Bathing By Lotus: Introduction To My Vietnam

Vietnam, my muse, gives me good reason to write.

Most of my life I never even imagined going to Vietnam, and, I grant you, this is not a destination on most people’s short list, which, for me, has been to my advantage: more for me to see without hordes of tourists getting in the way. At least in some places. “Why are you going to Viet-nam?” is a more common question. “What did you do to get sent there?” The names of few countries are as loaded, and people of a certain age still know Pleiku, Ashau, Ia Drang, Kon Tum, Danang. Hue and the Tet Offensive. The names are as exotic as the images are horrifying: a Buddhist monk in the lotus position going up in flames; a GI with a Zippo lighter setting fire to a thatched hut, and the final image of a helicopter rising off the top of the U.S. Embassy as Saigon fell.

 I went to Vietnam the first time at the suggestion of a college vice president as a part of a sabbatical, and I have returned again and again, so much so that I cannot imagine not returning. In fact, the suggestion that I go may have saved my intellectual life, if only because there was so much to make sense of.  Over the dozen-plus years, I have seen changes I never anticipated:  Hanoi’s No Bai Airport went from a two-room mold- and stain-covered concrete building left by the French  to air-conditioned glass and chrome, more Chicago’s O’Hare than O’Hare. Halong Bay now has luxury cruise ships, no doubt with every amenity and probably  chocolates on the pillow, but when I first visited, the boats were rickety, wooden but serviceable with no lifejackets on board—and in that context, lifejackets did not seem to matter.  They would have been superfluous. I had no doubt that I would be okay on a boat with someone who most likely lived on it. The boat was a chuggy motorboat.  In cities, beggars with one leg sat on the sidewalks and extended an upside down baseball cap; a woman with one eye proffered a little girl with a cleft palate, asking for alms. Compassion fatigue set in fast. Street kids sold Chicklets, lottery tickets, nests of baskets and trinkets even more than they do now.  If I tried to negotiate with a vendor about a pirated copy of Lonely Planet Vietnam, I got a story  from the vendor about not being able to pay for food to eat, but the last time I visited and made such an offer, I was told, on Le Loi, a main drag in Ho Chi Minh City, “That’s what I paid for the book,” as if her profit, or, generously speaking, the alleged economic fairness to both of us, was the main concern. Capitalism is now on the streets big time, or, as it is known, “the market economy.” When I first visited, the country had a dual pricing system: one price for Vietnamese, another price for everyone else. These days, many prices, like much in Vietnam, are often still negotiated, either in  U.S. dollars or in Vietnamese dong, and thus in flux; the value—and cost—of many items are determined by a combination of the buyer and the seller. And some are prix fixe, marked, which, frankly, does simplify things. The value of an object is labeled and it’s no longer possible for even the most puckish tourist to begin negotiating with “one dong”. (Currently the exchange rate is 21,000 Vietnamese dong to one U.S. dollar.)

I don’t know if this is what anybody anywhere expected when the U.S. and Vietnam normalized relations and signed a bilateral trade agreement in 2001. It is said that Vietnam has changed more in the past ten years than in the previous one hundred. More than half the country’s population is under thirty, which means they have no memory of what the Vietnamese call “The American War.”  My oldest friend in Vietnam is a daughter of one of John McCain’s former guards at the Hanoi Hilton—officially Hoa Lo, fiery oven, or Maison Centrale, according to the French who built it to incarcerate Vietnamese. After the war, her parents named her Binh, meaning peace. The Vietnamese have gotten over the war: “Let bygones be bygones,” I was told. Sixty thousand Americans died; ten percent of the civilian population of Vietnam was injured or killed and over a million Vietnamese, from both north and south, were killed.

What the Vietnamese call “The American War” is over, and although the Americans lost it, blue jeans, MTV, pop culture and the internet are winning the peace.

When I browse through Heritage, the Vietnam Airlines in-flight magazine, I hardly recognize the place since the magazine emphasizes the high-end that even I may well not be able to afford: resorts on Phu Quoc, in Hoi An and near Danang. The massive industrial zone north of Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, is getting even bigger. But even though the landscape has changed, I have a sense of where I am. T-shirts used to cost one dollar. Now they cost two dollars, minimum,  although if you buy a number of any item--for instance, of tourist-grade opium pipes--the vendor will most likely shave a few dong off the final price. The superstition continues that the first sale of the day will bode good or ill for the entire day—and so that first sale is important. Shops and street vendors used to sell local items, the stuff mostly for folks nearby—read that to mean cheap—and then, on the other hand, items for tourists: on the one hand, inexpensive polyester clothes, practical matching pants and shirts for women, the ao baba, and on the other hand, T-shirts saying “Hard Rock Cafe” or decorative mobiles fashioned out of small versions of the conical hats Vietnamese women wear, the non la.  These days, yes, those are all still there, but the shops are more likely stores with glass front windows, western copyright violation (probably) fashions, Pierre Cardin among them, and even security guards—one per store, it seems.  Labor is still cheap. The country’s goal is to be a developed nation by 2020. A shop in Hanoi was called fcuk, a local version of a European chain; it was there one year, gone the next.  Starbucks has arrived in that land of coffee and silk as have KFC, Pizza Hut and McDonald’s. The chain Pho 24 has over a dozen restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City alone, and in Can Tho City is a restaurant called Pho Cali (California), catering to upscale soup eaters in a restaurant joining the other hundreds of home-grown family-run soup shops. Coffee shops—where everybody hangs out—have gone wireless, zoomed along into the twenty-first century as the rest of the country moves into the industrial revolution, through  industrial zones where textiles, shoes and furniture are made, places  of cheap labor, many of them run by Japanese or Koreans. When I take my L.L. Bean “Made in Vietnam” duffle bag there, I tell myself it is going home. I have yet to see any copyright violation L.L. Bean products there. Apparently they are not in fashion.

