Ho Chi Minh City does not pause for you to catch up.

The motorbike is not transport here — it is the unit of life. Everything moves on two wheels: school runs, grocery hauls, egg deliveries, construction materials, entire livelihoods. A man balances a tower of egg cartons strapped to his back, cigarette in his mouth, weaving through an intersection like it is the only way this could have gone. Two riders carry a long metal ladder between them, one hand each on the bars, the other steadying the load. Nobody looks alarmed.

What strikes you is not the volume of it. It is how ordinary it all is.

A fruit seller pedals her bicycle across an open junction — the city's skyline rising behind her, though she isn't looking. She has places to be. And then, in the same city: a man asleep on his scooter, one foot propped against a pillar, the traffic surging past him without a second glance.

This is what Saigon gives you when you stop moving and start watching — a city that is always at full speed and somehow always at rest at the same time. People carrying impossible things without complaint. Families of three on a single bike. A young boy waving from a sidewalk for no reason at all.

The street is the living room here. The office. The market. The quiet place between shifts.

I didn't look for stories. I just didn't look away.

Photographed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, by Syazni Aizat. (2015)