Brown Eyes

I was introduced to Brown Eyes Bar in Huế, and to Mr. Phú, by a coworker from our Ho Chi Minh City office. She was from the area. She had gone to college in Huế and worked at his bar during those years. She spoke about him the way people speak about someone who mattered to them. After my first night with him, I understood why.

The first time I went, it was late and the bar was full. Music, travelers, the soft clack of pool balls somewhere behind us. When he learned I knew her, something in the room changed. He took me along the walls and stopped at photograph after photograph to find her. Here. And here. And here again. She was still everywhere in his place, years after she had gone.

We sat down with Vietnamese coffee and tea between us. We talked for over three hours.

He told me about the bar. About how his customers had changed since the pandemic. The travelers came in more guarded now, a little less open than they used to be. He was always watching, always adjusting. Not anxious about it. Attentive.

And he told me about the young people who worked for him. He said his job was not to make them into good workers. His job was to prepare them for their lives, wherever those lives took them. He used her as the example. He had moved her through different positions, given her different things to learn, because he already knew what she was going to become. He was right about her. I had seen the proof in our office.

At the end of the night he gave me a t-shirt, folded into a brown paper bag printed with the Brown Eyes logo. He told me, with some pride, that he had designed the logo himself. I still have the bag.

I came back later, after the tattoo and the sentence went viral. I think I went to the bar the way you go to a friend's house when something has happened to you and you do not quite know what to do with it yet. He was almost as excited as I was. He sat with me and said something I am still carrying. I wish I could say it the way he said it. I cannot.

What he said, in essence, was that there is a future already out there, present in the world, even when we cannot see it. Sometimes we are given a glimpse. When the glimpse comes, we have to grab it.

Then he was specific. Finish the book. Finish it quickly. He almost sounded disappointed that it was not already done. He told me the viral story was my signal. That the country, the river, the word, I had been trying to write about had answered me, and I was responsible to the answer now. Do not waste it, he said. Reach out and grab it.

I have thought about that night many times since. The first time I sat with him, he walked me along his wall to find a young woman we both knew. The second time, he walked me along a wall I had not known was there, and showed me where I was standing on it.

I am still working on the book. I think about him when the work is slow. I hear him say, in his bar, over the music, with the photographs of his young people watching from every wall, that the glimpse has been given and the only thing left is to reach out and grab it.