The first time I went from Hanoi to Haiphong by car, the road was narrow and bumpy and a round trip in one day was just not an option. The ride was all rice paddies and power lines. These days, with the improved road—infrastructure is improving—it is easy to do the Hanoi to Haiphong round trip in one day, and the ride zooms past only a few rice paddies, side to side with vast industrial zones—read that to mean for the most part low-salary factories, including Ford. At the end of a shift, workers stream out to the street, the women walking arm in arm, some getting on bicycles and others on motorbikes.

Working in a factory, after all, is regular work. It is dry and clean and does not depend on the vagaries of nature. I have been told, though, not to mourn for the Vietnam I first fell in love with during my first ride in from the No Bai airport into downtown Hanoi:  the picturesque (to me) rice paddies, the world of the Stone Age on the edge of the now-paved highway buzzing with motorbikes; the shimmering rice paddies, water buffalo and yoke ladies (my favorite) are still there, behind the factories. They are still there, and, after all, it is the locals’ private, not public, lives that I take photos of even though I know doing so is rude. I know this. If situations were reversed and if a tourist wielding a camera in a car drove by my house and took pictures of me, for instance, trimming my hedge, I would feel annoyed. I would feel a certain invasion of my life, my space. (Actually, I once GoogleEarthed my home address and when I got to the street level, I saw my house and also myself getting groceries out of the car—so the car I had seen going by that summer day was in fact the Google camera car. So I can kind of appreciate why some people in countries other than Vietnam believe that taking a picture somehow takes the photographed person’s soul.) But most of the best moments aren’t in photos, those moments happily enough uncaptured except in memory.

But in Vietnam I continue to take photographs anyway. My God, given the beauty of the place, how could I possibly not?

At home I don’t like traffic or loud noises or crowds, but in Vietnam I negotiate all of these. I  accomodate. Once I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on a late night flight and when the taxi to my hotel started going the wrong way around the traffic circle in front of Ben Thanh Market, I knew I was back in Vietnam--and I did not worry for a minute.  Over the years I have seen traffic go from moving completely as sometimes-demented fish swim, with very few stoplights (if any stoplights) to some stoplights (in some places obeyed) and also well-intended one-way streets. I am told there is even the occasional traffic camera, certainly problematic when the electricity goes out. Traffic in Vietnam is the ultimate self-organizing system.  However, one way streets seem to be suggestions these days, and there is always the possibility that someone on a motorbike may choose to make her motorbike way up the street in the wrong direction, or even up the street on the sidewalk, also against street traffic. This is more possible than it used to be because in some places there are now parallel parking lines painted on one side of the street as well as a stripe down the middle of the sidewalk; the sidewalk near the street is for motorbike parking, the side near the building for everything else: for walking, for moving the ubiquitous low plastic furniture into, for crouching on, for hanging out.  And it can also be for zooming along on a 100cc motorbike if the furniture and trees and people allow. In Vietnam, much of life is lived on the street.

Speaking of trees—if I may digress--these days the trees in cities are all being numbered, so that, I was told when I asked, “We can take better care of them.” In Ho Chi Minh City, beautiful trees have lined the sidewalk since at least the French occupied the place, trees that provide badly needed shade and have white paint around their bases, from the ground to about four feet up their trunks, either so they can be seen at night or to ward off ants, depending on whom you ask. These trees now also have numbers  painted on them: 176. 176a. 177. The numbers are spray painted via stencil and are hard to miss. They do not add anything to the graceful trees, the wide sidewalks, and the French architecture—the  French, Chinese and ultimately hybrid Vietnamese ambience. My sense is the numbers are intended as part of the greening, if you will, of the country. I first noticed them even as I rode in from Tan Son Nhat Airport late at night, that time when the dark city under the ever-present fluorescents is shadowy shades of yellow and blue and grey.  Umber. Electricity tends to be expensive, but a light shines down on a group of men in low plastic furniture eating soup on the sidewalk. The light from a small house shop front room spills into the street. These days there is more neon, but even that does not obliterate the warm (comparatively) soft darkness, creating a place magical, a place where vegetation is always in bloom, a place closed but somehow open enough,  a place that lets a traveler know that, whatever else the place might be, this is a place of surfaces.

Surfaces and circles: the wheels of the cars and the motorbikes and the wheels of the cyclos, the pedicabs. It used to be said that the cyclos were driven by former South Vietnamese soldiers, all they had the means to do after they finished their time in the now no longer existing reeducation camps. But I have seen a one armed young man as a cyclo driver, a man twenty if he was lucky, and some of cyclos in Hanoi are increasingly new and shiny. Lines of them carry western tourists through the Old Quarter in Hanoi, the tourists with their cigarette box cameras and money belts. They all wear baseball caps. The wheels go round and around. As socialist as this country may be, as Confucian, it is also Buddhist. If I lived in Vietnam, if I were an illiterate farmer—or even if I had any other identity--I am sure I could manage to believe in the possibility that the mosquito buzzing around my head was the reincarnation of my great-grandmother--or any other creature for that matter--just as I am certain that I would have taken to the opium pipe had I lived in Vietnam in the pre-air conditioning days.  The place redefines hot.

Cars used to be black, white or dark blue, and many still are, though I have seen a red car and a yellow convertible Volkswagen Beetle  in Ho Chi Minh City. Only in Vietnam have I ridden in Mercedes-Benz vans, a silver grey with the brand name on the side in maroon. Motorbikes:  Honda Wave, Honda Dream, Honda Dream II, Vespa, Honda Best, Suzuki Future–and more. The bikes will go beyond the detailing I saw on one for Hello Kitty and the one with a zebra motif, and a pink one that had written on it “Sweet Little Lies.”  Another was hot and red and had printed on it: “I DON’T CARE”. You read it here first: I predict that eventually, even in that collective culture, detailing will become all the rage. Ten years ago there were a few basic haircuts for all Vietnamese men and women, long hair for women, hair parted on the side for men, and now there are many, including feathering and layers and hair colors not possible without chemical assistance.

Vietnam began to open the door with doi moi, renovation, in 1987, their version of perestroika, and the door has continued to open, letting in ASEAN and the World Trade Organization. Nha Trang, formerly basically a fishing village in a city with a reputation for backpacker party boats, now has a convention center and hosted Miss Universe and Jerry Springer in 2008. Open the door and the breeze comes in and brings in some dirt as well, as the Vietnamese proverb says.

