Our "homestay" in Hoi An

Over and over, the friends we’ve made here have been incredibly generous to us, and our trip to Hoi An last week takes the cake. As always, the money our friends spent treating us was negligible to us but quite a lot to them. What we’ve valued even more is the first-hand, authentic experience of life here they’ve made possible for us.

In this case, our main host was a friend who for discretion’s sake I’m going to call Julie. She grew up in Hoi An before coming to Saigon for college. It’s a small city of about 20,000 people, and she and her parents and brother and sister who still live there (with a lot of nieces and nephews) know everybody. Julie arranged to move us smoothly around town meeting with this and that old family friend and seeing the town like a local.

Her parents and siblings were very welcoming. Unfortunately, the plan for us to stay with them fell through, since when they took our passports down to the commune police station to get permission to have overnight guests, it wasn’t granted. We ended up sleeping at a nearby hotel, but only for a few hours each night since we were always up late and up early to spend time with Julie’s family.

Getting there was a breeze on the Vietnam Airlines flight. (About $100 round trip.) It’s about 70 minutes from Saigon to the Da Nang airport, and we never got much altitude so we had a good view of the countryside. From Da Nang (near where China Beach is) we had a hired driver for the 50 km to Hoi An. The coast highway drive was depressing since the beach along the whole route is walled off for ugly tourist resort/ghettoes that all seem to be about one-quarter finished.

We got to Hoi An about 9 a.m. and spent the first morning walking around the old town center. The town is unique in Vietnam for a couple reasons. First, it was a major port for Japanese traders before Japan cut itself off from the outside world in the 1600s. Second, it was untouched by the bombing of WWII, the war with France and the civil war. There was plenty of Chinese and French influence also, but while we walked around, Ilene and I were struck by how similar it felt to old Japanese towns we had been in. In fact, there are probably more genuinely historic Japanese buildings here than we saw in similar sized towns in Japan, since earthquake, fire and the bombing of WWII has destroyed so many there.

Many of the oldest structures serve as homes for the current residents and as open houses for tourists. You have to buy a ticket to enter the town center, and you get four stubs for admission--a la carte--into those houses, handicraft workshops, temples and traditional Chinese meeting houses, which were kind of all-purpose community centers for the Chinese merchants living here. In addition to hitting our allotment of these, we also stopped at other inns and food stalls to sit down and have tea with Julie’s family friends.

After a nap at Julie’s house, she rounded up borrowed bicycles from her neighbors and we rode out into the countryside to a farming village where tourists are invited to visit.

In the late afternoon we took another bike ride to Cau Dai beach, a little outside of town. We arrived just in time for sunset and a spectacular storm on the horizon. After a swim we “showered” with buckets of water out of a communal cistern (35 cent charge). We returned to our mats on the beach, where most of Julie’s extended family joined us, and we started ordering boiled crab and other seafood from the vendors who run back and forth from the water front to camp kitchens set up back in the palm trees. That was only an early supper. After we biked back to the house, they hit us with another feast of ban xeo, served family-style on the tile floor of the living room.

The next day was mostly taken up with a tour to My Son to see the Champa ruins. More on that another time.

On the second afternoon, we bicycled out to a different beach. Julie says people just started using it since a new road was built a few years ago, and I don’t see it mentioned in my guidebooks. We didn’t see any other foreigners there, so it was the kind of place where everyone stopped and stared at us. At one point, Ilene and Julie were trading tongue twisters (“Sally sells seashells . . .”), and when Ilene tried some in Vietnamese, a group of strangers gathered around for the show. We joined in a soccer game with a couple kids and quickly attracted a couple dozen more. As with other places we’ve been, every child shouted hello to us as we passed. Most of the children there swim naked, and the sea was bath-water warm.

Again, we had a couple more culinary discoveries that I’ll write about later, and again a lot of Julie’s family showed up, including her 80-year-old father who took a swim before dinner. (Her mother was at home working on yet another giant dinner for us.) Three waiters committed to our group hustled out food like a fire brigade. We were about seven adults and seven children grazing on various fresh seafood dishes, iced tea, ice coffee and beer, and at the end of the party I saw Julie’s sister pay the equivalent of $12. That’s how much Ilene and I would pay to rent two beach chairs in Delaware.

