they cut a piece of muscle from my calf for a biopsy. I also did not cry when I had to take bitter pills endlessly. I did not cry from the pain. I did not cry from hopelessness. I only cried because my days were so long, that was the only reason.
My parents intentionally ignored my birthday in their grief and Lam Anh made up for this by his extra consideration when my birthday rolled around. When June 24 came, the day the doctor asked me to wait while he wrote me a prescription, Lam Anh spared no time in distracting me. He recalled a myriad of happy stories. Of course these stories belonged to a time when I was still strong. A time when I was young, barely a teenager, and used to preen in the mirror with a comb. Until I heard him speak, I had no idea how lovely I was in Lam Anh’s eyes. He said that in the old days my cheeks were rosy all the time, my hair shiny and smooth and my eyes were always glistening. Lam Anh remembered the first time he thought of me as his best friend, the day when he splashed ink on my white shirt and even though I threatened to tell the teacher, I did not do it. He also remembered every time I was recommended for good conduct and good study, every time I was selected to attend the examinations for excellent students and each time the teacher read my well-written essay out loud to the whole class. He remembered these occasions so well he even surprised my father.
On the day when my waiting had reached a five-year point, the bracelet I was wearing came loose and dropped to the ground. I pushed my wheelchair in front of the mirror and looked at my reflection. I knew I had lost four or five kilos every year. I knew what I looked like. I was just a bag of bones. The disease continued to gnaw at me and nobody could do anything to help me stop it. I cried while I pushed my wheelchair over to the laptop and sent a very short message to Lam Anh. The message said "TV" [TV is short for Tuyet Vong in Vietnamese, hopelessness in English]. Thas was the first year he did not organise a celebration for my birthday.
One day, Lam Anh sent me a message boasting that he had just discovered an extremely interesting webpage and asked me to take a look. I immediately logged on and after reading a funny introduction on the homepage, I found a strange entry: a list of those who could wait best.
As I scrolled through the list, I could not understand why a woman who had been waiting for her missing husband for 28 years had been listed first while other people who were waiting for things for 30 years or even 40 years were listed 50th or 60th. I also didn’t understand why a 73-year-old man who had been waiting for her son, who was sentenced to life imprisonment when he was only 55 years old, was listed at the bottom. It was incomprehensible to me that a gay man who had been waiting for a sex change operation for 12 years was listed 18th out of the 94 waiting men. I could not even understand why they had intentionally printed in bold the number of years spent waiting after each name.
The numbers made me angry. I didn’t understand why some crazy man had made such a weird webpage. Just to laugh scornfully at their powerlessness, those people with their stupid expectations or to make people compete in waiting?
I felt responsible for this group of waiting people, so I sent a letter asking the owner of the webpage to shut it down immediately, explaining why. The web owner replied with a false name: "In your letter, we have counted the word ‘waiting’ 17 times and only six times have we seen phrases like ‘not waiting’ or ‘stop waiting’. Instead of boycotting or changing this webpage, why don’t you join us? Because you too are just waiting."
I found it impossible to deny the truth, so I vented my anger at Lam Anh for having given me the wrong medicine and criticized him for being insensitive. Lam Anh reacted calmly. He advised me to register myself on the website and that if I was still angry afterwards, he would accept the label of insensitive. I registered myself immediately and was supplied with a list of user names for those who had waited best. All the names began with "wait", like "wait 15", "wait 785", "wait 367" and so on. I looked at the long line of words "wait" with great boredom. I hated them all.
Twenty four hours after my registration, I was immediately messaged by a person bearing the code 32. They asked me: "What are you waiting for?" I responded with the same question. "I’m waiting for a pardon," came the reply.
"Haven’t you got any other way than to wait?"
"I did in the past but not anymore".
"Why?"
"Because the person who is going to give me the pardon is no more now."
"What a fool!" I sent the message and shut down the Net.
I was again invited to chat by Wait32: "I don’t feel angry with you. I’ve had a hundred people tell me that I am a fool". I did not strike up a conversation. But a few minutes later, I received this: "Each time I took a mad man home, the number of people who told me that I was a mad man increased". I did not understand what Wait32 was trying to say. "Is there a person who takes mad man home?" I asked. Wait 32 replied: "It’s me." I thought Wait 32 was pulling my leg, so I made a joke: "How many mad men can you endure?"
"Nine at least."
"I don’t believe it!"
I shut down the computer.
This time I messaged Wait937. "Are you a male or a female?" I asked.
"Male."
"What are you waiting for?"
"I’m waiting for the time when I can stand on my two legs."
"So are you in the wheelchair?"
"No. I am lying on my side."
"For how many years?"
"38 years."
"What are you doing while waiting?"
"I’m working."
"In what way?"