I have heard that the loudest sound in Hanoi a hundred years ago was the sound of a bicycle bell. (I imagine the sound polite rather than insistent.)  But these days, its population three and a half million, the place roars—and it roars more loudly every time I visit. Fewer yoke ladies—women with a pole over one shoulder with a basket hanging below—populate the streets. A law requiring motorbike drivers and passengers to wear helmets has changed the landscape, although the helmets are more sponge lining inside Tupperwear and a chinstrap—and small children, often sandwiched between parents on a motorbike (the father always drives) are not required to wear a helmet because, the logic goes, their heads are too fragile. Ho Chi Minh City first increased its bus service to address the growing number of bicycles, motorbikes, cars and trucks, and now it is building a subway, something I would never have imagined ten years ago, from downtown to Tan Son Nhat Airport, though I have heard that eventually the international terminal may be moved to a new location, outside and north of the city, to reduce congestion. Even people who don’t speak English know the phrase “traffic jam.” Gridlock is not uncommon.

Still, though, this is a place where travelers have to apply and be granted a visa before they even board a plane to come here, except if they are going to Phu Quoc Island—but there is no direct flight to Phu Quoc International Airport—yet. Chua, as the Vietnamese would say.  Not yet. Vietnam is not  a place that American (and most other) travelers can visit on the spur of the moment, not an impromptu destination, and once they arrive, they will have to give their passport to the front desk (in my experience, in all but the Hilton and the Sheraton), since most hotels have to register their presence with the police.  This sense of being watched can be a little spooky: once, in Rach Gia, the capital of Kien Giang  Province in the Mekong Delta, a city of 200,000, a woman stopped me on the street and asked if I liked the city. I said yes, of course.  Dep qua. Very beautiful. In halting English she asked me how my work was going, and I told her fine and asked her how she knew I was working there, not on a holiday. Her English was far from perfect, but I did understand her nodding, “People’s Committee say,” which suggests a degree of monitoring, of safety (and fame) far beyond what I have at home.

After walking down un-air conditioned hotel hallways, the traveler sometimes has to insert a piece of plastic in a cylinder on the room’s wall to turn on the electricity. Those more easily spooked than I would characterize this not as greening but as Big Brother. Yes, it is, and it is still reasonable, I think, to assume that all internet access is monitored by the government through the post office. Once I received a birthday card that had already been slit opened, but when I mentioned this to my Vietnamese hosts, I was told it must have happened in the U.S.  Let’s just say I had my doubts, but Vietnam is a place where “big face”—saving face, no one being embarrassed—is important, so I let that go in the interest of harmony rather than ego or cultural mine-is-better-than-yours. Not that long ago the Vietnamese government had public bonfires of pornographic and subversive books and videos. I can send books to Vietnam by mail, but they have to go through a censor and the addressee has to pay to receive them—all of which is to say that shipping books to Vietnam may well not be successful. I was told there is, somewhere, a government-approved list of books and only those should be in-country, and this may be so, but I have never seen a Vietnamese look unhappy to be given, for instance, a simple, just recently out of print in the U.S.  edition of a textbook on public speaking. Vietnamese may not want to ever say no, but I have also learned to read—I think—at least some of the varieties of yes. I know genuinely glad when I see it.

In some ways Vietnam continues to be a controlling culture, with the central government in Hanoi issuing periodic “Decisions” which appear to regulate things.  One decision said that people should wear helmets when they ride motorbikes, and so they do even though there is little standardization. If it looks like a helmet, it’s a helmet. This is a culture of martyrs and heroes still manifest:  every city has streets with the same names, all renamed after Liberation Day (what Americans call “The Fall of Saigon”) and culturally significant except for a few named after the French, such as Louis Pasteur.  The past is always present, up to a point. Select parts of the past are present. Dong Khoi, Uprising Street, in Ho Chi Minh City, was formerly Tu Du (Freedom) Street, and when the French were there, its name was Rue Catinat. After Liberation, all the streets were renamed. Tran Hung Dao Street is named after a general who defeated the Mongol hordes. Le Loi declared himself Ly Thai To after he had led the Vietnamese to victory over the Chinese in the 1400s, and every city has a Tran Hung Dao, a Ly Thai To, and a Hai Ba Trung after the two Trung sisters who threw themselves to their deaths after fighting (not as successfully as they might have wished, but valiantly) the Chinese. Even though it is all surfaces, Vietnam is a palimpsest.

Like much in Vietnam, such control may be well-intended in its way, a movement in a direction, one that appears to be clear--transparent, even--but which is not. But I take heart from two notions. I have heard that a former ambassador once said that because so much is prohibited officially but managed to happen anyway, that a lot was possible, finally. An amazing amount, actually, for those people who know how to do things.  And a politically well-placed Vietnamese judged an idea for a joint venture after a few moments of thinking, “There isn’t a regulation against it, so we can do it.” This may sound like—and be—faint praise, but it speaks to how Vietnam might work. And some things, even those related to my own safety, I will never know: the guidebooks advise travelers not to have ice in their drinks, but I have been told that the ice, especially the ice for tourists, all comes from one location and therefore it is safe.  I put ice in my drinks—café sua da, iced coffee with condensed milk, or Tiger beer, or mineral water—because Vietnam can be hotter than hell. I have no idea where the ice comes from. Is such ice, made in one location, just for tourists? No one can give me an answer.  All I know is it is cold.