The next morning was mostly taken up with a trip to Marble Mountain. (More on that later.) Then, with our departure imminent, Julie’s sister took us on a very hasty trip to buy souvenirs using the friend-and-family discount at places where she knew the shopkeepers. When we rode back to the house on the motorbikes, balancing our cargo like natives, the driver was waiting for us with the trunk open, and Julie’s parents were at the curb fretting about us missing the plane. We hit the pavement in stride, tossed our souvenirs in the trunk—the same with our waiting luggage, packed with all the laundry that Julie’s mother had done for us—and, humbled by how far we were from being able to express our gratitude, we jumped in the car for a white-knuckle ride back to the Da Nang airport.

-Robert

Pirate economics, au courant

One very common sight that I normally don't notice anymore are street-level art studios where shifts of painters crank out stacks of copies of famous western art--the Mona Lisa, all the impressionists, Kandinsky, etc. These two examples made me stop and smile, though. The Bansky copy suggests multiple levels, since a defining quality of his work is how temporary it is.

And as far as I know, the new Batman movie isn't out yet. If it was, I would see vendors selling pirate DVD copies outside my hotel. But the publicity photo of Heath Ledger taken during production and that has since been attached to all his obits has already become iconic enough that it's being copied here in oil on canvas.

Pirating creative works and clothing designs is so common here it's almost impossible to buy something that isn't pirated. I've never seen a legitimate CD store, but stores selling illegal copies for about 60 cents each are everywhere. If you wanted to buy a real La Coste shirt, Levis jeans, Adidas shoes or North Face backpack, you couldn't find it, but trashy copies are available on every corner.

Similar story for books. What I notice there is how the vendors selling cheap photocopies of The Quiet American or In Retrospect by Robert McNamara is that it's the same limited selection from each vendor, that it's the same selection as when I was here a year ago and that there's no overlap with the government-run bookstore. For example, Thomas Friedman's books are popular at Fahasa but are not sold in pirated copies on the street. The CD and DVD selections, in contrast, stay fresh. Given that, and how none of the books are really "black market" in the sense of being contraband, I get the impression that the pirating comes with a lot of official approval.

-Robert

Video of Marble Mountain

We're back from Hoi An and busy making camp in our hotel room again. We have a lot of amazing stories to tell when we catch our breath. In the meantime, enjoy this short video clip of Marble Mountain--a site about 30 km from Hoi An with several caves at the top and several temples, including this one about half way up. It's not an especially intersesting temple--we've been in dozens--but the location is amazing, as you'll see. And I wanted to give a sense of the vibe when you stop by a temple.

This was taken with the very rudimentary video function on my point-and-shoot camera. Apologies for the quality of it.

-Robert

Tuan's birthday party

Our friend (and Ilene's Vietnamese teacher and colleague in teaching English classes) had his 27th birthday party last weekend. His sisters cooked a feast for him so he could invite all his friends. (Mostly cute girls.) We got him the Oxford Idioms Dictionary.

As usual, I mistakenly assumed the food on the table was all their was and filled up before even half the meal had appeared. The highlight was a Thai style tomato and chili pepper stew with seafood. Plus, it cleared my sinuses. For desert we had a "freshbought" cake that tasted like it could have come from Stop & Shop.

After lunch we went around the corner to the neighborhood karaoke parlor for a couple hours. I just missed getting a perfect score and a prize singing "Eight Days a Week." If I knew more Air Supply songs I'd be able to participate more.

-Robert

Departing for Hoi An

Today we are departing by plane for short trip to Hoi An, the ancient trading port in the central coast region, and My Son, where the ruins of the ancient Cham civilization still stand. Here are the wikipedia entries where you can learn more about them.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_An
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Son

We're returning July 4.

