The Clock That Tamed My Days

The first clock I remember had two metal bells on top that looked like ears. It sat on the table beside the couch where I slept, and its face never moved. It clicked through the dark at night, one sound for every second I wasn’t a person yet.

My dad would sit on the edge of the couch and put a hand on my shoulder. He smelled like cigarettes and the kind of coffee that takes twenty minutes to drip. He didn’t say much. Just dậy đi. Rise now. He said it in the same voice every morning, soft and steady, like he was afraid of waking something else in the room.

I was four. We’d been in Canada less than a year.

In Vietnam, the sun did the job of waking people. Roosters made the calls. A man on a loudspeaker at six in the morning told the whole street when to get up. Everyone heard the same announcement. Nobody was late, because no one was separate.

In Canada, the clock rang and the room was cold and nobody heard it except us.

The lessons the bells taught

I didn’t like the clock. I respected it the way you respect a teacher who never smiles. I learned to set my breathing to its tick. Four ticks for a short breath. Seven for a longer one. If you held to five you felt brave and a little stupid, which is the feeling most of childhood runs on anyway.

My dad trusted it the way farmers trust the weather. He never yelled at it. He never wound it early. He never resented it on a Saturday, even though a Saturday should have been a day without a clock. To him, the bells were a promise kept. A country that told you when to get up was a country you could live in.

I didn’t understand that for a long time.

Canadian mornings

On TV, people woke up with their hair already done. They had clean shirts and smiling spouses and children who already knew their lines. In our apartment, my dad drank his coffee standing up, my mom packed lunches that smelled like something the other kids didn’t know how to react to, and I put my socks on with the urgency of someone who was going to be late for something important. Usually school. Sometimes just the bus. The bus driver didn’t wait. The bus driver was Canadian.

School was time divided into blocks. Bells rang and teachers called it education. I wasn’t a great student. I liked watching people more than watching words. I’d listen for ten minutes and then drift for five. I’d come back when someone said my name, which they pronounced like it was a question.

The clock helped. It kept me seated. Seated kids notice things. I noticed who cried before lunch, who lied about their weekends, who pretended to read. I didn’t become the smartest kid in class. I became the one who could tell you what the smartest kid looked like when he didn’t know the answer.

The call centre

My first real job was at a call centre. Time became a score. Calls were seconds. Breaks were minutes. A computer counted both. My headset was a long leash.

Thanks for your patience. My name is Roy. How can I help you today.

Some callers had the same clock I did. You could hear it in how they apologized for calling. They didn’t want to take up your minutes. Others had a different clock. They’d hold the line for forty minutes waiting for a supervisor like they had all the time in the world, because they did. I learned that the people who treat your time as a resource are usually the ones who’ve never had to watch someone else’s clock run down.

I got good at the work. I got better at the mask. I could be warm for the length of a call and then fold that warmth back into my chest when the call ended. I was proud of it until I wasn’t.

Around month eighteen, a woman called to yell at me about a fee she didn’t recognize. I resolved it in four minutes. She thanked me. She cried a little. I said, in the voice that meant nothing, that I understood. Then I ended the call and watched the computer start its timer on the next one.

I didn’t feel anything about her for thirty seconds. Then I did.

That was the first time I understood that the clock wasn’t counting the work. It was counting how much of me was still in the room.

The grid

I took the headset off eventually. I moved into roles where the clock meant something different. Meetings. Calendars. Reviews. The clock became a grid. Other people’s time started showing up in boxes next to mine.

I had to decide what to do with those boxes.

The version of me who’d been raised by the bells wanted to fill every box. Reward the diligent. Punish the late. Enforce the kind of rigor that had kept us fed in a country that didn’t owe us anything.

But there was another version of me. The one who sat on the couch while his father’s hand rested on his shoulder. That version knew the clock was never the point. The hand was.

You can tell the difference, later, between a manager who treats time like a resource and one who treats it like a signal. The first runs a clean operation. The second ends up with a team that will stay through things the first one never even hears about.

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Saigon now

I live in Saigon now. I walk out of my apartment in the mornings and the city is already moving. Scooters turn at speeds that wouldn’t be legal anywhere else. A man sells sticky rice from a cart that has a small radio playing a song I don’t recognize. The old woman who ran a pho stall on my corner closed last month. Nobody knew until the stall didn’t open.

The pace here isn’t slower than Toronto. It’s denser. More happens per minute because more people are trying to do something with their minute. But the clock doesn’t interrupt. The clock is just what you work around while you do the actual business of being a person.

I eat lunch in an hour that a Toronto office would call two and a half. I take a coffee the way my dad would have recognised, sitting down, not standing, letting the drip happen. My mother would ask me why I wasn’t rushing. I’m not rushing because I used to.

What the clock was actually for

Here is the thing I wish someone had told me when I was four and listening to the bells ring through a thin Canadian apartment wall.

The clock doesn’t tame you. Other people’s expectations tame you. The clock is just the instrument they use.

When you understand that, you can pick up the instrument yourself. You can set it for the things that matter. You can ignore it for the things that don’t. You can hold your meeting at 8:30 sharp and then let the conversation run long when the conversation deserves it. You can end a call in four minutes when four minutes is what someone needs, and let it run to forty when they need forty. You can be both Canadian and Vietnamese about time, which is a thing my dad would have laughed at, because to him those were the same thing. You just had to know which one the moment called for.

What happened to the first clock

The first clock is gone. I don’t know where it went. Some moving truck, probably, or a thrift store in Scarborough where a stranger wound it up once and then didn’t.

I hope whoever owned it next felt the same thing I did when the bells rang. That something in the room was paying attention to you whether you earned it or not. That the morning came anyway. That you could still be in it.

My dad kept that clock for almost a decade. Long after we’d moved to a bigger apartment. Long after we had a coffee maker that beeped. Long after the digital ones were cheap and everywhere.

He kept it because it worked. And because someone had sold it to him in his first month in Canada, and the person who sold it to him had been kind.

He never said that. I figured it out years later.

What is the first object you remember trusting?

Roy Tran
Beyond the Title