While I was in Hanoi, I went back to art galleries where Ilene had shopped before, and had a couple of interesting experiences.One gallery was in a single narrow house. (Lonely Planet describes how these narrow deeply set houses were built in response to a tax structure that was based on the property’s street frontage.) This one had been split down the middle to make two shops, each of them about a shoulder-span wide, and the two shopkeepers seemed to be in living in a very intimate state of competition. As I entered the one I wanted, the shopkeeper at the other one tried to wrangle me into hers. I almost had to force my way past her.
Once I got into the gallery, the shopkeeper asked me if I wanted to see more paintings upstairs. She leads me into a kind of airshaft in back and up cement stairs to the third level and over a catwalk into the back part of the building. I looked in the studio in there for awhile, and as I was leaving, the shopkeeper from next door was waiting in ambush on the catwalk and poached me to continue shopping in her gallery.
The second strange thing was the next day back at the same gallery. While I was browsing, I could hear a voice on a loudspeaker out in the street making a lot of racket. I don’t understand the language, of course, but I pick up on the authoritarian vibe from police and soldiers sometimes, and I didn’t think anything of it. They’re usually just ordering people to get out of the way, I think.
But I looked out the door, and I saw the shopkeepers, who were perched on their plastic chairs on the sidewalk, scramble up and clear up everything they have with them. I went out to look, and a truck with about a dozen soldiers rolled by very slowly, and when it got about two door down the street past us, one soldier hopped out of the back and confiscated a motorbike that was parked there. Without breaking stride and absolutely ignoring the owner, who tried for about half a second to stop him, he just started pushing it away. The saddest part was the behavior of the woman who owned the motorcycle—how quietly and briefly she tried to object and how quickly she shut it down and planted herself back on the step in front of her shop without even a grimace on her face.
I asked the women at the gallery who I had been talking with what was going on and they explained that it was what it looked like—that they were confiscating motorbikes parked on sidewalks. “Cannot put motorbike there,” they explained. “Only for walking.” Which would make sense, except that I have never seen another sidewalk clear of motorbikes in Vietnam. Usually, it is literally impossible to get through and you have to walk in the street. Why this sidewalk on this day, they weren’t able to explain to me. To the woman who lost her motorbike, it was like a bolt from the blue.
-Robert
