There’s a game foreigners visiting Vietnam like to play, a parlor diversion that doubles as an intellectual and moral exercise. It’s called “How Can I Justify Not Giving This Person Any of My Money?”

A casual listener can hear any number of people engaged in this game at tourist-packed corner cafés in Saigon on a typical evening, when the street hawkers and hucksters are out in force. It starts when a Vietnamese person of any age approaches a foreigner who is otherwise busily engaged - in sitting down, for example. The solicitor could be a toothless local man carrying a case full of remarkably inexpensive name-brand timepieces. Or maybe it’s one of the legions of booksellers who lug around five-foot-high piles of haphazardly photocopied paperbacks. The game’s early stages involve players ignoring the vendor and his or her repeated entreaties to buy, until said vendor moves move on to the next table, where the ritual begins anew. One player then sighs, turns to another and utters the game’s official opening line: “I’d love to help every one of them, but…”. This is the cue for a companion, or any nearby English speaker, to reply with, “But you just can’t.” Thus the game begins.

The object, of course, is for you and the other players to successfully rationalize brushing off the endless parade of Vietnamese men, women, and children who approach you with goods or services in the hope that you will exchange money for those things, usually much more money than you think they’re worth. Extra points are awarded for using the phrase “At least they’re working” and/or making a veiled - or not veiled, whichever - reference to supposed abusers of federal welfare programs “back home.” Points also are given for comparisons to grifters, swindlers, and idlers in one’s home country. Extra credit is awarded for the exchange of knowing glances if, while playing, you’re approached by someone selling something, especially if they’re under the age of five.

In the tourist-choked District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City, street vendors - and, more rarely, handout seekers - operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They zero in on foreigners like guided missiles, programmed not to take no for an answer, or at least to pretend not to understand the meaning of the word in English, until the target’s body language has taken on the aspect of a cornered dog being force-fed a bowl of steamed beets.

Their tactics are creative, visceral, and brutally effective. A sweet-faced youth of perhaps four, clutching a few packs of chewing gum, might wander up to you where you sit, place one hand up on your knee, and look at you with deep, soulful eyes, eyes that couldn’t possibly belong to an ordinary four-year-old. “Please, mister,” she’ll say. “You buy gum.” This appeal is difficult if not impossible for any semi-sentient, warm-blooded mammal to resist, especially when one takes into account the asking price, which in most developed countries is the kind of money you wouldn’t bother picking up off the street if you noticed it lying there.

Ironically, an odd characteristic of Vietnamese currency makes parting with such a pathetic sum much more difficult for the average tourist. The currency in Vietnam is the dong, a single one of which is worth roughly as much as a hundredth of a paper clip or, if you prefer, a dozen or so of the little sprinkles that go on Christmas cookies. In other words, one dong by itself is pretty much worthless. Yet the Vietnamese insist on expressing sums of money this way, which has the practical result of making them sound like much bigger amounts than they really are.

A cup of coffee, for example, might be priced at VD 13,500. Thirteen thousand and five hundred?, you think to yourself, scrambling for a calculator. That’s highway robbery! Or maybe you’re presented with the bill after an average meal for two at a low-key Vietnamese restaurant. A hundred and twelve thousand dong?! We’re gonna have to cut this vacation short, if things continue this way. The western brain has difficulty dealing with such big figures, forgetting that a thousand dong is considerably less than a dime, therefore failing to grasp that the coffee clocks in around .80 cents and the meal sets its two owners back a total of about $7.

I’ve often thought that the Vietnamese government would do itself a lot of favors if it retired the dong in favor of a more muscular unit of currency - say, the kilodong. Or better yet, the millidong. It’s got a nice metric ambiance about it, and it’s worth ten thousand of the other kind, bringing it into closer parity with western currencies. A typical dinner for two would cost MD 11.20 under my plan, and that coffee’s now MD 1.30. This puts the perceived value of the millidong (but, crucially, not the real value) somewhere between the dollar and the Euro. Americans would feel just as inferior visiting Vietnam as they do in France, and Europeans might be a little less inclined to throw around those sneering, post-colonial attitudes. Everybody would take Vietnam a little more seriously, if you ask me.

But until that happens, you’ve still got to deal with a puppy-dog-eyed Kewpie doll barely out of diapers asking you for several thousand somethings, presumably so that she can someday go to school and avoid a life of drug-addicted prostitution.

And she’s only the barest tip of the iceberg. The Vietnamese know the value of youth all too well. Around 9pm each evening, the streets swell with an army of mothers who carry sleeping newborns and infants around in the crook of one arm or draped over a shoulder while walking from cafe to cafe. In their free hand, they carry small, individually wrapped packs of facial tissues for sale. Maybe you’ve got the stones to send a four-year-old packing, but are you man enough to show the door to a mother-and-child team who look like they stepped out of a History Channel documentary on Dustbowl-Era Oklahoma?

The combined mass of street vendors, xé ȏm drivers, and pleading restaurant touts make negotiating the sidewalk on De Tham or Buy Vien streets as mentally hazardous as running a gantlet of pitchforks and shovels. The sheer salesmanship on display would bring the canniest used car dealer to his knees.

“Hello friend!” “Hello boss!” “Hello chief!” “Mister you help me please? I sell nothing all day.” “You need motorbike?” “You buy t-shirt? Give you good price, very cheap.” “You want DVD? All new release.” “You like fruit? You buy please. They so heavy.” “You need wallet? Real leather. How about Vietnam postcard? Twenty postcard one dollar.”