"With three fingers."
"What are you doing with three fingers?"
"I write newspaper articles."
"How long does it take you to write an article?"
"I write twenty five articles a month. I’m sorry. I’ve got a phone call."
I did not feel like sitting idle, so I searched online for Lam Anh, asking him if he knew any mad men. He seemed well prepared for the question, sending me the link to an article about a man who used his house as a poorhouse for mad men he found on the streets. He also sent me a series of e-articles written by a man who could move only his three fingers. Having read all these stories, I sat dumbfounded.
After that, I spoke to someone waiting whenever I logged onto the net. One of them told me that when he was a little boy he stood and waited for his mother, who was going to buy an umbrella to protect them from the sun. His had been waiting for her to come back for 13 years. I thought the boy was cultivating his hatred for his mother. But on the contrary, he had become a poet, who won high prizes for poems on his mother – the gentle mother, the mother who had devoted all her life to her children. I began to show my admiration for him, because I knew life had ignored me and I had showed an even colder attitude towards life.
Wait133 was the 27th waiting person I had met on the Internet. Her situation was similar to mine, the same disease. She asked me the same questions I had put them to others: "What are you doing while waiting?"
I gave her my sincere answer. "I eat, I sleep, I read books and I surf the net."
"So what, you read and surf the net?"
"To kill the time."
"I’ve got a very interesting book. Shall I send it to you through the Net?"
"Yes, please!"
So Wait133 sent me the book. It took almost two hours. The book told of the life of an Irish boy in dire poverty. I read it with great interest in two weeks. And then I found out that Wait133 had translated the story. So I wrote to Wait 133:
"How do you put aside your feeling of loneliness, your pain, the disease that is gnawing your body day in and day out? How could you forget everything to translate the book?"
"Wait937 can work with three fingers, while I can move my ten fingers, you know. And we all have our head safe and sound! Without that nobody would want to keep waiting."
"I also know English. My father taught me when I was still a little girl."
"Oh, you’re much luckier than me. I’ve no teacher, only books."
"But I haven’t used my English for a long time. Actually I’m not sure I even need it."
"Each foreign language is a treasure. You’re a rich person, you know."
One afternoon my father came home from a meeting, looking thoroughly drunk. This was the first time I had ever seen my father in that condition. I was told that he had become drunk after tossing back the fourth cup of whatever they were drinking. But he only cried and cried – he didn’t curse or say anything foul. Maybe he had been forced to drink too much.
My father was an English teacher at the district’s English centre, which helped people who wanted to improve or brush up their English. He taught English with all his heart. On the day my father got drunk, a woman came in with a boy, earnestly asking father to teach English to her son, because she wanted him to learn in the district’s school instead of going back to a mountainous school. After hearing this, I said I could help instead of father. Mother was very glad and quickly went to get a stool for the boy. I began to teach the boy. He was completely ignorant of any English, so I had to be patient to teach him and wait for father to get a hold of himself.
The next day, I mentioned this to father who said: "You accepted the boy, you should teach him!" I thought of it as a challenge and I accepted. The boy wrestled with English through all those sultry summer afternoons. He made progress and the news about him spread to the school. The principal said that he would invite the boy to attend the school’s English lesson and, if his English was good enough, he could stay for the school year. After nearly three months of teaching the boy, I was anxiously awaiting the result. I was on the edge of my seat as I waited for the school bell. The boy ran straight from school to see me and informed me that he had been accepted at the school. It was enough for me, for the boy and his ecstatic mother.
Word that the boy had successfully finished a two-year English learning programme in only three months spread throughout the elementary school. Children’s parents came to see me with a proposal to set up a class and teach their children. I was not ready to treat teaching as a real job until one day father took home five big boys, saying to them: "My daughter will help you learn English with ease".
"Dad, you’re so funny!" I cried in surprise.
"They are all eager to learn," he said stubbornly.
In the end I accepted it and helped these mountainous boys learn English. At the end of the school year, they all passed their final examinations. I was so happy that I told all my "Wait" friends on the Net. They all shared my joy and persuaded me to register my name on the list. The owner of the webpage sent me an e-mail to congratulate me:
"Congratulations to you for being put on in the list. I would like to inform you that you are now classified as 62nd. This is not a modest rank at all. It is not the number of years that makes you the best waiter. It is how you live while waiting – this is the main thing. We know that when you hit the 10 year mark for waiting, you sent a message to your friend saying ‘hopelessness’. Your friend never told you, but he has done everything he can to stop your hopelessness from destroying your expectations, but only you yourself can separate that hopelessness from you forever."
I burst out crying. I knew the owner of the webpage was really Lam Anh, the friend who had been waiting together with me for all these years.
Translated by Manh Chuong
(from Viet Nam News)
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