Almost fifteen  years ago Vietnam was not Burma or North Korea, but it was isolated in a way it is not now. I am told Vietnam did not have any street signs at all until a Francophone convention in the 1980s. These days, every business  has its name and address, street name included, displayed on the front of the shop. They know where they are. The Chinese, the French, the Japanese all occupied the country at various points, and after the end of what Vietnam called “The American War,” after Liberation Day in 1975, Vietnam turned to the former USSR.  But once the Berlin Wall fell,  the Cold War ended and the USSR divided, Vietnam was on its own. Vietnamese students studying in the Eastern Block, the USSR and Cuba were sent home, and, since then, Vietnam has been adjusting its sights to the rest of the world. “We know we are backward,” one college president told me. Given their resources, Vietnam has moved fairly quickly, and rumor is it is going to move even more quickly. Ten years ago the country had three state-run television stations but now it has more than nine. Cable television is available although many houses in the provinces still have television antennas—and the further you get from the center of any city, the taller the antennas get. I don’t know what cable television  options  are available to whom and at what price, but in the Hilton, the Sheraton and even some provincial three-star hotels, I have seen flat-screen televisions and international CNN, an even-handed and thoughtful cousin to the CNN seen in the U.S. But when I asked  Vietnamese friends who live well outside a major city  if they had CNN yet, they told me, “Yes! We have Cartoon Network.” Not surprisingly, Tom and Jerry are popular here:  there is no dialogue to translate into Vietnamese, and the smaller mouse does always manage to outwit the larger cat.

These days Petrolimex gas stations are on the side of the road even in the countryside, but ten years ago, as often as not, occasional racks of liter bottles of gasoline lined the side of the road, along with racks of whatever fruit were in season: pineapple, jackfruit, dragonfruit, or pyramids of mangos or mangosteens.

Ten years ago, non-citizens were not allowed to own property, but now depending on whom you talk to, they can, or at least they can co-own with a Vietnamese citizen. The non-citizen may be required to live in the property at least half the year--also depending on whom you talk to. For a country with a long history of occupations, such caution makes sense. Vendors still take both U.S.  dollars and Vietnamese dong, although the exchange rate has changed to favor the dong: nearly 21,000 dong per dollar now compared to 14,000 dong to the dollar ten years ago. Hotels will exchange dollars into dong but not the reverse, although banks and exchanges will. Vietnam Airlines, state-run, is increasingly but slowly getting sophisticated.  Checked baggage is now bar coded with sturdy luggage identification tags rather than dainty handwritten-in-pencil ones on the end of tiny strings. (Looking back, I am surprised my bags ever arrived home.) Buying e-tickets online from Vietnam Airlines from a location outside the country can still be problematic. Tourism, especially for citizens, is heavily promoted by VTV travelogues—“Vietnam: A Destination for the New Millennium”-- since comparatively few citizens may have the wherewithal to go abroad; in addition, citizens need approval from their provincial government before they may leave the country:  “the visa from home”.  Such national promotion is good for the local travel business. These days tourist police standing on corners in cities help tourists navigate the traffic and supplement the work of the regular police. Not only are there more Vietnamese in airports, but in Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport I once saw a father and son waiting for the flight to Ho Chi Minh City. The father had a suit and laptop; the son, maybe twelve, had a brush cut, jams and Nikes, and after he said a few words to his father, he bust a move, ending with breakdancing.  But in this place where labor continues to be cheap, at a Vietnam Airlines office the wait used to be at least an hour despite a system that may or may not have its own logic, perhaps: take a number, as if in a bakery, but the numbers are in the 1000s, 2000s and 3000s. The order in which people were called was unclear. That office is now gone, and I assume we are supposed to do what business we can online.

And maybe in their way the Vietnamese understand they have a national audience of 84 million to encourage to travel, to act upon their nationalism; in contrast, the population of the rest of the world, even with encouragement, may not necessarily be inclined to visit Vietnam.

These days, if Vietnam were a woman, she would be a material girl. Consumption is conspicuous because status is conspicuous, and this is still a Confucian country, one top-down with a sense of order and an appreciation for status. By reputation, overseas Vietnamese, say in the US, work their butts off and buy a Mercedes as they do nails, open restaurants, and send their children to the best schools they can afford. They understand sacrifice as well as the idea of family as a financial resource. That perhaps is part of the refugee psychology, the immigrant story. The children succeed and go on to support their parents. And so too in Vietnam, of those still there: the move is from the thatch house to the corrugated tin roof house to a house made completely of cement. Running water instead of canal water. Hot in addition to cold water. A refrigerator, a washer, a dryer, a stove to replace the hotplate. A  conical hat, a non la that is not frayed, a motorbike newer than the creaky one left (still) from the war—and I have seen a Harley-Davidson parked in Ho Chi Minh City as well as several very snazzy new car dealerships, including ones for Toyota and even Mercedes-Benz in the agriculture-rich Mekong Delta.  Cities are renovating, and someone has to be paying for all this tearing down and rebuilding behind bamboo scaffolding. 

Vietnam has money. Ten years ago the median income was something like $300 a year, and now….who knows? Women in Hanoi’s Old Quarter used to run a hose out of their narrow-front tunnel houses onto the street early in the morning and wash their hair over a red plastic basin on the curb. Such homey private-made-public activity has been replaced with glass-front shops owned by family or who knows who.  These days, hair is washed in private. Hot toc for men, basically portable barber chairs moved anywhere (it seemed) that there was a wall to hang a mirror on are fewer, and  there is now a new flower shop not among the many outdoor shops on the curb, but in air conditioned (and refrigerated) comfort in a Ho Chi Minh City mall. Vietnam is movin’ on up.

Yet despite the changes, Vietnam is still a land of abundance and a kind of chaos: of food, rice, and, above all, heat and noise.  Pho, the national all-day soup, is still available on almost every block. Anything made of rice is still available, and I am told the baguettes in Vietnam, thanks to the French, stay crisp because they are made in part with rice flour. Pork, chicken, cuttlefish, crab, shrimp, eel, snakes, snails, water buffalo.  Fish fish fish. Pumpkin flower and variations of green vegetables with no English names, it seems, that my host can ever provide beyond “water spinach.” “This is veg-e-ta-ble,” they say as they plop it into the hot pot. Pineapple, cocoanut, jackfruit, dragon fruit, lychee, mango, papaya, mangosteen, custard apples, durian.  Banana leaf salad. A variety of cakes to satisfy the national sweet tooth and coffee and tea keep the country caffeine-fueled. Food is everywhere, always, and a dinner can take two hours, to be followed by singing, songs that it seems everyone in Vietnam knows.

