The night guard

Nobody acknowledges the nobility of subtle existence or quiet careers. Invisibility is mostly labeled as "lazy" or "losers," as corporate people mention in their shiny offices.

Photo by huanshi on Unsplash

It was hurricane night, and we were looking for a sheltered spot to park and spend the night. An old man from the nearby gate walked towards us, offering us a discrete site behind a high wall to avoid the wind. When we lay down and fell asleep from the window, the man stood tall in his guard station, observing a storm to come, a little man conversing with the unknown nature. His quiet posture lit a fracture of light into my darkened night.

*
Gate guards, station guards, or company guards are often invisible among people’s daily mingling. My father, a gate guard in his early career and a cemetery guard in his retirement, told me that he was happy to be invisible, meaning he didn't need to intervene in violent incidents or stressful encounters. A daughter of a guard, I unconsciously moved about my life without noticing the people of my father’s kind until I was twenty.

That year, I took a bicycle trip along the country, 70 days of 2,000km; I saw the world in the eyes of night guards.

One night, I stopped at a rubber plantation before reaching a small town. The rain bucketed down, and I couldn't see through the thick veil of water. I dragged my bicycle into the first line of rubber plants to pitch a tent. Sitting in the black curtain of torrents, I saw a human shadow. That person saw me because I had my light inside the tent, but I couldn't see him, which wrecked my nerves.

“Why are you here this time?” a man's voice tried to be on top of the water sound.

“Just travel by. I couldn't ride anymore, it was too dark and slippery,”

“I am the guard of this plantation. Can I go to your tent?”

Did I have a choice? I didn't because he already approached the tent door.

He explained that it was perilous to be in the rubber plantation because criminals passed this area very often at night. He said I could follow him home; he was with his old mother. They didn't have a bed, but I could sleep in their living area. Moreover, the flash flood might come that night.

He helped me fold the tent and push the bicycle toward the main road as the water had already risen over my ankle and the tires.

His house was a small shed made of aluminum and wood with advertising tarps to create a porch to sit out on sunny days. That night, the wind ripped the tarps into tattered flags. The lightbulb flickered and weakened. An old woman was sitting in the dark. He introduced me as a passerby and asked her to give me a towel.

The mother gave me a thin towel when I was in their tiny bathroom behind the shed. In the dark and exposed shadow of the lightbulb, I realized the mother had lost her eyesight, yet she found her way to the towel and gave it to me.

An instant noodle soup waited on the red plastic table when I walked out. The lady said, "Eat up. You will feel warm. Poor you, little girl. What are you doing there this night?"

The man was slurping noodles and talking at the same time that I was traveling by and needed a place to avoid the rain. He didn't describe the part where he found me in the middle of the rubber plantation and had to fold the tent with me as the water flooded.

Then they put a sedge mat on the floor, a blanket, and a pillow on top and asked me to sleep there. The water pierced through the roof, making the sound ask if thousands of shapeless feet were marching into my restless dream.

"I was relieved my son did the right thing to take you home. It was dangerous there," the old lady was unpeeling the fresh corn to cook us breakfast. Her eye cones were in murky white. She touched the corn hair to define which riped enough to peel.

Over the boiling corn, she told me that her son used to be a robber. He slept in the rubber plantation all day, waiting for the night, preying on unlucky people who passed through the endless tree maze at nightfall.

"He knew the place like the back of his hand until he was arrested," he robbed a motorcycle off a lady without realizing that when he jumped on her, she fell and hit her head on the rock. The woman suffered a coma, and the case was serious enough for the police to find out who caused the accident.

The mother went on to tell me she cried days and nights. First, the morning light blurred behind the door; then, it meshed into a bright empty space. At last, she lost her sight. She was so lonely when he was sentenced to five years in jail, in a prison eleven-hour bus ride from here amid the mountain range in Central Vietnam. Her eyes didn't let her visit him. He served the term, returning home to realize how time and loneliness consumed his mother. He knelt by her chair, swearing to be a good son and never rob again.

A little chill ran down my back. He was right that I shouldn't have set up my tent on the rubber plantation. He was right that the flood might have come. But most of all, he was right when he tried not to make me another victim of his past. At the time we met, he was working as a guard for the plantation owner. The job didn't pay much, but he got enough to care for his mom and spent time walking among the cool and greeny air of the endless tree path, where his youth made him into a robber and a caring son.

Before I continued my trip, the man taught me how to measure the other's intentions if I was in a vulnerable situation like that. "Never camp in the rubber plantation. Never camp near the highway, either. Talking to strangers as if you were waiting or coming to see someone local, your brother, your uncle, or your boyfriend, and mention are waiting for you," he counted each case with different scenarios.

