"Where are you from?" A mindless question repeated out of habit amongst frequent travelers. One that I've always been drawn to because of it's ability to serve as a simple gesture of friendliness before moving on your way, or as an appealing door of conversation that when fully opened, can transcend cultures, borders, blind assumptions that otherwise rest just on the surface of our minds. This dichotomy between surface level conversation and the starting point to completely new social exploration makes it a nice verbal tool to carry on most any journey.
In this case, the 'where are you from?' came from Tom (obviously a western taken name) and his comrade Liu. We had just finished an evening of beautifully quirky events and stopped by a decrepit corner store next to our hotel in the mountain city of Sapa to grab a few beers for the hotel as we wound down the night. Be it jet lag or just exhaustion we'd somehow taken to falling asleep at max lateness of 10pm each night, and what better way to wind down a night than with a decrepit corner store, ya know? Tom and Liu sat in the back of their dark, half stocked store on two folding blue chairs, iconic in Vietnam.They were so relaxed and acknowledged our presence to such a minimal degree I wasn't sure if they even worked there. Then in one of those micro-second moments between two people that somehow is able to fit ages of complex emotions, thoughts, and unspoken dialogue into one hypercharged interaction, Tom sensed our confusion and just how unwelcoming he realized they'd been. He flashed us a huge, toothless, Vietnamese smile that immediately transformed the energy in the room into positive, welcoming warmth. 'Hello! 45,000!' he said in reference to the amount of Dong we owed him for the beers (Yes - Vietnamese currency is called Dong...grow up people). We handed over 50,000 and waited for our near $0.20 in change. Then it happened - Tom decided to push open door into who we were. A door he'd been mentally eyeing since he saw us. "Where are you from?" he asked. There we were on the other side. Not the physical us which he'd met some 5 minutes prior, but the actual us - the history of us, the stories of us, the place we're from. We said we were from New York to which he quickly responded in broken but confident English 'Ah! I am a painter!'. The fact he connected those dots was beautiful to me, saying much about how he saw a city he'd never actually seen. He told us he was from Hanoi, where we'd just come from. We joked it was crazy there and that was why he moved to Sapa. It was a simple but personal conversation.
Now this whole time Liu had not said anything. They were both standing now but Liu had just been a silent, smiling observer. At a natural lull in the mostly Tom led conversation, Liu looked first at me and then passed his small ceramic tea cup that I'd failed to notice in front of both him and Tom. After passing me his cup he shot Tom one of those harmless but shit eating grins which is universal to boys worldwide when they are assisting in pushing a newbie towards anything slightly out of their comfort zone and into a red zone of trouble making. Tom erupted into laughter while narrating to me that this was 'local medicine...made of medicine'. This, plus all the signals up to this point, told me it was probably about 6,000% alcohol and most certainly distilled in Liu's kitchen with a variety of second hand kitchen ware. And I was excited by that vision. Never take candy from a stranger sang in my ear (this being the adult version of such candy), but I flicked it away and tipped the teacup back. The medicine was delicious. Incredibly herbal but not as toxic as I'd presumed. They said it 'cures everything' and I believe that to be true, in the same way that most things not good for you will end up making you feel good one way or another.
Tom had opened the door, and we walked on through to say hello. A beautiful interaction had been created. Had we spent some time to explore a little further, I've no doubt we could've found several more doors to explore that would've surely culminated into quite a night of debauchery. Alas, with an early hike the next morning we left the duo to their devices and headed our way. And as we did, the actual us, the real answer to the question 'Where are you from?" had one more story to shape it.
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