Train-chasing and Time
Time is money, except that it's no longer a cliché at Hà Nội train station. If you arrive ten minutes late for the train from Hà Nội to Hải Phòng, which leaves at 9:20 a.m, it's okay because you've got the fast & furious uncle in Adidas pants. He wears a cap and loiters around in a windbreaker—today, the rain creeps up on Hà Nội perhaps to bid farewell. He has the keenest pair of eyes on earth, but of course they can't be keener than what you see on the façade of a Cao Đài temple. He is best at reading body language, and the moment he sees you he knows that you're late. "I take 200 thousand," he bargains. "I đuổi tàu (chase the train) for you! If you want 70, then we can only go at the normal speed." Do you trust his motorbike to catch up with the train? It's a train that takes three hours to cover over 100 kilometers anyway. "If we can't catch the train, I won't charge you," he declares.
As you hop onto his motorbike with a helmet that's lost count of the heads it's hugged, you keep your train ticket inside your handbag and lock your hands around the tail of the vehicle. From Lê Duẩn, or Trần Quý Cáp, or Hà Nội train station, he races the three of you—hey, don't forget the motorbike!—through the teeming Hà Nội streets. Certainly you will pass the street lined with makeshift stores selling green jackets and helmets to xe ôm/ "hugging-motorbike" drivers, who dislike Grab guys yet realize passing off as them is the way to survive. Airports and train stations do many things to bar Grab drivers, but what about Grab drivers who aren't? While you grapple with that question, the uncle may have reached Ô Quan Chưởng, one of the twenty-one remaining cửa ô—which Google ineptly calls "gates"—to the ancient Thăng Long citadel (the dynastic Hà Nội). He may drop you off at Long Biên train station, or if the train has, alas, already left Long Biên, you will hop onto his motorbike again hoping that the Gia Lâm odds are in your favor. Goodbye, Doumer—not the Governor-General of French Indochina but the Long Biên bridge, which you remember a writer cited in your sixth-grade textbook hailing as "the witness to history." Towards Gia Lâm, moving towards Gia Lâm, moving towards...
Did you make it in time for the train stopping at Gia Lâm? Đuổi tàu—chasing the train—is as real as it is mythic. Time is money, because you can't expect the Adidas uncle to compress the 20-minute ride into 10 minutes without paying him more. Time is never singular, because you've got him who challenges that missing 9:20 means missing the train, him who maps out alternative trajectories of time towards a time-being that fails to discipline. At Hà Nội train station, time is urgent, time is loud (as the staff lady yells at those running late), but time is also negotiable, successfully or not, so time is multifarious. Uncles subsist on selling time to you, who gives an uncertain commodity the benefit of the doubt. Trading in time between train stations means setting the business in motion while delaying it—"I won't charge you unless we arrive in time for the train," said the uncle. Trust given, stretched, awaiting its fate—withdrawn or consummated with 200 thousand? Đuổi tàu is a curious being-with the city, where social contracts bend the temporality of space and spatiality of time. Will you đuổi tàu again?
