The (not so free) speech contest

Ilene and I got co-opted the by the state the last two Sunday mornings to be the guest judges at an English speech-making contest at the Culture Labor Palace. A frustrating aspect of it was that the participants had to submit drafts in advance for approval from the director. One consequence of that was a tendency to blandness in the arguments in the first round. (Though no blander than the average U.S. freshman essay, which suffer other cultural pressures.) Also, I found myself censoring my follow up questions for fear of leading people into territory that would embarrass them.

Apart from that, it was fun and very impressive. We had 15 participants the first week and 7 finalists today. It was open to all, and it was mostly girls and young women from 14 y.o.a. to late twenties. In the end, the winner was the youngest, mostly because her pronunciation most resembled the foreign cable television programs she is growing up with.

Despite the free-speech restrictions, the finalists all showed themselves to be very thoughtful analysts of their country--anxious about the future without being fearful of change, with a refreshing sense of personal responsibility. Ilene and I both left with the impression that if these women get an opportunity to use their talents, they're going to kick butt.

The fan favorite was the 15-year-old girl in her school uniform--her nicest outfit, I think--and the best part for me was seeing how proudly her father claimed her afterward when he introduced himself to us. It was obvious that he had rehearsed saying in English, "This is my daughter."

At the end, Ilene and I were expected to give some advice, which was humbling considering that I usually flub speeches in my native tongue. And it was no fun picking only one winner to get the prize--1 million dong, which will cover a semester of college tuition here and will cover a movie and popcorn and soda for four back home.


[Note for other travelers: Connecting with this English conversation group was the smartest thing we did to meet people and learn more about Vietnam. I strongly recommend volunteering to go be the guest native-speaker at one. You'll leave with invitations to all kinds of real-life experiences for as long as you're in town. If you're interested, leave a comment here, and I'll suggest someone you can contact.]

-Robert

Video of meat market

Sorry about the very poor quality of this video. I hope you bear with it, because it gives a little bit of a sense of one of the most interesting ways to pass the time for an American here, which is to walk through a meat and fish market that operates VERY differently from anything at home. This is late morning when it has quieted down quite a bit. Earlier, you would have trouble navigating through the sides of beef and pig carcasses being hauled on shoulders, wheelbarrows and motorbikes and the buckets full of it being slid around on the path. It was about 95 degrees F when I shot this.

It's shot at Cho Ben Thahn--Ben Thahn Market--which is the largest market in Saigon. The very back end is fruit, flowers, then the meat and fish stalls you see here, and you'll see a quick long shot of the interior where everything else imaginable for home and personal use is sold.

My favorite part of this is about half way through when a fish decides to liberate itself. Can you spot it?

-Robert

Rocking out with the youth of Saigon

I finally got a chance to experience a little live music and youth culture. I kept putting word out there, and finally some people in the English Club who are interested in rock music arranged a night out.

This video is at a place called Cafe Yoko, well-known here I think, in District 3, near Tao Dan park. It, and all the other places I've heard about with live music at night, are called "coffee shops." There is a bar, but juice and soft drinks are the norm, at about four times the usual price, and the under-aged are welcome.

The band behind the singer is the house band, I think, and stayed up through a set of about 90 minutes while the singers rotated. First up was an older woman who seemed like a den mother to the regulars. She sang jazzy/swing versions of Beatles songs. When the woman in the video came in the door, the first singer made way and left, to another coffee shop, I suspect. This singer focused on ABBA and Alanis Morissette songs, including "Ironic," which . . . . oh, don't get me started. They layers of annoyance with that song go down forever.

After her the main act came on, and he worked through a list of rock classics--All Along the Watchtower, Little Wing, Sultans of Swing, more Beatles--and it got progressively louder and more rocking as it went along. I enjoyed it a lot, and the band was really good. When they were done, a three-piece blues rock combo came on while most people payed their tabs and left.

Most of the people there were in their 20s and a few had just a little more edge to them than anyone else I've met. I saw one tattoo, one piercing, one ponytail, one beard, and lots more cigarette smoking. And as you can see, they sit politely throughout--no dancing and no fists raised in the air. We were out the door and heading home by 10:45.

-Robert

Culinary adventures in Hoi An

1. I neglected to get pictures of a couple of our best meals in Hoi An, including multiple bowls of the famous local specialty, cao lau. Don't miss it. I'm not enough of a gourmand to describe all these soups are different, but believe me, they are . This one is made with a thicker noodle, much like Japanese soba noodles, and must have something other than rice flour in it. It has a wheatier taste to it. Another special ingredient is a kind of crouton fried in oil. The broth has something else going on in it that distinguishes it from pho and bun bo hue and others, but I don't know what it is. Our friends tell us that that cao lau is available in inferior forms in Saigon, but I suppose it's worth seeking out there if you aren't going to be in Hoi An.