-Robert

Much Luck, Much Children

The most memorable part of this trip to Vietnam has been my return by train from Hanoi to Saigon. It was one of those chaotic, immersive, roll-like-the-locals-roll experiences that is the goal of travel for many people. I wouldn’t trade it away, but I hope I don’t have to do it again soon.

At my 1 p.m. departure from Hanoi, I was the only person in my cabin, and I started to think that was preferable. On the way up, because absolutely no one else spoke English and my cabin mates were kind of cold fish, it was a little awkward the whole time. I wanted to experience life in Vietnam, but I also thought 30 hours to myself to watch the scenery and read my ragged copy of Jane Eyre would be fine, too. Reader, I did not have the cabin to myself.

After a few local stops, I got my first cabin mate. She sat in the opposite bunk and didn’t say a word and didn’t look up enough for me even to nod hello. I thought, “Here we go again.” It was really hot, and she was obviously distressed from getting her luggage on, burrowing in her bag for tissues to mop her brow. I kept sitting there grinning at her, waiting for her to look up so I could say, “Xin chow!”

Then, when the porter came by to tell me something about my dinner order, she popped out with a translation in excellent English. She said she hadn’t said hello before because she was embarrassed by how hot she was. We got to talking and became friends, and I depended on her for conversation and translating the rest of the way. She was super nice. She goes by Suzie with her English-speaking friends.

Suzie grew up on a lychee farm in a province near Hanoi and had gone to college in Saigon and is still living there, studying banking and working for an import/export firm. She was returning from a visit home, weighed down with fresh-picked fruit from the family farm, a pile of which she promptly made a present of to me. (Delicious!)

One funny thing about Suzie is how preoccupied she was with her cell phone. At one point it stopped working for some reason, and she could not let it go. She would put it away in her bag and then every five minutes get it out again and examine all the buttons and say, “Oh, I’m very worried about my phone.” Like it had a high fever or something. She eventually got it working and she had a massive collection of photos, home videos, and pop tunes stored on it that she used to entertain the other passengers.

Suzie had ridden 50 kilometers that morning on the back of her uncle’s motorbike with all her luggage to the train station and waited four hours for a train and had gotten on this one without a ticket. The porter (who I suspect was running some kind of side business selling empty seats and SRO rides) had sold her a ticket for a coach seat and told her to rest on an empty berth in my cabin until the other ticket holders got on.

Next, the passengers in the opposite bottom bunk arrived—a mother and her five-year-old daughter. Suzie sat with me to pass the time, and we got to know the others. I was carrying a package of Pokeman cards to offer as a gift, and I got a big kick out of it when the girl replied politely, “Xin com on, bac”—Thank you, uncle—and she spent several hours playing with those.

A boy in the cabin next door spotted the cards eventually and asked for some and kept trying to get in my backpack to find more. He was a bully and a show-off who wasn’t much fun to be around, but he attached himself to me for some reason and I couldn’t shake him. He had a horrible rash on his leg that made me desperate to keep him out of my bunk without being rude, but no luck. I eventually distributed out to him and several others all of the Werther’s butterscotch candies I had with me, and kids were carrying fistfuls of them around the train the rest of the day. I found several of them stuck to my luggage on the floor at the end of the trip, spit out down there whenever a meal time came.

Finally, the occupants of the two top bunks showed up—two parents with four kids under seven. When they appeard in the doorway, Suzie said brightly, “Much luck, much children,” which I took to be a translation of an ironic expression about the coincidence of good fortune and large families. Judging by the sounds in the bunk above me during most of the trip of the mother retching into a bucket, I suspect more luck was on the way.

So that made nine ticketed passengers in the four beds in our cabin, plus Suzie, plus frequent visits from the Pied Piper next door and his growing parade of followers. Eventually, night set in, parents and children piled together family-bed style, the lights were dimmed. Suzie couldn’t find the porter who sold her the coach ticket, and she didn’t show any signs of leaving. She didn’t seem to see anything immodest in it, so I took my cue from the rest of the passengers and we stretched out in my bunk head to toe, quite cramped, and I slept fitfully, trying to keep from falling off the edge.

