My Long Lost Twin Brother

Yes, I finally found him. Here, in Hai Phong!

He’s actually from China. He’s here to study Vietnamese and is living in the same building as ours. Although he and I don’t have the same nationality, there’s a strange affinity between us. He waits for me outside our dorm rooms sometimes for hours in the cold at night just to wait for me to walk out so he can start a conversation with me in English. I am so busy with the Vietnamese students and don’t really have as much time to talk with him as he would want. One night, he showed up outside our gate asking me to help him understand a book he’s been reading. It’s a Chinese book that his old roommate bought at a bookstore in China but no longer wanted to read it and gave it to him and he has been reading it for a few months now but could understand very little. I don’t know any Chinese, and his English is extremely limited, so it has been hard for me to help him. So, we’ve just been trying our best to make time for him, and we actually had him over for dinner with us today. We also don’t know if he just wants to learn English or really wants to understand what he’s reading.

It’s funny that one time I came to class, and a student asked me what I was doing downtown the night before because her friend saw me there. I told the student I was not downtown, and her friend must have made a mistake. She insisted that it was me. Now having met my twin brother, I think it was him who went downtown that night!