When I left, the mother and son gave me some boiled corn for another meal. It was over 100km of rubber plantation whenever I crossed this part of Highway No.1. Its brown and green straight lines were the well-organized surface with chaos beneath, where the childhood of a guard was created and made when I met him. The imaginative life paths we often see in movies actually formed the man's choice to become his existence. I remember that guard decided to become a good man because his mother lost sight of him.

*

My father told me that the majority of his job was in solitude. It was a paradox because a company guard often sat in front of the company, greeting and meeting everyone who came and went. "Nobody really lay eyes on me. People think of a guard as a nobody who is low enough that they do not need to be in touch, yet they need this guy's approval to pass the gate for their business. Yet again, they know the guy doesn't have actual authority to stop them from passing the gate," he concluded.

On that same bicycle trip, once I slept in front of a community gate because there was no motel at the place, and nobody in the village wanted to let a stranger at their houses. I persuaded a shop owner to put my tent next to her gate so that I would be safe from some unpredictable situation. She shooed me away. I asked a church to sleep in their giant garden; the brother rejected it. "Too sensitive," he said, mentioning that local police didn't like the church to have strangers sleeping in without official notification days before.

Tired from the mountainous ride, I found an empty lot in front of the community gate to set up my sleeping spot. I decided to make it temporal so that if someone wanted to evict me, I move again. At 11 p.m. or so, an old man showed up and asked what I did there. He seemed to be frustrated and took a while to think; then, he asked me to move my sleeping mattress closer to his night guard post.

"If you don't mind, my post is next to the big tree. It is safer. You can sleep where I guard. Nobody would mess with you. They all know my post," he suggested.

I slept until 8 a.m. When I woke up, the old man already left. His co-worker from the morning shift shook his head, "Brave you, how dare you ride a bicycle in this area at night. We are afraid for you," then he gave me some steamed cassava wrapped in banana leaf, the breakfast from the old man. He told me tales of people getting robbed by mountainous thieves crossing by, not to mention frequent accidents caused by motorbikes because people couldn't see in the pitch dark.

The house of the old guard was on the way, so I dropped by to say thank you. He shrugged his shoulders and wished me luck on my trip. "I have a daughter studying in the city now. I always hope she would be helped when she needs it. You remind me of her," he smiled. They were farmers and only earned enough for the daughter to visit home once a year. He gave me her address in the university dormitory. Coincidently, she lived at the campus just next to my university.

After the bicycle trip, I visited the dormitory to see his daughter. I brought her some fruit and told her that I was grateful for her father. I didn't know if persuading her that her father had a noble job was enough. Most students from rural provinces were embarrassed by their parents' jobs, farmers, workers, vendors, and guards. I just wanted the fellow girl to know that her father helped a young girl in a vulnerable situation, and I wished she met good people in her life, just like when I met her father.

I have never had a good relationship with my father. He was not there when I needed him as a teenager. He was always "at the post". After that adventure around the country, I realized it was the reality of his job. He had to be at work all year round if he didn't get sick.

*

The guards’ subtle circumstances were not acknowledged by others related to them. They moved about invisibly beside others. If they had never been noticed, it was a good sign that the place had no serious security problems. Not until the unstable reality shows its true color do people realize their balanced existence is kept by those quiet guards.

The bicycle trip put me in different kinds of interaction with the night guards around the country. They were very aware of their surroundings. They care about everyone's safety, not just the property that paid them. They took care of people in a practical way, giving shelter, food, conversations, and situation evaluation. They care as the second nature of their career.

Most of the night guard jobs were paid poorly, and some companies even categorized this job as for "lazy people" and "they do not need to do anything." I overheard this many times in corporate environments, and I thought that stereotype added to my frustration toward my father's career when I was younger.

When I was at the university, my classmate was paid $5 to stay up all night at a construction site while a villa was being built. He made a spot inside the house to look out. He had to patrol three times before 6 a.m. “I saw how the villa gradually took shape. But when it was done and clean, I had to leave, moved to another pile of concrete and sand, all over again,” he laughed and mentioned that $5 helped him pay off three years of university before he graduated.

Some people live their invisible lives; like my father said, he liked it that way. Our society is built around people who make their prominent life, a life of fame, or a life of glamour on social media.

Nobody acknowledges the nobility of subtle existence or quiet career. Invisibility is mostly labeled as "lazy" or "losers," which means low payment as corporate people mention in their shiny offices.

But there were people like me, mostly saved by their invisibility and care.