Watches and backscratchers, bracelets, rings and keychains. Toothbrushes, nail clippers, shampoo and Q-tips. English-language newspapers and magazines, cologne, fans, cigarettes and lighters. Pirated anything and everything.

Eye contact is to be avoided at all costs. Stepping into a cafe or restaurant is no guarantee of a reprieve. Vendors patrolling the street walk right into open-air restaurants, stopping at every table to see if you wish to become the owner of a bobble-headed rubber horse or a new pair of sunglasses to accompany the ones you’re already wearing. Cafe owners are curiously unperturbed by this, rarely giving the hawkers so much as a glance - simply stepping around them to deliver food to the table.

Not everyone is selling hardware. Beggars, often disfigured, are free to hobble just about anywhere they like - into stores and through restaurants, stopping often to display gimp arms, hunchbacks, and stumps, hat held between your nose and a meal you were formerly planning to enjoy.

I’m in awe of two Cambodian kids, brothers, who work De Tham Street downtown, a.k.a. backpacker central. They’re performers of the old-school style, despite being approximately 6 and 8 years old. Dressed in garish, handmade costumes at once too big and too small, they specialize in the classic sideshow arts: fire-breathing, snake-swallowing, hot-coal-eating, and the like. After a typical ten-minute sidewalk performance, they walk through the seated cafe crowd soliciting tips. I’m always tempted to give them a big bill, something special for the effort, but I’m worried one of them will try to staple it to his forehead for an encore.

Like most of this workforce, these boys are smart. A friend used to dismiss them as “hacks,” claiming the snakes were rubber fakes. I always felt this was a little harsh. Personally, I can’t see much difference between the difficulty levels of threading a long green plastic piece of rubber down your throat and doing so with a similarly-shaped live reptile; I’m impressed and disgusted either way. But these snakes are real, which my friend discovered to his dismay one night when he was a little too loud in his denunciation and suddenly found one draped around his neck, dripping in saliva and heading down his shirtfront.

I tend to like the kids best, especially when they’re selling something, because they’re so easily distracted from their mission. There’s a little girl of about five who has the De Tham Street cafe my friend owns on her circuit every night starting around 8pm. I don’t know her name; she’s still got a lot of baby fat on her, so she walks with a little bit of a waddle. It’s pretty clear she’s getting enough to eat. The only English she knows is “Buy gum?”, but I always like to have a little fun with her. Like all the working kids her age, she’s a great actor. She shuffles/waddles up to you and fixes you with a look that bespeaks a life of deprivation, tedium, hopelessness and hunger - although as I’ve said, this last one is a little hard to believe. The overall effect is a portrayal of despair that Brando could have admired.

It’s good, but it’s no match for the tickle monster. One finger in the ribs and her technique falls to pieces. She giggles and shrieks, squirming in delight, and then an instant later she’s back in character, looking even more serious because she’s on the clock and she’s got a job to do, and tickling’s not in the rulebook. But she’s also easily distracted by typical childhood pleasures. My cheap cellphone has a game on it called “Rat Xenia” that’s as dull as any videogame I ever saw. In it, squiggly, pixelated blobs that are evidently supposed to be rats scamper across the screen. Your job is to steer them, using four phone buttons, toward pixelated traps that appear randomly on the screen. It’s electronic boredom incarnate, but if she’s giving me the eyes of despair and keeping just out of tickle reach, I’ll hold up my phone for her. In a moment she’ll be leaning against me, clicking hypnotically, rapt with her mission of guiding rats to their dooms.

There are also the fruit ladies, or as I like to call them, the basket cases. Usually older women, this gang carries across their shoulders a two-meter wooden plank, notched at each end, from which hang baskets piled high with fruit - rambutans, mangoes, pineapples, local bananas, exotic dragon fruit, coconuts ready to be turned into boat drinks with one deft slice of a razor-sharp machete, and other bewildering varietals I can’t even begin to name. The women keep fairly busy with the locals, for whom they’re essentially mobile produce sections. But tourists are too easy a mark to pass up. A common tactic is for these women, who have calves of steel, to approach a foreigner and moan miserably about how weighty the basket is: “You buy please. So heavy.” Another bit of genius is to ask the target if he or she would like to try carrying the baskets. This works well on new arrivals, still in thrall to a place that has never seen a Starbucks. Having discovered for themselves just how heavy the baskets are, it’s that much harder not to buy something from her after they’ve had their fun and taken their pictures. As you might imagine, this one rarely works twice.

Foreigners sometimes try to draw a distinction between these workers and those who exclusively target tourists, supposing that somehow one is more “legitimate” than the other. But that doesn’t make sense to me. They’re all just trying to earn a living any way they can. That little girl’s act is perhaps a little more transparent, but not fundamentally different from the one put on for you by a realtor or an investment broker or anyone who’s ever worked in advertising.