The heat a visitor can avoid at least part of the time through air conditioning, at least until the electricity goes off, sometimes with the explanation, “They upgrade the electricity”. This situation is far less common than it used to be, but when it does happen, it seems that the locals sometimes seem to know ahead of time about the rolling blackouts, but not always. And then there are times when it just goes out, surprising the tourists (the locals never seem surprised, regardless, just nonplussed). Sandy Beach Resort on China Beach, near Danang, used to identify a backup generator as an “amenity,” which in the context of Vietnam makes a lot of sense.

As for the noise: Vietnamese are talky. And they talk loudly. I hear it all the time even if the words themselves mean nothing to me: “Bubu topgap din din humana oy? Haufoo autopsy chinchin vuy tuma peepo odoh.”

 It is as if they do not know how to speak in a soft voice until they venture into an English class, at which time they have all they can do to whisper. I suspect there is no such thing as a comfortable silence in Vietnam. (But I could be wrong.) And the discussion seems always longer than it would be if it were in English, and I can only speculate that this is at least in part because no one ever says no directly.  Even if a speaker wants to say no, he or she says yes and then goes on to explain why the idea on the table—expressed by the first speaker—might be wrong.  Or perhaps the person simply promotes another idea, never even addressing directly the first idea. And I gather this is done gently—that is, indirectly--even if the voice sounds strident. And then, if there is more than one possible speaker, all  the other Vietnamese need to get involved and add their voices, always trying to maintain not just connection but the group relationship and making sure that no one loses face no matter how misdirected or just plain wrong the idea of the  first person was. This kind of negotiation—which is what it is but with no no’s—takes more time than the comparatively direct American English. This is far more nuanced than “Yeah, but.”

And it is great theater for visitors who are willing to watch and wait.

As a material girl, Vietnam has her identity and her loyalties, including to Ho Chi Minh. Commercially successful as Vietnam strives to be, Ho Chi Minh and the Party are always with her. The best-maintained, painted buildings in any city or town are first the People’s Committee building (yellow, French architecture, with the red flag with the gold star) and then secondly, Nhan Dan, the Party press (ditto). This is no small thing: these buildings always look freshly painted compared to the white (or any color, really) with grey mold and stain so frequent everywhere else. Ideally the paint used for government buildings has lime in it to prevent mold—but such paint is expensive. So to the unappreciative eye, many buildings look uncared for, but to me, they possess a beauty in their imperfection. They have character, and they are cared for as much as they can be given the resources, and, well, their custom. They do look untended, compared to their inhabitants: a people clean and standing tall, so much personal pride, the children’s clothes so seldom dirty. The people look like they care, and I believe they do. The country is trying, for instance, to address the garbage problem: every day I see women (and they are usually women) in orange coveralls picking up garbage from the street. Vietnam has no Lady Bird Johnson to caution against littering, and garbage can be basically anywhere, not just in a can. Ten years ago the streets  functioned as open dumps if need be, with coconut shards that always looked like skulls to me along the curb. But Vietnam is working on it, or at least they are looking like they are working on it in their collective and Confucian—and commercial and material—way. Someone at the top has clearly decided the streets need cleaning.  The Vietnamese are a proud people, generous in their hospitality, tribal and welcoming both. Not surprisingly, the tactful and indirect Vietnamese do not have a word exactlyequivalent to farang, outsider, in Thai. Instead, the Vietnamese have kinh, ethnic Vietnamese, a word that excludes, if truth be told, local minorities, tribes such as Hmong, Dzung and Tai, as well as  ethnic Chinese even if their families have been there for generations and are citizens, and, of course,  the term excludes  people like me.

These days there is more hot water and there are more toilets (Toto and American Standard). I would never have imagined Vietcombank ATMs—that is, the state bank—but they are there even if they are dependent on electricity, a slightly risky proposition. Microwaves and cell phones.  Vietnam for the most part skipped landlines telephones. When I visit, I am, I am always certain, the only person in the country of eighty-four million without a cell phone (or I don’t use the one I have except for emergencies. It is turned off.)  Pirated CDs and DVDs and books are illegal but in many ways credible-enough copies even if the books are likely to be missing, if you look closely, a couple pages in the middle. A new chic café in Ho Chi Minh City trains former street kids and homeless adults, and it offers coffee and books—books to read or to make copies of on the conveniently nearby duplicating machines, all as you sip.

 Vietnamese are concerned that their culture may be changing too quickly, are worried that the traditional ao dai, the two-piece outfit of flowing slacks covered by a form-fitting tunic with long sleeves and high neck, is being replaced by versions of western clothes, or even by more comfortable versions of the ao dai, with low necks or short sleeves or even refreshingly loose and comfortable  bodices. Ao dai are traditionally worn with very (and I mean very) high heels, and a friend told me when I was measured for the first of my three, “You must wear big underwear.” (For me the bigger issue was that I was a healthy American woman who—as I expected—would not look sylphlike in an ao dai, but more like a water buffalo.) Yet the ao dai is taking new shapes: scoop neck, sleeveless, and, in one fashionable Ho Chi Minh City restaurant, the ao dai tunic over blue jeans. Female traditional dress suggests a nationwide breast-and-foot fetish, but day-to-day life argues that the woman carrying the yoke, the pole over the shoulder with baskets at both ends, bouncing along the street, peddling her soup or fruit or knickknacks, might well be the national icon despite the speed at which the country is changing. Even if the country is for the most part run by men (even though there is what amounts to an Equal Rights Amendment in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence), Vietnamese women carry the load.

