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.

The product is manufactured from the modern technology chain; assuring the foods hygiene safety and obtaining high crispness and sponginess but always maintaining natural colour and flavour of fresh ripen fruits and especially the chemical substance is not used in the process of production. The ingredients of the product have many nutritive facts, Vitamin which are to necessary for human body and are also a delicious meal for tourists and travel days.”

What’s not to like?

It’s been a while since I mentioned it, but I have another blog - a sister blog to Man and Ultraman called The Daily Edamame. I once described that blog as “the lima beans to Ultraman’s corn” in an effort to make a succotash metaphor about the two, forgetting that a) edamame is made from soybeans, which makes for a confusing metaphor, and b) not all that many people really know what succotash is, and even fewer actually like it. The inevitable result is that people stayed away in droves from Edamame, worrying probably that it was a blog about obscure ethnic vegetable dishes.

Fear not. The Daily Edamame is nothing more than a photoblog featuring some of the many thousands of pictures I’ve taken since I’ve been in Japan and Southeast Asia. I’m not a professional photographer, which will be obvious, but every once in a while I get lucky. Now that I’m back in one place for a while and in possession of a new laptop, I thought it made sense to crank things back up. So forget everything you ever heard about beans and get over there, pinto. Er, pronto.

The wet season in Southeast Asia: obviating the need for daily weather reports since time immemorial.

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.’”

When I arrived in Vietnam eight weeks ago, one of the very first things I noticed was that, after 10 months in Japan, I was once again in a place where cars keep to the right side of the street. Which was a relief, as it had taken me months to get used to cars driving in the left lane, a learning curve during which I nearly lost my life daily, because I’d be looking down the street the wrong way, think to myself, Well all’s certainly clear in that direction, then step into the street and suddenly see my life flash in front of my eyes to the soundtrack of a blaring horn as I narrowly missed becoming a flattened pedestrian fatality. (On one hand, this was a great way to review the highlights of my life. On the other, some of the bits were a little boring, frankly, and it was always hard to buy new underwear in my size in Japan.) Also, it makes perfect sense in retrospect, but it took me a while to figure out that, just like in America, as things go on the street, so do they also go everywhere else. I was constantly running face-first into startled Japanese people who were walking, naturally, on the left side of the sidewalk, or the office hall, or the supermarket aisle. So while I thrilled at the idea of once again traveling on the unambiguously correct side of the street and escalator, I also worried about how long it would take me to unlearn everything I’d learning about walking in Japan.

I should mention that when I first noticed this, it was technically just a few moments before arriving in Vietnam, by which I mean landing, because I was peering down at the roads through the window of the airplane as we dropped toward the runway at Hanoi International Airport. There are two other interesting things I did not anticipate about Vietnamese traffic at this time, one of which I noticed from my seat in the airplane - that there were very few cars, but lots and lots of motorcycles - and the other one I didn’t notice until later, because it can’t be seen, only heard.

And what a sound it is. Vietnam is a symphony of noise, one in which the horn section dominates. Some horns are short, piercing exclamations, others are lengthy outbursts that go on long enough to shift into incredible new registers as their owners race past, clearly hellbent on either manslaughter or suicide. The sheer variety of horns is staggering. They honk, screech, blast, whine, and babble. They bellow and cough, shriek and wail, bark, burst, and ululate. Some produce malicious, angry noises that are the fingernails on a chalkboard of the horn world, while others have the gentle gravitas of an elephant melodically breaking wind. Some sound like geese that have been goosed.

They do not stop, except in the very small hours of the night, and then they merely subside.

All this honking actually serves an important purpose. There are 80 million people in Vietnam and 40 million 125cc motorbikes, all operating on roads that in many places are more pothole than pavement. When you pack that many two-wheeled vehicles together — many of them laden with assorted boxes, shrubbery, furniture, construction equipment, live farm animals, and often entire families of five — on narrow, neglected streets, you have an accident waiting to happen. Several million accidents, actually, all at once. But they don’t happen, or at least not on the scale you’d expect.