Even the handicapped keep busy here. While many profoundly disabled persons do resort to begging, others ride around in three-wheeled carts powered with a vertical hand crank that sits in the area between what would have been their legs. One morning a few months ago in Hoi An, while I sipped a cup of coffee at a cafe with a view of the river, I watched a gentleman pump toward me in one of these contraptions, stopping just in front of the cafe, which was set a few steps above the street to prevent it from being inundated when the river flooded. He gummed a huge smile at me and waved an English-language Vietnamese magazine over his head, something I’d be no more likely to buy than I would a copy of Grit. I shook my head and found an invisible object a hundred yards away with which I suddenly became intensely preoccupied. Not to be deterred, the man threw himself out of the cart with a calculated thud and began dragging himself up the steps toward me, in the manner of a cat who’s just been hit by a speeding car and is returning home to die.

“No thanks!” I said, panicking. “Really, I’m fine! I’m allergic to ink, that’s all!” I tried to catch the eye of the cafe owner for a little help, but he was stepping over the man’s torso on his way to another table with a plate of toast.

It’s a challenge saying no to these people, I tell you. Vietnam is developing fast, but not so fast that it’s prepared to legislate disability benefits - or social security benefits, or unemployment benefits, or subsidized housing, or Medicaid, or homeless shelters, or really any sort of social welfare program at all. You lose your job or your legs in Vietnam, you’d better start working on those fire-breathing and hot-coal-eating skills.

So it’s no wonder that relatively wealthy westerners on holiday here, accustomed to those kinds of entitlement systems, get flustered, questioning the merits of handing over their hard-earned money to what they see as a pack of grifters and street urchins. My advice is to keep a few millidong handy and be generous with it. A pack of gum here and there won’t break the bank. And you sure don’t want to end up with a spit-covered snake down your shirt.

I have a not-so-secret fondness for a subject that ordinary Americans tend to avoid talking about in public. This is not because they fear getting arrested or anything (although it’s happened) but because doing so too often results in an argument. One of the nastier results of the so-called culture wars is that what used to be a perfectly manageable list of topics best avoided in casual company - God and politics - has ballooned into an encyclopedia-sized catalog of unmentionables, mainly because one group (I’m not naming any names) decided to conflate the two original items on that list, after which all hell, so to speak, broke out. These days you can’t use the noun “choice” without somebody calling you names and threatening to pitch a drink in your face. And pity the fool who mentions Parkinson’s Disease at a cocktail party.

My not-so-secret fondness - actually fondness is too mild a term, but it falls short of flat-out obsession - may rank among the dorkier ones out there. Yet despite this, it’s also one of the most currently inflammatory: evolution.

It’s not the sort of subject you want to bring up on a first date or, say, in the dentist’s chair, attitudes being what they are these days. But this is not new. Darwin put off publishing “On the Origin of Species” for 20 years because he knew that once he did, what followed would be the cultural equivalent of a giant record needle scratch sound effect. And he was right. And that sound was followed by the din of all Christian humanity screaming at the top of their lungs.

Curiously, almost exactly 150 years later, theyʼre still screaming. Why this is, is a mystery to me. In 1859, you could understand the reaction. Here he was, overturning thousands of years of institutionalized belief and dogmatic conditioning. He was lucky not to have been burned alive, as he most certainly would have been just a few hundred years earlier. Galileo, who pulled pretty much the same surprise on this gang in 1610 with his notion that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, was forced by Inquisition thugs to take it all back, and even then he barely escaped with lifelong house arrest instead of the stake.

It took the Catholic church 382 years to grudgingly acknowledge that maybe Galileo had had a point (this was 23 years after the first moon landing). So maybe it’s not too surprising that so many Christians are still resisting Darwin’s genius. If the past is any measure, they’ll be throwing fits about evolution for another 233 years before finally coming around.

In the meantime, appalling numbers of people continue to pretend that the cornerstone of modern biology and the fundamental explanation for the staggering diversity of all past and present life on earth is nothing more than a conspiracy cooked up by scientists designed to separate people from their religion. Polls show that more than of Americans believe the world, mankind, and all creation came into being in a divine puff of smoke a few thousand years ago, and that none of the creatures in it, particularly us, have changed one iota since that moment. They attribute the entire fossil record to Noah’s flood, wave away radiometric dating as too complex to make sense, and explain vestigial limbs in whales as God’s idea of fooling around.

Many of them are convinced that in order to acknowledge the incontrovertible physical evidence of evolution in the fossil record and in the DNA of all creatures (and it is incontrovertible), you also have to become a card-carrying atheist. But that’s just plain silly. Many of the the world’s most intelligent, eloquent spokesmen for evolution have mused on how the wonder of Darwin’s revelation, in its sublime beauty and elegance, makes them more likely to believe in a Creator, not less. And I ask you: how much more amazing is a God who set into motion such a remarkable process than one who merely snapped his fingers and called it a day? Even the Catholic church, that paragon of scientific enlightenment, recently noted for the record that as far as it’s concerned, Genesis and evolution are as compatible as milk and cookies.

The genius of evolution by natural selection lies not just in its simplicity but in its simple plausibility. It’s not difficult to grasp, at least not in its fundamentals. And when you do understand it, it makes perfect, beautiful, exquisite sense.

Yet deniers persist, even flourish. Ideology turns out to be much stronger than scientific evidence, at least when that evidence is twisted, suppressed, ignored, unseen, or willfully misinterpreted, as it is every day by people who feel their own ideologies are threatened by the fact of evolution. Part of the problem is that, the Pope’s copasetic attitude notwithstanding, lots of the more fundamentalist brand of Christians feel that learning anything at all about evolution would be like having dinner with the Devil. As far as they’re concerned, the less they know the better. As a result, there’s a frightening gulf of ignorance among people about just what evolution is and how it works.