Most Vietnamese want progress—and there seems to be agreement that it is progress—to move faster, and some say so. But elementary school students have to pay to attend public schools that are clean if stark in their décor. At least a third of any kind of post secondary coursework—and this continues into medical school—consists of Ho Chi Minh and politics. And this comes after the elementary, middle and high school political courses. How much is too much? Hard to tell. But many schools are pretty basic, resources are limited, and much learning is still rote.  Most of the grade for a course is usually based on a single final examination, and up until recently, only one in ten students who wanted a higher education could get it. That number is slowly improving and is now one in five, but the country has also admitted that even with the relatively new private and semi-public colleges and universities, quality continues to be a problem. This is still a country in which, as in the former USSR, everybody’s passing an exam—regardless of cheating or bribery or both—is good for both students and teachers. Some who cheat get caught but my guess is that most don’t. (A few years ago, a Vietnamese newspaper reported, one student in Ho Chi Minh City did get caught. The bribe? Seventy five dollars, a bouquet of flowers, and some chocolates.)

Given that Vietnamese educators know that they are “backward,” it is difficult to imagine what western schools look like to those few Vietnamese who visit them. But facilities aside, what about the liberal arts, general education—world history, languages other than English, math, sciences, psychology and sociology, literature and music that are not Vietnamese?  Critical thinking? There seems to be little room at the educational inn thanks to Ho Chi Minh, or at least to his more recent promoters: Uncle Ho himself spoke six languages and traveled widely. A friend of mine,  a Communist Party member, says it is time for things to change. Of Ho Chi Minh and politics courses at the college level, he shakes his head and says, “It is in our blood.” But I am not sure if the Vietnamese  realize the possible implications of providing a wider world, of teaching people to think carefully, and of the resulting possibilities, say, of dissent. For a while there was a think tank in Hanoi, and then it was closed. It lasted one year.

The one part of Vietnam that is never—and I mean never—criticized, and this will never change, is  the self-named Ho Chi Minh himself,  “Bringer of Light,” the former Nguyen Ai Quoc, originally from Vinh, a fairly poor province, a man now on display and commodified in a huge mausoleum complex in Hanoi. In some ways it is difficult not to admire him. Ho stood in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi in 1945 after defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu and declared independence from France, patterning the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after the American one. Since he died in 1969, he did not live to learn that the Vietnamese won and the Americans lost the war, but his picture is on all paper money and a bust of him is in every meeting room across the country. He has even found a place on T-shirts although I have never seen a Vietnamese wearing one. Uncle Ho, Bac Ho, a simple man, had wanted to be cremated and scattered equally over the north, central and south of Vietnam, but with help from the former USSR, he ended up in a huge marble mausoleum, one of the most impressive and daunting buildings in all of Hanoi—if not in the entire country--a small man with a wispy beard, all under glass, except when he is sent to Moscow every fall for a touch up.

                                                                                          *****

In Vietnam, introductions are important, a manifestation of the connectedness and collective nature of this S-shaped country. Gioi thieu, pronounced  zoy-tay-yoo, sort of. To introduce.

Being a reliable, or reliable-enough, narrator is important to me. These essays do not aspire to be encyclopedic or comprehensive. If you want a travel guide, go to Lonely Planet or browse at the local bookstore. Google. 

These essays are mine: the in some ways celebratory essays of one single, straight, childfree woman of a certain age, middle class, in many ways overeducated (I have a Ph.D.), especially for where I live, in an area in a part of the northeast United States that would profit from a Marshall Plan. I like living where there are four distinct seasons, and although I am not much of a fan of some of the locally-touted culinary specialties, such as beans and greens and chicken riggies, I do like the gritty authenticity of a lot of the local people I encounter. It’s a place I can afford to live in—and equally a place that I am always happy to leave, if only because in many ways I am an anomaly here. I have lived here for more than half my life, but I am not a local and will never feel like one. My name does not end in a vowel.

I am happy, from time to time, to get off the couch and to fly to the other side of the world, to deal with the discomfort, the airplane limbo, and to land in Vietnam, a place that still offers a lot of tourist bang for the buck, especially after the cost of the plane ticket. (And the statistic that flying is safer than driving takes on a certain perspective when you consider the traffic in Vietnam.) I get there and I take a shower, washing off the 24 hours of grime. Once there, I am willing to be a tourist, a traveler, a visitor, to admit that in most ways I do not belong where I am visiting, to put myself in temporary exile in a place where I have to function without knowing much of the language. It’s not a place with identifiable National Geographic landmarks: there’s no Eiffel Tower, no Big Ben. There I smile like there is no tomorrow, and there this is not something that I find I have to force myself to do.  Certainly they know I am not a local, although after a few days I like to think of myself as a regular, even temporarily: I am someone to stare at (and in Vietnam it is okay to stare). My passport is my identification rather than my driver’s license with the photo that doesn’t look like me anyway. I am not allowed to drive; I have to be cargo. My personal checks are no good. Travel makes me vulnerable.

I pack and I go to Vietnam. I am grateful to have such a destination: a place in the tropics with its sights and sounds and of course—above all—its smells. Jasmine. Lotus. Heat, even, I swear, has a smell. And I go to the local airport knowing that the person in front of me for fourteen hours in the 747 between Chicago and Hong Kong may push his seat back into my forehead, or my baggage may get lost or I may get sick. Will there be tedium? Yes. Can travel be uncomfortable? Of course. Did I remember to pack my hairbrush? Where is the Imodium just in case?

But the one thing I have never been is bored. (“Ever to be bored is to have no/Inner resources,” John Berryman wrote, and I agree.) Impatient, yes. Confused. Lost. Even a little sick. Hot? Absolutely. Even miserably hot—and frequently so.  While I have visited many locations, I have spent much of my time in a city of almost 200,000 on the Bay of Thailand, Rach Gia City  in Kien Giang Province. The city is about five hours from Ho Chi Minh City by car. By Vietnamese standards, the city is very diverse, with substantial Khmer and ethnic Chinese populations. But it is a place (like most of Vietnam) with no drinkable water. Sunscreen every day. No driving a car (although I can be driven, often in a white Toyota). No regular English newspaper, no public library with books in English, few hamburgers. Internet access can be limited, although most people have cell phones. Malaria pills. Chopsticks. Rice rice rice. Lots of seafood and fresh fruit and vegetables. No snow.

