New Years In Hanoi
Vietnam’s City of Dignified Chaos
We came to Vietnam because it’s my fiancée Laura’s happy place. She worked here for seven months as a psychologist treating locals and teaching psychology and fell in love with the country and the people. She speaks Vietnamese and has close friends in Hanoi who are like family. Being here is like a homecoming to her.
My first impression of Hanoi: a bustling blur of activity. Motorbikes fill the streets. Hundred-year-old silt-covered crumbling French colonial homes and thousand-year-old Confucian temples line wide boulevards and a web of narrow ancient winding streets and alleys. Leathery old bicycle rickshaw drivers ride slowly down the street past massive rippling banyan trees that dangle vines over the sidewalk. Dignified old women squat on short stools at streetside food stalls sipping Pho noodle soup. Masses of teenagers dressed in navy blue and white traditional school uniforms sit outside corner cafes sipping lime juice. Ladies wearing iconically Vietnamese straw conical hats carry five-foot-long bamboo polls balanced over one shoulder weighed down on both sides with heavy baskets of herbs and spices. Sidewalk fruit vendors sell colorful fruits I’ve never seen or heard of. Just outside the city, farmers and massive oxen till rice paddies flooded with river water on land no doubt used for hundreds of years for this purpose only — now the encroaching Asian tiger economy is forcing the rice fields to share their land side-by-side with modern apartment buildings.
It’s a very long series of flights to get here and I’m exhausted before we arrive. The absolute first thing I see as we step outside the airport is a perfect harbinger of the wonderfully foreign bizarreness of modern Asia: a huge billboard over the airport parking lot warning us that trading rhino horns is punishable by prison time. I can’t help but smile. I like it here already.
Two hours after checking in to our hotel we’re picked up by Laura’s friends to celebrate the Vietnamese New Year, which just happens to fall on the day we arrive. I’m put on the back of a motorbike driven by an undercover narcotics officer who busts heroin traffickers on the Burmese boarder. Laura has friends in interesting places. She’s on another bike with her closest Vietnamese friend and ‘sister’ (wife of the cop), moving in and out of my focus as we fly through dense swarms of motorbike traffic down wide European boulevards past huge regal French colonial mansions, colorful kimono shops, cramped gong stores, aggressive street vendors, Chinese medicinal herb stalls, sleek Asian fusion restaurants, corrugated tin-roofed tenement apartment complexes and quiet parks polkadotted with palm trees and banana plants that shade old ladies practicing chi gung.
The motorbike congestion is so dense I can reach out and touch drivers on both sides whenever we’re stopped at a stoplight and so loud I can’t imagine anyone living nearby taking a nap during the day. Women in classy smart business outfits wearing pollution masks ride alongside men in dusty work clothes and teenagers barely old enough to drive — some people are riding three or four to a motorbike. I look to one side and there’s a family of four, one of the kids is fast is asleep sandwiched in between two parents. Another guy shares his motorbike with an eight-foot-tall potted kumquat tree.
New Year’s dinner is served at Laura’s friends’ apartment, a sweet loving family of five who dote on Laura, none more so than the cop. Grandma smiles wide and hugs us both. They love Laura. English is broken to non-existent. I have no idea what I’m eating but it’s pretty good. I find out later it’s pig’s ears — the family has conspired with Laura to keep me clueless until after I had swallowed a few bites, at which point they fill me in on the mystery and warmly crack up laughing after I assure them that it’s all good. A few days later all of us venture out to a restaurant that serves snail soup (tasty). The same place generously offers me fried baby pigeon (declined). They make a point of letting me know that this restaurant is known for its flavorful sheep’s penis (not on the menu that night). Yeah you read that right, local flavor doesn’t mess around.
Wandering through Hanoi, locals try to charge us inflated prices for all kinds of things. Laura schools them in their own language without breaking a sweat. Admonished, tails between legs, the real price gets agreed upon, then the seller breaks out in a smile, Laura does the same and both of them break out in laughter. They chat together before moving on. This happens over and over. A few words in Vietnamese and everyone loves her.
Here in North Vietnam nobody bats an eyelash when we say we’re American. It’s been forty years since the American War ended and everyone is too polite to remind us that we lost. Any inkling of a grudge is superseded by the knowledge that the choices our parent’s political leaders made have nothing to do with us any more than the choices they make have to do with their own government politics. But really it comes down to the international language of money — we’ve got it, they want it, and everything else is water under the canals.
If you live in Vietnam you don’t need an alarm clock to wake you up in the morning because the government does it for you. Six days a week at 6:45am loudspeakers all over the city blare a wake up bell, then a woman’s voice reads the news for the next half hour. Workers, get up in the morning! The government is a capitalist one-party dictatorship wrapped in the thinly veiled propaganda illusion of communism, like modern China. Separation of government and media is irrelevant — TV newscasters read the government-sanctioned evening news wearing military uniforms. But this is also irrelevant to many because barely anyone watches the news — most people are tuned to schlocky Chinese soap operas and MTV Asia.
Laura insists we visit the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, the single most important place in the city. A very, very long line equally split between locals on pilgrimage and tourists on holiday takes us into a classically faceless communist bloc architectural wonder, wherein lies the body of one of the biggest badasses of the twentieth century, fully on display for everyone to see, glazed and embalmed, almost fifty years dead. No amount of emphasis on how important this man is to the people here is too much — it’s not just a show of communist propaganda, Uncle Ho led these people out of an unbroken streak of a thousand years of slavery under the Chinese followed by protracted occupation by the French followed by twenty years of war with America. Stand up straight after you enter the building, no smiling, hands at your sides, no giggling, hats off, don’t smile, don’t step out of line, walk in lock step, don’t put your hands in your pockets, don’t smile. The rules are enforced. I get admonished by a cop for having my hands behind my back.
We spend days and nights walking through Hanoi. The city is lit up and glowing after dark for New Years. Local couples are swing dancing in a park late at night with music blaring out of nothing more than an ipod and a beat up old set of speakers — they invite us to join them, and we dance with them right there on the sidewalk. Hanoi is buzzing with local dance clubs and karaoke bars. It has a very international feel. Brazilian salsa hums outside an expat French brasserie. Partying kids cruise in and out of a middle eastern hookah lounge doing its best to conjure Dubai. Laura crashes in the hotel room late but I’m not tired. I head back out after midnight and settle into a dirty dusty fluorescent-lit bar full of locals all getting ripped on shitty Tiger beer, the Coors Lite of Southeast Asia. We toast each other without language.