Also, there’s the inconvenient issue of the Bible having its own version of how things got kicked off, a version literalists tend to take, well, literally. If the Bible contradicts an overwhelming body of evidence and the world’s entire scientific community, to them that can only mean the scientists are either all wrong or all lying.

“Evolution is only a theory,” they like to say say. Well, sure, but in scientific terms so is Relativity. E = MC² = “theory.” That’s the way science works. Scientists are always open to the idea of somebody finding hard evidence that changes the whole ballgame, so they’re unwilling ever to sound too positive about anything. But you don’t hear Christians questioning the scientific validity of what will happen if a nuclear bomb is dropped on their head. That’s only because the Bible is strangely silent on the subjects of Relativity and quantum physics. If Genesis had suggested the sun was made of the fiery flatulence of heavenly angels, you can bet that today we’d be arguing over whether to teach astronomy in public schools. “Nuclear fusion is only a theory,” they’d say.

So I’m gratified beyond words when I see people standing up publicly for reason, common sense, and the willingness to actually use the mental faculties that we’ve been endowed with. One of my favorite of these people is Olivia Judson, the author, journalist, and evolutionary biologist who’s been writing a weekly column for The New York Times since January called The Wild Side.

One of the great things about Olivia is that she’s not preachy or didactic; her columns are usually about the wonder and the majesty and, yes, sometimes the mystery of the evolutionary process, from its business at the very bottom of biological systems, at the level of DNA, to its operation at the top, at the level of hungry crocodiles, intestinal parasites, blind salamanders and serenading humpback whales. But yesterday’s column was an exception, and a welcome one. In it, she argues for the critical importance of teaching evolution in schools, for having the courage to pit 3.8 billion years of irrefutable evidence against blind ideology and see which one emerges victorious. I’m pasting it below so you can read it (and please, for all our sakes, do) without clicking all the way over the The New York Times’ website. I hope they don’t mind.

My hometown friend Ida Becker is traveling the globe on a personal mission right now. She’s asking people everywhere she goes to tell her one thing they believe with all their heart. “With no criteria or requirements for participation,” she asks, beyond simply stating “something that particular person believes to be true.”

Ida’s a long way away at the moment, in Thailand, and she’s not likely to be in Vietnam for several more months. But I’ve thought about her challenge for a long time. And I’ve often thought that if I were asked to choose one thing that I believe in with my entire body, heart, and mind, it would be that evolution by natural selection is the single most marvelous, transcendent, influential, beautiful, paradigm-changing, life-affirming idea ever conceived by a human being. Bigger than fire, bigger than the wheel, bigger than sliced bread, Darwin’s revolutionary epiphany lifted humanity to an entirely new plane of intellectual and spiritual existence and, at long last, told us where we had come from. Evolution is the best and most important thought ever thought.

Yet as Judson and many others have observed, the field of evolutionary biology has made astonishing progress since that first light went on 149 years ago. In the intervening years, thousands of people have refined, elaborated upon, and transformed that most excellent of thoughts into an entire new realm of scientific inquiry. The understanding of evolution today has about as much in common with Charles Darwin’s original idea as an F-18 fighter jet has with the Wright brothers’ first flying machine.

Incidentally, you might ask where God fits into all this. The answer is, anywhere you like. Not least of the wonderful things about evolution is that it doesn’t require God - but it doesn’t preclude Him, either. And that’s fine with me.

******

Optimism in Evolution

By OLIVIA JUDSON

Published: August 12, 2008

LONDON

When the dog days of summer come to an end, one thing we can be sure of is that the school year that follows will see more fights over the teaching of evolution and whether intelligent design, or even Biblical accounts of creation, have a place in America’s science classrooms.

In these arguments, evolution is treated as an abstract subject that deals with the age of the earth or how fish first flopped onto land. It’s discussed as though it were an optional, quaint and largely irrelevant part of biology. And a common consequence of the arguments is that evolution gets dropped from the curriculum entirely.

This is a travesty.

It is also dangerous.

Evolution should be taught - indeed, it should be central to beginning biology classes - for at least three reasons.

First, it provides a powerful framework for investigating the world we live in. Without evolution, biology is merely a collection of disconnected facts, a set of descriptions. The astonishing variety of nature, from the tree shrew that guzzles vast quantities of alcohol every night to the lichens that grow in the Antarctic wastes, cannot be probed and understood. Add evolution - and it becomes possible to make inferences and predictions and (sometimes) to do experiments to test those predictions. All of a sudden patterns emerge everywhere, and apparently trivial details become interesting.

The second reason for teaching evolution is that the subject is immediately relevant here and now. The impact we are having on the planet is causing other organisms to evolve - and fast. And I’m not talking just about the obvious examples: widespread resistance to pesticides among insects; the evolution of drug resistance in the agents of disease, from malaria to tuberculosis; the possibility that, say, the virus that causes bird flu will evolve into a form that spreads easily from person to person. The impact we are having is much broader.

For instance, we are causing animals to evolve just by hunting them. The North Atlantic cod fishery has caused the evolution of cod that mature smaller and younger than they did 40 years ago. Fishing for grayling in Norwegian lakes has caused a similar pattern in these fish. Human trophy hunting for bighorn rams has caused the population to evolve into one of smaller-horn rams. (All of which, incidentally, is in line with evolutionary predictions.)

