The Things You Learn When It's Only You (or Love Letter to the Rice Paddy)

Hoi An, Vietnam
07/04/2023

At the risk of embodying every cliche about Westerners who spend months traveling around SE Asia, I must say, I have learned so much about myself on this trip. When you remove yourself from your usual context, take yourself away from your typical backdrop and send all the other cast members off stage, all that’s left is you. Not you as you relate to where you live, what you do, or who you spend your time with. Just the barest, purest you. And when it’s only you, you can’t help but see who you really are.

Here's just a few of the things I've seen.

That man was clearly not right for me.

All it took was a little bit of distance – ok, 8,795 miles – to see perfectly clearly that the man I wanted to make it work with back at home was not right for me in any way. He told me he feared he could never make me happy. He pointed out a few incompatibilities and I had already identified some others on my own. Yet I insisted to myself and to him that we would never really know until we tried. But I did know. I had already had some iteration of the relationship that I was about to have with him with two other people before him and those didn’t work, so why would this? And why did I want to do it all over? This – that a relationship with a divorced dad who lives in another state wouldn’t work – wasn’t really a new thing that I was learning about myself though. The new thing was that I always try so hard to make things work when there is often very little basis for it. How often, I wonder, has it been at the cost of something else that actually would work?

Yes, I am a city person.

One of the incompatibilities he cited was that I could only be happy in a city and that he never wanted to live in one. In the spirit of trying to make things work when there is very little basis for it, I insisted that I didn’t know what other kinds of places would make me happy because I had only ever lived in cities and that I would never know until I tried. And that is true (as I have learned on this trip! Read on.), but it is also true that I was built for the city.

I didn’t really connect with Chiang Mai, and I knew that it was because it was slow. Though it’s the second biggest city in Thailand, it doesn’t have a city’s energy nor its skyline. It felt like a sleepy town without any of the charm that typically comes with that label. I was restless there and ended up traveling outside the city more often than I had planned and staying away longer than I had planned. I enjoyed myself more in even smaller, slower places, including islands and tiny villages, that had more natural beauty and more charm and, yes, I also enjoyed myself more in bigger cities.

After a few weeks in Chiang Mai, I visited Singapore. When the taxi carried me away from the airport and down the highway and I saw the first signs of the city, I felt as if my whole body sighed. It was a feeling I knew well. One that I had felt on arrival in other cities around the world.

And I said to myself, and partly to him in a conversation happening only in my head, Yes, I am a city person. And I wondered why I had tried to deny it. Here was this person who really saw me, trying to save us both a lot of heartache, and I was trying to convince him that he was wrong.

During those three days in Singapore, I was positively revitalized. I strode around the city like the New Yorker that I have been since before I ever set foot in New York. It felt like I’d been given pure oxygen. And though I had been completely blissed out on travel and newness from the moment the plane landed in Korea three weeks prior, I hadn’t yet felt this vibrant.

But, my god, do I love the rice paddy!

But what I said was true: I didn’t know what other kinds of places could make me happy because I had never experienced them. I think when I said that to him, I wasn’t sure that it was true. But I have learned here in Hoi An that it is. Since I have been in Vietnam, I have spent time in what seems like every type of geography, and it has been some of the most beautiful that I have ever seen: beach, jungle, river, bay, mountains – both the kinds of mountains that I had seen before and also stunning limestone tower karst that look like they came from the pages of a fairytale. Each has been jaw-droppingly gorgeous. But none has had the impact on me that these last two weeks in the rice paddy have.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a hotel on the rice paddy with a balcony off my room that overlooks it and also in a coworking space that is essentially a glass box on the rice paddy – nothing but green, the brightest, most vibrant green, for as far as you can see on three sides of the building. While Hoi An also has beaches, a river, and a city within its borders, I’ve barely spent any time in any of these because I simply cannot get enough of the rice paddy. When I’m not breathing it in from my balcony at the hotel or soaking it in from the co-working space, I’m aimlessly riding my bike through it for hours in the mornings or the evenings.

The rice paddy goes on for I don’t know how far – further than I’ve ever ridden my bike on these hours-long aimless sojourns. It’s broken up into giant blocks. Flat roads run through the paddy, across these blocks, and you can watch bikes, scooters and the occasional 4-wheeled vehicle cross the paddy all day. Very narrow alleys crowded with simple farm houses, cafes, restaurants, convenience stores and small inns form the boundaries around each block of paddy. Cars won’t fit in these alleys. When they dare, they have to back out or go around the whole perimeter of the paddy in order to exit. It’s best to drive onto the paddy on a two-wheeled vehicle. That’s why, staying here, I’ve finally gotten over my fear of taking motorbike taxis. It’s the only way to get picked up and dropped off at my door. Otherwise I’d have to walk to the main road to meet a regular taxi.

It’s a good ten degrees cooler on the rice paddy than it is anywhere else. And the near-constant breeze brings with it a fragrance that I never knew existed but that I’m sure I will unsuccessfully try to find or replicate once I get back home. The air around the rice paddy is steamy, nutty and just a little bit sweet. It smells, not surprisingly, like a soupy pot of brown rice that’s been sprinkled with just a touch of sugar.

When I do pry myself away from the rice paddy to spend an evening in town or at a restaurant on the river or the beach, I notice something that happens every time I return. I’m on the back of the motorbike, zipping through the streets of Hoi An – bright lights overhead; the incessant buzz of horns that drivers use to indicate that they will continue through an intersection so make way; cars, other bikes, motorcycles, and scooters all around. Sometimes my knee grazes the knee of the passenger on the motorbike stopped at the light next to us. There’s stimulation everywhere. Then suddenly, as if there were a blackout, it’s all gone. We are out of the chaos as we turn onto a narrow alley that leads to the rice paddy. Barely lit, the tiny street is dark and typically silent save for the bark of a dog or the crow of a rooster. The alleys are so tight, and so crowded with little structures, that I can’t see what’s ahead, just the buildings right next to me. We turn sharply through the tiny grid until suddenly, as if we’ve come tumbling down a chute, we are on the wide open rice paddy. The breeze rushes over me and brings with it that sweet nutty smell. And every time this happens, it’s as if my whole body sighs.