Starting with dawn the next day, our cabin steadily degraded into a soup of spit out fruit pits, spilled milk and dropped rice grains. The girl across from me at one point threw up in her mother’s lap and bounced back fast, eating everything in sight after that. Later, while her mother napped, she amused herself by taking sips of water and spitting them on the floor. At one point, my bag of groceries became fatally contaminated, and I abandoned it to the elements and hauled the rest of my luggage up into the bunk with me. Above us, the two parents, one of them sick, juggled their three youngest back and forth across the aisle, and when one parent had to go to the bathroom, the oldest sister, who never stopped smiling the whole trip and never said a word, held on to a couple of her siblings to make sure they didn’t fall off.

We pulled into Saigon Station at 9 p.m., only 10 minutes late, thank goodness, and I asked Suzie to translate while I made a big speech about how glad I was to meet them all and good luck and so long. I about broke my back helping Suzie haul all her fruit out to the taxi queue, and after my own short taxi ride, I was never so glad to see the business-class hotel that had seemed so cramped when we first arrived in Saigon.

In all seriousness, there is something special here about the intimacy and companionship between parents and children, which Ilene and I have noticed before. It was lovely to see it up close during the train ride—how comfortable everyone is in their skin, how little scolding the children need, how infrequently they get crabby or act out or demand amusement. There is much bad luck here for some children--begging on every street, horrible birth defects, primitive supports for handicapped children, limited opportunities for all the recreational and social activities we assume are necessary for healthy development. But I hope I'm not romanticizing that poverty when I say there are other gifts most families have here that we lack. It’s something I've been trying to put my finger on, and I'll continue trying to describe as I give it some more thought.

-Robert

The Hanoi Hilton

On my last morning in Hanoi, with a couple hours to spare, I decided to visit Hoa Lo Prison, also known to Americans as the Hanoi Hilton. I haven’t yet been to similar sites, such as the War Remnants Museum in Saigon or the Cu Chi Tunnels for a couple reasons. One, the “American War,” as the Vietnam War is known here, to me isn’t a very interesting lens through which to look at this country. And partly because of some complicated feelings I have about how far off the museums here typically are from my own standards of academic objectivity.

I was more interested in this visit though, because it has a more contemporary resonance. The current leader of the Republican Party (In our robust two-party system) used to be an inmate there, and that history is being frequently evoked in the current presidential campaign.

The prison was originally built by the French colonial administration here in the 1890s and was used by the North Vietnamese government after the French were driven from Hanoi. It was a huge site equal to a few city blocks. The French leveled a “crafts village” to build it, about a mile from the city center, and now almost none of the complex is still standing. Most of it was cleared for the footprint of a giant office tower and apartment building for foreign businesses.

The little bit still standing has been remodeled as a museum. The displays are better made and better translated than in most museums here. As I’ve noticed elsewhere, the narrative is overtly hostile toward the French but takes a more moderate tone about America. In this case, the displays describe the prison as an attempt by the French to control a revolutionary insurgency and describe all the inmates as political prisoners. When the North Vietnamese government controlled it, it presumably became just a regular old prison housing legitimate criminals.

Two rooms are devoted to the American POWs that were held there between 1965 and 1973. The introduction explains that these rooms will demonstrate how well the prisoners of war were treated. The glass cases display Red Cross packages, cartons of American cigarettes, greeting cards from home, and 8X10 photos of the prisoners eating, playing basketball, etc. To my eyes, the photos looked staged, and the subjects didn’t look like they wanted to be playing basketball. They have a picture of John McCain during a visit here in 2000 and what they say is his flight suit and other gear. Another display represents anti-war protesters in France and America as sympathizers with the Vietnamese liberation effort. There's no mention of the torture that American P.O.W.s have alleged and that the Vietnamese government still denies.

Aside from that, the bulk of the museum is devoted to exhibits of the cells, shackles, a guillotine, etc. that were used during most of the prison’s history, and those were very moving to see in person.

-Robert