That’s because in Vietnam, honking one’s horn does not mean “Get out of my way, you irritating, brainless, steaming pile of retarded baboon shit,” the way it does in the U.S., but rather “Here I am, just so you know.” Besides being much friendlier, it’s also much more practical. In America, all honking accomplishes is to piss somebody off, dramatically decreasing the chances that they’re going to accommodate you in whatever way you’re hoping they will. Here it’s exactly the opposite. The system works a little like the way bats echolocate to keep their bearings, or the way fish use receptors in their skin to know what their immediate neighbors are doing so the whole school can turn on a dime. All that racket is just a giant conversation happening on the streets, which is a little ironic, as most of the drivers and their passengers are also busily conversing on their cellphones.

Figure also that road rules, as such, are all but nonexistent in Vietnam. Medians are an afterthought, stop signs are mere suggestions, traffic lights are a waste of electricity, and sidewalks are considered crucial parts of the roadway. Driving into oncoming traffic is a skill that’s seemingly taught from birth, as is the ability to drive at speed millimeters away from neighbors on five or six sides or weaving maniacally through traffic while your passenger sits sidesaddle on the back in heels and a short skirt, applying lipstick in a compact with the composure of a bored housecat. The Vietnamese government enacted a law last year that requires every motorcycle driver to wear a helmet, but this seems largely understood by the population to have been an ironic joke.

The one rule that everyone observes is that the bigger your vehicle is, the greater your claim to the road. Right of way is determined by size and size alone. A utility van defers to a garbage truck, and a Kia moves aside for the utility van. The pecking order proceeds down through the ranks of passenger cars, motorbikes, and bicycles, though it does allow an exception for the technically larger but slower moving cyclo - a motorized version of a rickshaw in which the passengers ride in front, facing the tumult head-on. (It probably goes without saying that tourists rarely ride in a cyclo twice.) At the very bottom of the hierarchy stands the humble pedestrian, who if she is wise hugs the side of the road and keep her head up, eyes peeled.

Strangely, this formulation changes once the pedestrian wishes to cross the street instead of to move with traffic. In fact, it’s upended altogether. Given the negligible reasons for traffic ever to pause, it does not, and so a pedestrian waiting for a break in the traffic to cross the street will wait a very long time indeed. Therefore, the way to cross a street is simply  - and for newcomers this takes a great deal of faith - to step into the street and begin moving toward the opposite curb. (If this seems counterintuitive from where you’re sitting, you should try it on a major Saigon thoroughfare.) The key, like swimming with sharks, is not to make any sudden or unexpected movements, and to maintain a slow, steady pace toward the other side of the road. Miraculously, the traffic parts around the person as smoothly as a stream flowing around a boulder. The result is a cacaphonic mechanical ballet that seems to defy the laws of space, time, inertia, causality and common sense. But somehow it works.

I owned and rode a series of motorcycles in the U.S. on and off for about ten years, so I thought I’d have a leg up when it came to renting one of the thousands of motorbikes available to visitors for $5 a day or so and zipping around Hanoi. It’s amusing, really, when I reflect back on my naive self climbing aboard that first scooter and looking forward to a day of carefree cruising, taking in the sights, the wind in my hair, or what’s left of it. I was still unaware that you age differently driving on the streets of Vietnam: one minute there is like a year in the real world. And that this speeded-up time is reflected daily in your physical appearance. I was oblivious also to the fact that letting your concentration on the road and the other drivers waver from 100 percent to 99 percent is akin to standing on a golf course clutching a steel pipe over your head in a thunderstorm.

I learned quickly. These days, I’m a different driver than I was in America. I climb sidewalks in my Honda Dream for the pole position beneath the red light, watching for a moment to dart into the oncoming traffic for a shot at jumping the median so I can beat the horse-drawn cart I can see hogging the road two blocks away. I fill my tank with petrol poured from a plastic one-liter Coke bottle at a “gas station” on the roadside before jockeying for street space with scarred, grizzled veterans of the road. And when I have a close call, which is often, my life flashes before my eyes, and I pay attention even to the boring bits, and the soundtrack is music, sweet music.