When I am there, I am one of very few Westerners in a province of more than a million people. At home, as a woman of a certain age in the U.S., I am invisible. In the Mekong Delta, not speaking the language and clearly not a local, I am anything but invisible.

 Sometimes I reach a point where I am really not interested in nuoc mam, the ubiquitous fish sauce that is at every meal, or in much of anything else. The feeling passes, though. But bored? Never. Someone said about me half a lifetime ago, “Give her a piece of string and she can play with it all day.”

Indeed. I can watch and be entertained very easily. I am content walking around and looking, at least until the heat gets to me. I like the convenience and apparent cleanliness of my single hotel rooms, the sense of both connectedness and disconnectedness. A hotel room means I am traveling. Even if the bed is hard, I am moving. On the road. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.  I am pretty much limited to what I can carry: the basics.  I am just about never homesick. If I wanted things to be the same as home, I would have stayed home.

                  And, in fairness to Vietnam, the place is enormously focusing since my first conversion experience on the road in from the Hanoi airport.  How do I make my way across this street?  How do I repress the urge to bolt? How do I help not just the bicycles and the motorbikes but the Toyotas and the trucks—the trucks!—not hit me? Why is this person I have just met going on and on about numbers of hectares, numbers of faculty, number of classrooms and computers when I can see around me what the place looks like? Why is this boiled “running chicken” so chewy? Is the laughter of the person I am talking to a good sign or not?  How can I ask a question—be it about something political or something innocuous or about the flying roaches--without causing either of us to lose face?  Why is there a rooster crowing at dawn right outside my window in a city of however million? What is that 6 a.m. announcement from the public loudspeaker saying after the music from “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” finishes? What is an appropriate response to the person at the next table to me at the restaurant leaning over to me and saying something that sounds like “You he luk now co tay kow baba shoe nooey?” How can I not pay attention to all the movement, the energy, the sheer life in this place where there are so many shades of green? How can I come to understand this place on the other side of the earth when I don’t understand the language but know that there are dozens of words for the various kinds of boats?  The word for water, nuoc, is also the same as for nation. The opera house translates as “house sing big,” and leeches are “noodles in water.” And given the heat and my need for regular cool showers, my favorite is su tam voi huong sen, “bathing by lotus.” The showerhead looks like a lotus bud, the flexible metal stem of the lotus leading to the water source, most likely the faucet. I get it. It translates. Mostly. But coming from my culture, I would never have thought of it. So in some ways it does not translate at all.

                  So too the culture.

                  But I love it: bathing by lotus.

                  And of course, “bathing by lotus” is in a country where the national puppets, enacting folk tales, walk on water, and where Hanoi used to be called “Thang Long”, “Soaring Dragon”. Vietnam is a country where boats have faces. Of course.

In some unanticipated moments, the place is so surprising and yes, difficult, that it starts to feel holy. I cannot speak the language, but who would not fall in love with Vietnam and the impossibility of ever knowing it even as she pursued it? And yes, I cannot lose the feeling that even if I did manage to learn the difficult tonal language in which ma, depending on how it is pronounced, can mean mother, ghost, tomb, horse or rice seedling, I would still never really know what is going on.

           Yes, I rhapsodize.

Most of my life I never even considered visiting Vietnam.  And it may be the case that the timing of the initial decision to go was just the right thing to do, a nudge from the universe: bored at work, starting to realize how solitary I really am, in need of stimulation, I went. In fact, the minute, the minute the idea of travel to Vietnam was suggested to me, I said yes on the spot without having any idea what I was getting  myself into. At the time, other parts of my life, other activities, did not seem likely  to yield much new in the long term. I was—and continue to be—a middle aged woman in a culture that values youth, self-promotion, and celebrity. Perhaps in some ways I felt on my way to being moot. So why not go?

These days I by no means take this travel for granted, however, whether I am by myself or on occasion with others. I go and I come back. I know how fortunate I am.  I know that my travel, even buying a plane ticket and staying at three star $50 a night hotels ($18 outside major cities), is beyond the means and imaginations and outside the value systems of a lot of people.  I know that I could not do it without support from friends and family. I take my travel lightly and I don’t.

Let me explain: I live modestly. My house is paid for. I have tenure. I work ten months a year, I have flextime, I have a laptop, an old iPad,  and until I retired,  I had a small comfortable and attractive office with windows. (I even got to choose the colors of this latest office.) I am enormously grateful for my a decent health insurance policy that I have never had to pay a cent toward, and given my small ailments—none of them life-threatening, knock on wood, and none of them even painful. If I creak on occasion when I get out of bed in the coldest mornings of January, then I am limber enough within the next fifteen minutes, and anyway all the minor aches and pains and allergies disappear when I am in Vietnam. When I travel, friends tend to my cats and to my house. My brother stays in enough contact, and if I am gone for any amount of time, he tends to my bills. In some ways I sometimes am in more regular contact with some people at home when I am away than when I am on the same continent or even in the same city, and they have been generously understanding and supportive. They may or may not travel to out-of-the-way places, but they understand the importance to me of the “Everything here is fine here, a little snowy, and we’re glad you are okay” email. Distance changes perspective in more ways that I can explain, I think.

 I live modestly.  I wear J.C. Penney, not Jimmy Choo.  I am a solid colors kind of girl. I tend not to even wear heels. I like small creature comforts: a fluffy comforter in the winter. A hairdryer. Polish on my toenails. Netflix. I have tuna out-of-the-can  sandwiches for lunch and spend the early evening blue hour, when I am at home in the summer, either going for a walk around the neighborhood  and discreetly glancing into blue-lit living rooms, or lying in the hammock in the yard and looking at the clouds. I plant low-maintenance perennials. I am not an annuals girl. Housework is not my favorite.

          And I am selfish. I never wanted to have a job nine to five and then come home and sit in the La-Z-Boy. I wanted a way of life, not just (just?) a job, even if—I now know—the boundaries between work and leisure blur, even if it means the personal and the professional mix. So be it.

I wanted to write.

