VIETNAM
Dispatches #5-6 · newest dispatch · back: Laos

DISPATCH #5
Hanoi · Thursday, August 26, 1999

After two weeks of Laos, Hanoi is like being dropped into a blender.

I flew in from Vientiane on Friday the 13th, which I decided not to think about. The flight was an hour. The taxi from the airport took longer than that, mostly because of the motorbikes. There are a lot of motorbikes in Hanoi. I don't know how to explain how many. Imagine the busiest street you've ever seen, and then replace every car with five motorbikes and a bicycle, and put a family of four on each motorbike, and a pig on one of them, and have none of them stop, ever, for anything. That's a quiet street.

I'm staying in the Old Quarter, which is a tangle of narrow streets north of a lake in the middle of the city. It's hundreds of years old. The streets were originally each for one trade, and a lot of them still are, and they're named for what they sold: there's a street of silver shops, a street that sells nothing but silk, a street of tin boxes and pots, a street of paper decorations and red and gold things for festivals and offerings, a street of shoes. The buildings are what everybody calls tube houses: very narrow at the front, maybe ten feet wide, with a shop on the street, and going way, way back, with the family living behind and above. In the morning the sidewalks fill up with people cooking and eating on tiny plastic stools about a foot high, like the furniture in a kindergarten. I eat breakfast on one every day. I'm six foot one. My knees are up by my ears.

Breakfast is pho, the noodle soup: rice noodles in beef broth with slices of beef and green onions and herbs, a squeeze of lime, chili if you want. You eat it at seven in the morning, sweating, at a table on the sidewalk, while the city roars past three feet away. It's the best thing I have ever put in my mouth. I'm not exaggerating. I've had it eleven days running.

How to cross a street in Hanoi, as taught to me by the guy who runs my guesthouse: you do not wait for a gap in the traffic, because there will never be a gap. You step off the curb and walk across at a slow, steady pace, and you do not stop, and you absolutely do not run. The motorbikes will go around you, like water around a rock, as long as you're predictable. It works. It's terrifying, and it works. The first time I did it I made it to the other side and stood there shaking, and an old woman selling bananas laughed at me so hard she had to sit down.

Every morning around six, the lake (Hoan Kiem, the Lake of the Returned Sword) fills up with people exercising: old men doing tai chi in slow motion, ladies doing aerobics to a tape player, people running around the shore, badminton games with no nets. There's a little old tower on an island in the lake. The story is that a long time ago a king was given a magic sword and used it to drive out invaders, and afterward, when he was out boating on the lake, a giant golden turtle came up and took the sword back down to the bottom. People told me there are still big turtles in the lake. I watched for one every morning. No luck so far.

On September 2nd it's the national holiday, and the whole city's been putting up flags for a week. Red with a yellow star on every house. I'll be away for it, at the coast. Speaking of which.

DISPATCH #6
Ha Long Bay and the train to Hue · Tuesday, September 14, 1999, from Hue

Ha Long Bay first.

I went with a little group from my guesthouse on the first of September, over the holiday: a minibus four hours east from Hanoi to the coast, through rice paddies and towns and more rice paddies, and then onto a wooden boat painted blue and white with a dragon's head on the front. Then the boat chugged out into the bay, and I stopped being able to talk.

The bay is full of islands. Not a few islands. Something like two thousand of them, and they're not islands like you're picturing. They're towers of gray limestone that come straight up out of the green water, hundreds of feet high, with trees and vines growing out of the cracks in their sides, all different shapes, crowded close together. Some look like animals. Some look like faces. Some look like the tops of buildings, like a whole city had drowned and only its towers stuck up. The boat went in between them, and they closed in around us so that we couldn't see the open sea anymore, and it was absolutely silent except for the motor.

We stopped at a cave in one of the islands, a huge one, full of stalactites and stalagmites that someone has lit with colored lights, green and red and purple. That was a little much. But the cave itself was so big it had its own weather. Then we stopped at a floating fishing village, where families live in houses built on rafts, with dogs and potted plants and laundry, and little kids rowing themselves around in boats not much bigger than a bathtub. A woman sold us squid right out of the water. Then we swam off the side of the boat in water as warm as a bath, with a limestone cliff going up over our heads like a cathedral. We slept in a hotel in Ha Long City that night and went back out in the morning, and I would have stayed a week if the boat had let me.

The bay is on the World Heritage list too, which the guy on the boat told us proudly about six times. He had every right to.

Then, back in Hanoi, I took the train south.

There's one main railroad line in Vietnam, and it runs almost the whole length of the country, from Hanoi down to Saigon, with the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. Everybody calls it the Reunification Express. The Express part is a joke. I took it as far as Hue, in the middle of the country: one night and most of the next morning. I splurged on a bunk in a soft sleeper, which is a little compartment with four bunks and a door that closes. My three roommates were a grandmother, her daughter and the daughter's son, about ten, on their way home to Hue after visiting relatives in Hanoi. None of them spoke English. I speak about nine words of Vietnamese. It didn't matter at all. They fed me. I mean they fed me for twelve hours straight: sticky rice wrapped in leaves, dried squid, little green bananas, a whole bag of lychees, sunflower seeds. The boy and I played cards using a game he invented on the spot whose rules changed every time I was about to win. The grandmother went to sleep at nine o'clock sitting straight up and woke up at four sitting straight up, as if she'd blinked.

When I woke up, we were running along the coast. On one side of the train there were rice paddies going on forever, bright green, with water buffalo and white birds and people in cone-shaped hats bent over working, and little graves standing out in the middle of the fields, painted and tiled, where families bury their people right on their own land. On the other side, every so often, between the hills, the sea.

Hue was the capital of Vietnam under its emperors, up until the 1940s. It's on the Perfume River, which is a beautiful name for a river and a fairly normal-looking river. On the north bank there's the Citadel, a huge walled square with a moat, and inside that is the old Imperial City, where the emperors lived. A lot of it was destroyed in the war, in 1968, and you can still see it: there are big empty spaces where palaces used to be, with grass growing over the foundations, and walls with bullet marks in them. Some of the buildings have been restored, with red lacquer and gold and dragon carvings on the roofs, and they're stunning. But it was the empty spaces I kept thinking about. I walked around for a whole afternoon, mostly by myself, in the heat, with the dragonflies.

Every American my age who comes here is going to think about the war. I've been trying to figure out how to say this right. Everyone I've met here, so far, has been friendly to me, curious, and kind, and nobody has once made me feel unwelcome because of where I'm from. When I've been asked, and I've been asked a lot, "Where are you from?" and I say America, people mostly say "Ah! America!" and smile and ask whether I'm married. I don't really know what to do with that. I'm a history major. I've read the books. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and listen, which seems like the right thing for a guest to do.

I'm going to stay in Hue a while. The guesthouse grandmother has adopted me.

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