Back on the boat we managed to coerce the captain to drop anchor away from the other boats for the night so we could enjoy the peace and quiet a bit of solitude might provide from the obnoxious tourists aboard the other boats. We did stop away from the rest of the boats, but not quite far enough away. As everyone was standing on the roof of the boat contemplating whether or not to jump the whopping 20 or 25 feet, I got a running start from the other side of the boat and launched myself into the warm night air landing in even warmer water. Besides feeling like I was swimming in pee, it was extremely salty, so I became incredibly buoyant. I’m a terrible back floater usually but in this bay I could lounge around for hours on end without so much as an arm underneath me to keep pushing myself up. A few others followed in suit and finally jumped in, most of which were doing the stereotypical-one arm over their head, the other hand plugging their nose-dive, and a couple even screamed the whole way between roof and water. We all jumped and swam around for a solid 20 minutes when a couple of the people we were trying to stay away from came swimming over and asked if they could jump off of our roof. I assured them it would be fine, so they climbed up and jumped off, well, two of the three jumped off, the third one climbed down because she got scared. They were around my age and had American accents, so when the guy jumped off he swam over and we started talking. We rifled through the obligatory questions, “where are you from” being the key one here. As it turns out, when we cycled through the country, state, county and city that we were born and raised in, we both grew up in Huntington Beach, CA and knew a couple of the same people. I was absolutely blown away. I know it’s a “small world”, but holy shit. I was swimming in a bay half way around the world and I run into probably the only other Huntington Beach native in the country at the time. We spent a few minutes treading water, talking about our respective purposes in the country, mine, of course, was just to see it whereas he was working for the American embassy in Hanoi and he was living there for six months. He offered to buy me a drink when I came back through Hanoi, which I was fully entertaining the idea of, and then I got out of the water to climb up and jump off again.

Growing up in Huntington Beach was interesting. There are a great number of really cool people I grew up with who I still hang with on a regular basis; my very best friend is from Huntington Beach, however, the cool ones are definitely the exception rather than the rule. There is a very large concentration of “bros” in Huntington who have a bad reputation for being obnoxious, loud, pious, and tactless, driving raised white trucks with “SRH” stickers on them, wearing flat-billed baseball hats turned 45 degrees to one side with oversized dickies shorts, black socks pulled up and puffy skate shoes despite the fact that the vast majority of them can’t skateboard to save their lives. I’ve spent the better part of my youth doing everything in my power to not be a part of this uniquely grotesque subculture, and am perplexed every time I run into one of them by their demeanor, their lack of appreciation for things other than fake boobs and lifted trucks, and their rhetoric.

The Malay import had a very comprehensive appreciation for all things Western, including a lot of the slang and jokes used profusely in my hometown. He, like myself, was not a fan of the aforementioned type of people, and jabbed countless jokes at me about being American, especially being Californian, albeit his admittance that I was by no means a stereotypical Orange County guy.

That said, The Malay and I are standing on the roof of the boat, getting ready to jump, when the three roof jumping mooches from across the way announce that they will be swimming back over to their boat now, so we say farewell, and as a parting act of idiocy, my fellow guy from OC sticks a fist up in the air and yells, “Later man! Represent H.B. bro!”, which he said with absolute conviction, like, he isn’t just from H.B, he is FROM H.B. and it literally summed him up in one statement for me and innately placed him in the demographic which I just described. I was in shock for a second that he so quickly lost my respect, and I gave him a, “Will do, bro” from which he didn’t catch even five percent of my sarcasm. As the three of them swam off, I hung my head with shame and my Malay buddy nudged me and mimicked the guy, “Yeaaaaahh, H.B. bro!” Again, he had a very in-depth understanding of the jokes and slang from my part of the world, so he caught on to how shitty the call was. Having just spent the last few hours trying to convince this guy and the two Australian girls on board that all Californians aren’t like the kids in the show The OC, the one guy we run into in the middle of the ocean in Vietnam totally proves my point wrong.

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