Conversely, hunting animals to extinction may cause evolution in their former prey species. Experiments on guppies have shown that, without predators, these fish evolve more brightly colored scales, mature later, bunch together in shoals less and lose their ability to suddenly swim away from something. Such changes can happen in fewer than five generations. If you then reintroduce some predators, the population typically goes extinct.

Thus, a failure to consider the evolution of other species may result in a failure of our efforts to preserve them. And, perhaps, to preserve ourselves from diseases, pests and food shortages. In short, evolution is far from being a remote and abstract subject. A failure to teach it may leave us unprepared for the challenges ahead.

The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence - or indeed, evidence of any kind - has permeated the Bush administration’s policies, from climate change to sex education, from drilling for oil to the war in Iraq. A dismissal of evolution is an integral part of this general attitude.

Moreover, since the science classroom is where a contempt for evidence is often first encountered, it is also arguably where it first begins to be cultivated. A society where ideology is a substitute for evidence can go badly awry. (This is not to suggest that science is never distorted by the ideological left; it sometimes is, and the results are no better.)

But for me, the most important thing about studying evolution is something less tangible. It’s that the endeavor contains a profound optimism. It means that when we encounter something in nature that is complicated or mysterious, such as the flagellum of a bacteria or the light made by a firefly, we don’t have to shrug our shoulders in bewilderment.

Instead, we can ask how it got to be that way. And if at first it seems so complicated that the evolutionary steps are hard to work out, we have an invitation to imagine, to play, to experiment and explore. To my mind, this only enhances the wonder.

Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion.

While I’m on the subject of motorbikes, I was musing recently that it’s been nearly a year since I’ve driven a car. Not in itself an earth-shattering piece of news, I know, but it’s one of those little things that you catch yourself missing every once in a while, along with such things as convenience store hot dogs, American football (to the rest of the world, “football” means only one thing, and the NFL doesn’t enter into it), un-subtitled Hollywood movies, and non-smoking sections.

That got me thinking that I’ve got an anniversary of sorts coming up - it was on August 14, almost one year ago, that I landed in Narita Airport in Tokyo and began doing whatever it is I’ve been doing with my life since I’ve been in Asia. It’s a pretty significant milestone. One whole year. That’s longer than some people spend in prison, or getting a master’s degree, or married. So I was thinking that I need to do something significant to acknowledge it. Not just throw a party or bake a cake or go to Bangkok and spend a memorable evening trying not to contract Hepatitis C, but something more lasting. (Yes, smartass, Hepatitis C would fit into the “lasting” category, but I’d prefer something I could share with my grandchildren, thanks very much.)

So I’ve almost convinced myself that I’m going to get a tattoo.

Yes, go ahead, make another Hepatatis crack. I’ll wait.

Got it out of your system? Good. And while you’re at it, ask yourself this: Is Hepatitis really something you want to joke about? I’d be knocking on wood if I were you.

Back to the tattoo. For starters, I don’t have any others. I was never really a tattoo kind of person. Back when I was a kid, they were the sure sign of somebody who was not to be messed with, someone who had probably been to prison, drove a loud motorcycle, ate glass shards with bourbon for breakfast, and looked for fights in which he could headbutt his opponent. I didn’t want to be mistaken for that guy. Then, later, when I was an adult and tattoos became trendy and ubiquitous … well, you can see the problem. Tattoos were trendy and ubiquitous. I didn’t want to be mistaken for that guy, either. So it just went on like this all of my life, with me never really regretting not getting a tattoo, never feeling like I was in desperate need of something that, when I was old, would look like there were melted crayons running down the folds of the skin on my back.

So were I to actually get one, it would be my first and, presumably, my only. I can’t really see one small tattoo becoming an addiction to ink or a gateway drug to multiple body piercings and suspending myself from hooks. On the other hand, I bet people who suspend themselves from hooks said the same thing once.

There’s also the issue of what kind of artwork I’d choose. Something traditional? Something “tribal”? My name translated into Asian characters? Could be risky. I heard from too many Japanese people who’d seen Americans walking around with magnificent kanji characters encircling their neck or bicep that translated as “TOILET DRINKER” or “PLAY MYSELF ALWAYS” or “BELLY BUTTON KING.”

And of course, joking aside, I really, really don’t want to catch a blood borne disease that will remain with me for probably as long as the tattoo. Here in Southeast Asia, hygiene is often a difficult concept for common individuals to grasp, to say nothing of restaurant workers. Extrapolating from this, I’m guessing medical-level sterility is an abstraction on a level with quantum electrodynamics.

The upshot is it’s still just an idea I’m toying with. Part of me hates the idea of joining the ranks of millions of brainless, attention-seeking fraternity dickheads, even if I’m not sporting “sleeves” and never, ever call it a “tat.” But I’ve got to do something to mark a year as a stranger in a strange land. One day, I want to be kicking back with my grandkids - or more likely, my sisters’ grandkids - take off my shirt, and watch them gape. “What’s that on your back, grandpa?” they’ll ask in hushed voices.

“What, that old thing?” I’ll ask, casually flexing my arms and watching their eyes pop. “That’s a memento of mine, a little something from when I was a young man and I spent a year in Asia.”

“Really?” they’ll say, agog. “What’s it say?”

“It says, ‘REMEMBER YOUR ANTIVIRAL DRUGS.’”