And in middle age I find myself to be an essayist at heart, one of watching and culling and assembling, comfortable and happy to follow where things may lead, both spectator and participant. In high school I was taught never to use I when I write, but I am well over that misguided instruction, and although it has been a while since I have read Henry James, I do know from writing classes his injunction to try to be someone on whom nothing is lost. In some ways, I am in many ways most comfortable with a pen in my hand.

When I travel, I have time to incubate, to reflect, to talk to myself. To cultivate receptivity. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, on the road I have a room of my own. For me perhaps this is indulgent or even downright selfish the way other people are extravagant about spending money at fancy beach resorts or on family trips to Disneyworld: it allows me to cultivate the life of the mind. Inner speech. Even at home I have a reflective cast of mind with what I think of as an old school attention span, which is to say that often I think there is no rush, really. It is my comfort with John Keats’ negative capability, being “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”.   In Vietnam I have time to be selfish in a way the workday—even my workday—does not allow. It’s an intellectual, mental going to ground, sort of. It’s a kind of mobile meditation in a place where time is  “rubber time,” not American-punctual.  I write to remember, I write to understand.  I don’t usually think, “I can get an essay out of this,” but sometimes I do. So too with my photos: I point, I frame, I shoot.  Who else would want more than a photo or two of Ho Chi Minh City traffic?  I have many—and then even more.  I have learned that I prefer small scales, and Vietnam even with its 84 million people in small locations (to me, anyway) is a comfortable size, two hours by plane from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, north to south, and maybe another forty-five minutes by plane to the far reaches of the Mekong Delta. I have one very cool passport, with extra pages, full of one-page visas, all now expired, and I am working on a second.

Even at home I live in my head in many ways (and home may be in my head, finally), and so I am something of a homebody too, even when I am in seat 27C in a steel tube flying at 30,000 feet over the Pacific.  As much as I like it, I didn’t really deserve the Wonderwoman toothbrush my hygienist gave me. At home these days I live with three housecats: Doodle, an orange  tiger, and Moonbeam, calico, a cat also possessing, I swear, feline ADHD. Swishy, a one-eyed black cat, joined us a couple summers ago since it seemed no one else wanted to adopt her but me.  If I go upstairs, they go upstairs. If I go downstairs, they go downstairs. I bring pictures of them to Vietnam and I miss them when I leave: their endearing nose touching; their occasional emphatic fire-engine meowing when they decide they are unhappy with the day’s proffered cuisine; their greeting me at the door. They are good foot warmers on cold nights, friendly  writing companions as together we watch the latest draft chug out of the printer. But as I write this, as devoted as I am to them, as someone who once had “fluffykids” as an email password at work, even I have to admit that as much of I adore them, I also have to recognize that, as three of the friendliest cats in the universe, they greet everybody at the door.

I leave and I return. I go from temperate zone to tropics to back again. Usually when I prepare to come home, I feel as if I have been away too long but there too short a time, as the Grateful Dead said. I pack. I haul the suitcases. I am, without fail, paranoid about the Moleskine journals I fill while I am there and tuck in my hand baggage when I leave for the airport. Vietnam is not a place where I have ever seen anyone sitting in a café and writing as I have in other countries, and I have difficulty imagining that ever happening there. But maybe it will happen, and I hope I am wrong. During my time in-country, I keep the journals either locked in the suitcase in the hotel room or with me, and I am always sure to say good things about the country which I do, after all, find fascinating, just in case they are read while I am out. I travel on a tourist or business visa.  There is a certain self-censorship in Vietnam, and this whiff of Big Brother intensifies the experience of my being there. I have to be careful—in some ways paranoid--in ways I am not when I am at home.

I have to be Zen about being in Vietnam. I try. And I know in my bones that this—Vietnam—is a subject worthy of my talents, of my time. Of the work that writing is, even before my hand starts sticking to the page in the heat. At home (ironically), my writing happens on Vietnamese time, “rubber time,” in the summer when more often than not the time expands to fill up the time that writing takes. The writing, my cultivating my own interiority, lasts as long as it has to. In some ways, in the heat of the summer at home or overseas I hibernate. I drift. I assemble. I reassemble. If I am not on the road, I finally have the time to travel in my head.

Indiana Jones I am not, but, again, if I wanted things to be the same as home, I would have stayed home.

Vietnam is not an easy narrative, not a place that lends itself to a comprehensive linear portrayal, and so the essays here are a bouquet—roses and carnations, lotus and lilies. Not intended to be comprehensive, the essays about Vietnam are ways to know Vietnam, parts of my Vietnam. They are different sizes and different shapes, yet I hope complementary enough in their fashion.  If the essays are uneven, I hope the unevenness, the flaws, are as in silk, part of the beauty.

These are essays about visits over a dozen years. Vietnam continues to change. Ho Chi Minh City now has a 20% occupied skyscraper, glass and chrome, in the shape of a sail on the harbor. The locals pride themselves on Vietnam being a developed nation by 2020, even if it is not clear what they mean by developed: cities that look like every other city in the world? Is Jerry Springer hosting Miss Universe in Nha Trang, a fishing village turned resort with a convention center really the icon the country wants?

 In their way the essays are general and specific, private and public, internal and external, documenting appearance and speculating on reality, time and space writ small as my life is, with my understanding both complete and evolving. I speak only with what authority I have; I may have a good sense of who I am, and I am also willing to be a slightly different self in Vietnam. I have no choice. The reality is we act where we are, and in Vietnam I try to be a good sport. In some ways Vietnam is my que hong hai—Home Sweet Home Number Two.

Each essay here  about Vietnam is a modest undertaking, I know, and so be it: as with many such enterprises in life, there is much to be said for doing a small thing with some style. These are, then, literary meditations written with an eye toward my reader. My ambitions are modest, and I do not attempt, as the Vietnamese (and those of us from some times and places in New England would concur) sometimes say as an insult, “to decorate myself”, to show off, to overstate what I do or who I am.

Dear reader, please accept these essays in the spirit in which I offer them.

As I said, introductions are important. Gioi thieu.

Here is my Vietnam.

Copyright Sandra A. Engel