Blind to it All

Leigh Doughty
September 2021

They all sat around a table on small plastic chairs after a long day of teaching. There were twenty empty bottles of beer on the table and there was a crate of fresh bottles on the floor and a bucket of ice lay by its side.

The fans on the wall spun slowly and cooled nobody. They rolled up their sleeves and undid the top buttons of their sweat soaked shirts.

In the background a group of university students cheered, ‘mot, hai, ba, yo!’

The teachers joked about their days and what they’d seen. One teacher had a small Vietnamese boy vomit over his desk in the middle of class. Another teacher tried to outdo him and said he’d had a power cut after lunch that lasted an hour and he’d still manage to teach the class.

Halfway through his story the karaoke singer arrived.

The karaoke singer was blind and he pulled along a speaker on wheels that came up to the height of his chest. When he set it down he started to sing with the speaker at full volume right outside the bar. Nobody could hear anything but the music.

The blind man didn’t have a voice for singing but he sang anyway in some broken falsetto as a small and disheveled girl appeared with a hat in her hand and went round tables. Some people tried to ignore her and some people dropped loose change into the girl’s hat.

When she came to their table one of the teachers pretended not to see the girl. Another offered her a piece of chicken, and one slipped her a bank note and gave her a high five for which she accepted and then ran away from the strange foreign man in the sweat-stained shirt.

‘You shouldn’t encourage it,’ said one of the teachers as they took another sip of beer.

Once the girl had run back to the blind man, he’d finished his song and reached out for the money in the hat. She whispered something into his ear before he nodded and moved on down the road. He dragged the speaker along behind him as the small girl followed along.

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Leigh Doughty is a writer and language tutor based in HCMC, Vietnam. His work can be found in the VNexpress, The Good Men Project, and The Meridian. When he isn’t writing he can be found tweeting about books: @LeighDoughty

You can read his piece,
“Surviving and Thriving in a Vietnamese Public School” →

And other writing on:
The Good Men Project: “the converstaion no one else is having” →