Looks like itchy-footed New York Times’ scribe Matt Gross, a.k.a. the Frugal Traveler, is kicking off his latest budget pilgrimage for the paper’s travel section, and it’s a biggie: a 12-week circuit of Europe, modeled on the age-old Grand Tour - the venerated solo trip around the contininent that young Englishmen and women of yore undertook as a kind of on-the-road finishing school. Basically it was a chance to get up to no good, sow their oats and poke fun at the locals, all in the name of rounding out the ol’ “education” on daddy’s credit. Some things never change.

Ah, the European summer. It puts me in mind of my own three-month Grand Tour long, long ago, when I was just out of college - fresh-faced, naïve, horny and idealistic, not necessarily in that order. This, of course, is in the distant prehistory of 1991. But some things never change.

It was my first trip outside of the U.S. I didn’t model it on any legendary historical precedent, but it was still pretty grand. Mine started at the beginning of June in Luxembourg. (What? Why Luxembourg? If you must know, IcelandAir offered rock-bottom European rates at the time, with a stopover in Reykjavík and a terminus in Europe’s least sexy city. Hey, it got me there. As I said, this was a while back.)

I put chilly, dreary Luxumbourg behind me as quick as I could and headed immediately for, well, Normandy, France. Not finding it any different from Luxumbourg in any material sense, I recalibrated my inner compass and made a beeline south, toward warmer climes and less prudish female beachgoers.

The next three three months were chock-a-block with your standard inventory of backpacker adventures: youth hostel lockouts, topless beaches in Portugal, stolen passports, overseas romances, topless beaches in France, a hike along the Cinque Terre, de rigeur museums in Florence and Rome (plus a stop in Spoleto, Italy), pastoral Swiss mountain scenes, a very blurry weekend in Amsterdam, Eurodisco fever, running out of money, having my altered Eurail Pass confiscated by eagle-eyed rail officials, and sleeping under the night sky atop a Paris Metro ticket station with a pair of pierced British lesbian hippies (maybe those last two are not in the standard inventory per se).

I saw London, I saw France, and I saw a cute FSU coed named Jenny Kissel’s underpants in Lagos, Portugal. (Actually, I didn’t see London.) All told, I traveled in a succession of third-class train compartments from France to Spain and Portugal, across to Austria and Switzerland, over the Alps to lurid, humid Italy and back up again through the bratwurst belt of Germany and Czekoslovakia (it was still just one country then), still further up into the Netherlands, on to Belgium, once again into Paris and, finally, to Luxumbourg again at the end of August. I was roughly two thousand 1991-era dollars poorer, but exponentially richer by pints of beer drunk, languages butchered, foreign women ogled, touristy sights seen, snapshots snapped (with actual film), borders crossed, hostels snuck into, kilometers logged, international horizons opened and exotic thoughts thunk.

I kept generally to the beaten path, but I also made a point of breaking from the well-trod tourist trail and striking out into the uncharted realms beyond the guidebooks’ smooth itineraries as often as possible. Here, I hoped each time, let there be monsters. Quite often, I found them, or anyway predators of a sort - an audatious, fearless pickpocket on a near empty bus in the middle of nowhere, Spain; another, even bolder larcenist who sliced the straps of six money belts and relieved their dozing owners of them following an evening at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich; and other, similar encounters.

But mostly I learned that the best way to see a place is to glance through the guidebook and then set it aside, letting your gut lead you where it will, following the invisible string that tugs at it. It doesn’t always yield the greatest number of famous sights notched, but it satisfies a more fundamental, limbic reason for why we travel. Even the most jaded, sunburned, souvenir-shlepping tourista feels this urge, though he may not recognize or acknowledge it.

When I returned from my 12 weeks in Europe, I was crushed to find that every single roll of film I’d taken was completely blank, every inch of it overexposed - ruined because an idiotic 22-year-old first-time traveler didn’t know how to properly load film into a 35mm camera. This mistake ate at me for years. Sure, I still had the journal I’d kept, and I glanced through it wistfully on occasion. But without the photos I’d taken, somehow it all seemed … irretrievable, lost forever to that fixed moment in time, that distant version of me.

Only long afterward did I realize what an excellent thing that is.

Incidentally, Jenny Kissel says hello.

Last weekend will probably rank among the very few of my stay in Japan, if not my life, that I remember long after I’ve forgotten almost everything else. I’m not at all sure that’s a good thing. I’m not at all sure about much, right now.

Sunday morning, I watched two Japanese Yakuza beat a man to death, or at least close to it, from a few feet away on a sidewalk in downtown Osaka. Later, I nearly got dumped into a prison cell and deported by Japanese Immigration.

I should mention that these were two unrelated events.

For the moment, I’m here to talk about the first one. I’ll have to come back to the other, which shouldn’t be a problem, as I’m still dealing with it. But more on that later.

