I’ll always be grateful to a hotel receptionist named Chau, who one day offered to get me out of Hoi An and into the homes of people in the surrounding countryside. From the back of her motorbike I watched the landscape whiz by as she drove us several miles to the west. We passed rice and corn fields, a kid on the back of a water buffalo, trucks that threatened to flatten us. We passed a phalanx of teenage girls who, in their conical hats and white ao dais, sat atop their bicycles with such perfect poise that one wondered if bicycling were a form of ballet.
Among the places Chau took me was the home of a friend, where we had lunch and then rested through the worst of the midday heat. As I lay with my eyes closed on a mat in one corner, digesting my meal and listening to the sounds of Vietnamese bouncing off the concrete floor, I appreciated the unintelligibleness of it all. Because I couldn’t understand the words, I could focus exclusively on what was beyond them: friendship. Here were people relaxed and enlivened by one another. There was nothing formal about the interaction, no sign of pretense, no austerity in how they laughed or even reclined. They were completely comfortable together.
The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing 167 years before two of Chau's friends rested on a bed, one with her feet propped up on the other's legs, had this to say about friendship:
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thoughts, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