Not to get too pop-philosophical, but I’ve spent a lot of the past 24 hours torn about even mentioning the events of Sunday morning. What does it accomplish? I sat with a young Japanese man who was lying on the ground, helpless, covered in blood and lymph and god knows what else and held his hand and talked to him because I was afraid otherwise he would die right there. And the idea that I could walk away from that and sit down and write about it on some online journal with a stupid name so anyone who reads this can get some voyeuristic frisson out of the story or, worse, think to themselves what a moving and exciting experience it must have been for me … well, it’s hard not to feel a little disgusted at that. This was a real human being, with an entire lifetime’s worth of thoughts and words and feelings leading up the moment where mine intersected with his. It wasn’t a movie or a videogame, though part of me had to keep reminding myself of that at the time, which itself was kind of pathetic and gross. When the paramedics finally took him away, I realized it was unlikely I would learn if he lived or not. I’m no doctor, but it wouldn’t have taken an expert to look at this man and know his chances were not very good. For all I know, he’s dead now. Mining all of this for blog fodder feels like a lot like spitting on him.

But another part of me feels compelled to say something about it. Perhaps it’s the writer in me, although that feels a little slimy, too, or maybe it’s just the occasionally lonely guy living in a foreign country where he still doesn’t know that many people and really has no idea what he’s doing with his life and sometimes gets homesick, especially when random chance brings him face to face with the bloody fact of life’s fragility and the utter inhumanity of the people we walk by every day.

So I’m writing about it, but I hope you can understand if I need to shelve the arch tone and ironic eyebrow for a few minutes. They’re not gone, just unavailable to me right now.

So let me start over. Early yesterday morning, I saw a man beaten nearly to death on a sidewalk in downtown Osaka. I don’t know who he was, what kind of a story he would tell, or even his name. For all I know, he may be dead now. If he’s not, and I’m guessing his chances were even at best, it’s possible I may have had some small part in that. I have no way of knowing. But I hope so.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be walking the deserted streets of downtown Osaka at dawn on a Sunday morning. The reason for this is less obvious than it sounds. Will and I had gone to the Shinsaibashi district the previous evening for an party hosted by one of the many international clubs there. From my apartment in Ibaraki, it’s about a 20-minute train ride into JR Umeda station in north Osaka. From there, it’s a 10-minute subway ride to Shinsaibashi, the after-dark destination of choice for Osakans.

A quick word about Osaka and Shinsaibashi: During World War II, the entire city of Osaka, like Tokyo and many others, was reduced to a pumice of ash and rubble by Allied firebombing, while nearby Kyoto was miraculously spared. Following the war, Osaka rebuilt itself in a more modern fashion. The pre-war temples, shrines, daimyo residences, bunraku and kabuki theaters, samurai quarters, merchant rows and geisha districts were gone. They were replaced by concrete, steel, plastic, glass, neon, and vulcanized rubber. Today, more money flows in and out of this one port city each day than all but eight nations on earth.

While the northern, or kita, section of the city is the home of most of the international businesses and the main two train stations, the southern reaches are where the city’s pulse is best measured. And that pulse beats strongest in the Shinsaibashi district, an urban love letter to self-indulgence and immediate gratification. The area is a maze of restaurants, bars, fashion boutiques, covered shopping arcades, open-air markets, frantic storefronts, 10- and 15-story buildings separated by about the width of a cat, a tangled arbor of power lines and telephone wires, signs and lanterns. Most of the action in Shinsaibashi, as in many Japanese cities, is either above you or below, because that’s where most of the floor space is. Walking into a restaurant or a bar on the 12^th floor of a building, or in a fluorescent-blasted arcade beneath the street, is as natural as visiting one at ground level anywhere else. The result is a labyrinth of narrow streets down which people drive a vehicle only if they’re willing to wait for several thousand pedestrians to step out of their way on each block.

So it’s a little ironic that at the end of this story I found myself almost completely alone.

Midnight, Saturday evening: Knowing that I was one subway ride and a train trip away from my apartment in Ibaraki, and also knowing that the last train leaves on Saturday nights at 12:41 a.m., I left Will in the arms of a tipsy Japanese flight attendant and headed for the subway. What I didn’t know was that for some reason the subway system in Osaka stops running at 11:45 p.m. on Saturdays. (This, again, is a country where bank ATMs stop operating at midnight and charge a service fee if you use them anytime after regular bank hours. I’ve found it’s best not to ask why, with these things, but simply to accept.)

The upshot of this situation was that I no longer had any way to get home - not until the subway started running again at 5 a.m. and train service between Osaka and Kyoto resumed at 5:30 a.m. (A cab ride from JR Osaka to my house, even in the very middle of the night, runs about seventy bucks, which is not an option.)

Unwilling to return to the bar and continue throwing money away on drinks for another five hours, I decided to wait it out. This I did, vagrant-style, on the steps leading down to the subway entrance. I even managed to sleep a bit, awkwardly, just another drunken, passed-out idiot American, as far as the people who spotted me down there were probably concerned.

At 5 a.m., the metal gates to the subway entrance screeched open, and I stumbled in, exhausted, sore, and slightly hungover.

Thirty minutes later, I was still exhausted, sore, and hungover, but now I was lost, as well. Somehow I’d got turned around in the labyrinthine subway network and had emerged from an exit I wasn’t familiar with. I knew I was close to JR Station, but I was going to have to hoof it for a while until I spotted one of the signs I needed to point me there.

A few minutes later, I climbed out of the subway into the bright morning sunlight and saw an overpass which I thought might be the right way. As soon as I was on it and up above the street, though, I could see it led off in entirely the wrong direction. It was 5:30 a.m. and the streets were deserted; there wasn’t a soul around at this hour. I decided to turn around, retrace my steps, look for a sign I may have missed.

At that moment, I heard a commotion on the sidewalk below me, a scuffling on the concrete, accompanied by gutteral Japanese. I leaned over the railing and looked down.

Almost directly below me, a young Japanese man lay writhing on the sidewalk. Two other young men, wearing t-shirts that showed off sleeves of black tattoos running down their arms, were kicking him mercilessly, while a dyed-blond Japanese girl in heels and a skirt stood watching nearby, looking sick. In the street beside her, a black car with its doors flung open idled next to the sidewalk.

Twice the two thugs walked away from the man on the ground, only to return again and start kicking him again. The man was little more than a rag doll, barely moving except when he was kicked. Mostly they aimed for his head.

How long this went on, I don’t know. Ten seconds? Thirty seconds? A minute? At some point, I realized it couldn’t be allowed to continue. There was nobody around, not a person in sight who could do anything but me. Without thinking, I walked down the steps of the overpass and around the corner at the bottom. I walked toward the man on the ground, who was lying completely still now.

One of the thugs was coming back for another go at him, and he didn’t see me until I was just a couple of meters away. I stopped at the man lying on the sidewalk and raised my hands to the approaching man with my palms out, a mute plea. I said nothing. He stopped and looked at me for a long moment. I can’t remember anything about him, not his face, not the look in his eyes, nothing. Just the tattoos, and that he didn’t seem angry, but content with what he’d accomplished and glad to be given the excuse to move on.

After a moment, he nodded once, cursed at the man on the ground and turned away. The two men stuffed the girl in the idling car, climbed in, and drove off. I was left alone with the man on the sidewalk.

I crouched down and looked at him. He was breathing, barely, and his eyes were open, though there was blood and tears and something yellow leaking out of them. His face was cut and bleeding and misshapen, and I could see a sickening bulge on his head beneath his short-cropped hair. There was blood all over his shirt and pants and on the sidewalk. He lay on his back, unmoving, and his eyes were half-lidded, glassy and unfocused, looking straight up. It occurred to me that he was probably in shock. I had to call someone, the police or an ambulance or someone, but I didn’t have a cellphone and I couldn’t see anyone on the street. I was afraid to leave him to look for help, but I didn’t know what else to do.

Suddenly I was joined by another man, who kneeled down on the other side of him. He was asking me something that I didn’t understand, and then he had a cellphone out and he was speaking in rapid-fire Japanese to someone. Then, just as quickly, there were other people standing around us, cellphones also out, or just standing quietly and looking horrified. I remember feeling completely, utterly helpless to do anything, and I looked down and saw that I had one hand on his chest and with the other I was holding his hand. But he wasn’t holding back.

Then I noticed that his eyelids were closing, slowly, and his eyes had rolled back in his head slightly. I said something to the other man crouching over him next to me. “Don’t let him go to sleep. He has to stay awake.” He seemed to understand. I slapped the hand I was holding several times, hard, and the man beside me did the same with the other hand. I reached over and patted his checks as roughly as I dared, not knowing if his neck was broken, not wanting to hurt him any more than he already was, but desperate to keep him from slipping into unconsciousness.

“Here!” I said. “Here! Stay here!” Or something like that. I can’t remember. But he opened his eyes slightly, and I hoped it meant that he’d heard me and could understand. A few moments later, the police arrived, and right behind them was an ambulance. Not more than six or seven minutes had passed since the man with the cellphone next to me had called them.

The police began asking questions of the people in the crowd, but I couldn’t understand any of it, so I ignored them. Two or three EMTs hustled out of the ambulance - I remember thinking how odd it was that it was baby blue, not white - with a stretcher and a neck brace. They placed the brace around his neck, then, faster than I could believe, he was on the stretcher and had disappeared into the vehicle. It sped off, and I stood by myself, the white sidewalk around me spattered with blood, everyone there talking to someone except me.

The police were taking statements from people. One of them was talking to the man who’d crouched beside me. I had no idea what they were asking, what they were saying. I felt a brief spasm of frustration that none of them seemed interested in speaking to me, but then I realized it didn’t matter. What could I say that could make the slightest difference? They’d been Japanese. They’d had tattoos. They’d beaten him savagely. And now he’s on his way to a hospital, blood and yellow stuff leaking out of his eyes, his head looking like it had been attacked with a steel pipe. Nothing I could say could possibly make any difference one way or the other for him now. He would either die or he would not.

Suddenly I wanted to get out of there very badly. I turned and walked away, and nobody stopped me.

My mind wandered, spinning. I let it go, not yet ready to allow it to settle on any single line of thought. I was wary of what might happen. I didn’t want to start crying in the middle of Osaka station, and I could feel it back there, lurking, waiting for a chance to rush me.

Who was he? How had he gotten there? What unknowable sequence of events had led him through the preceding hours, days, months, years to that moment, alone and helpless but for a complete stranger from the other side of the world, who had no good reason to be there that morning, no reason even to be in this country, lost and alone himself, trying only to get home with as little difficulty as possible? Did somebody love him? Did somebody wait for him? I looked at my hands and saw I had his blood on me.

I walked until I had no idea where I was, and then all at once it was Sunday morning, just after dawn, and the city was was empty except for a few early risers rushing to get somewhere on a gorgeous blue spring day.

I spotted my sign and followed it. I bought a ticket and waited in line and got on my train. Around me, people dozed and read newspapers and typed furiously into their cellphones, immersed in the inconsequential, forgettable ephimera of life.

The train rumbled north.