2. The other local specialty is fin fish or sea food grilled in banana leaves. That's a shrimp version pictured below. It's grilled with a salsa of green onions and garlic and slices of some kind of root similar to ginger but milder. The dish is called ca naong la chuoi.

The best part of going to a beach town is eating on the beach:

3. Pictured above is a snack made of mashed up sweet potato, baked in a fire pit in the sand and kept warm up over the grill. It's called banh dau xanh nuong. You pay about 50 cents for four of them, served warm on a paper napkin.

4. These whole steamed squid are a seasonal specialty I assume, because they are pregnant with roe. The eggs solidify into a filling inside the tube of the body. You chomp through to eat the tail end. That reveals the strip of cartilage that was spine, which you then pull out like a ribbon and then either eat the rest piece by piece or suck out the roe first. It's called muc com.

5. Rice soup with fish. We've had a terrific hot rice soup with grated spices on top a few times and had it again the beach. Before, pieces of white fish have been part of the soup. In this case, you order them separate, and add fish from the plate to your bowl of rice soup. That's the whole steamed fish below. It's called chao ca.

6. We also had steamed corn on the cob on the beach, though there's nothing special about the location in this case. On any sidewalk in Saigon in the evenings you'll find women pushing carts with steaming kettles in the base and unhusked corn tucked into a strainer above. At the beach, we bought a plastic bag of them before settling under our umbrellas and snacked on them before ordering the rest of the meal.

Naturally, all of these are served with a variety of fish sauces, sea salt and lime, chili peppers in soy sauce and so on used for dipping.

Spelunking on Marble Mountain near Hoi An

"Spelunking" is an overly grand term for our exploration on Marble Mountain, but it was a fun vocab word to teach our Vietnamese guests. I think there was only one passage in the whole place where we scrambled on all fours for a couple yards.

The area actually has several mountains, and the one that most people visit is called Thuy Son. It's about halfway in between Da Nang and Hoi An, right on the strip known by Americans 40 years ago as China Beach.

When you approach, Thuy Son resembles West Rock in our home of New Haven, so, except for the heat, it's a similarly strenuous climb--about 20 minutes up on a steep stone staircase if you didn't stop at all the temples and souveneir vendors on the way up.

Scattered around the top are several caves with high ceilings and open-air chimneys. They're all filled with a variety of Buddhist alters and statues, and most have one or two rooms behind the largest room. A flashlight isn't strictly neccessary, since sunlight pours into most rooms, but some of them are dark. Lots of bats call the caves home, of course.

Also at the top is a panoramic view of the beach and villages surrounding, and the headlong development that is going on in the area is very apparent. The sounds of dozens of hammers and saws at once can be heard ringing up from the valley floor.

We arrived about 8:00 a.m. and had a nice time exploring for about 90 minutes without getting hassled too much by touts. When we left at around 10 a.m., it was getting a lot more crowded.

We rode out there on the backs of our friends' motorbikes--about 30 minutes from Hoi An--and it was interesting to see a country highway that way. We had a little bit of an adventure on the way when the motorbike I was on got a flat tire. We pushed it about 50 yards until we came to a roadside repair man. You see these everywhere in Vietnam. In the cities, they set up shop on street corners and lean two tires upright against each other, wrapped in brightly colored paper, to indicate that they are open for business. The equipment is just a tool box, some batches and a bicycle pump, and the fancy ones have a gas-powered compressor to speed up the work. On this country highway, it was more like an actual shop in front of the mechanic's house, and we sat under an awning drinking tea with his grandmother who must have been 90 years old.

-Robert

Cham ruins at My Son and river cruise

During our visit to Hoi An, we went to see the Cham (or Champa) ruins at My Son. (Not to be confused with another My Son District to the south where the hamlet of My Lai, infamous in American history, is located.)

The Champa were an ancient civilization throughout Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand and Java. Through the early second millenia A.D., as ethnic Vietnamese started to unify the country, the ethnic Champa were pushed out or assimilated. My Son was the intellectual capital for the Champa kingdom.

We got there by taking a budget tour operator--cheap, but not the kind of intimate experience that I wrote about earlier. It's the kind of thing that western tourists only do, and one funny thing is how the two Vietnamese friends with us kept getting mistaken for foreigners. For example, they would initially be charged the foreigner's price for everything, and then there was a lot of backtracking and refunding when the tour operator realized he had compatriots on his hands. (Almost everything here has an actual price and a foreigner's price.)

It was about 50km by coach bus to the entrance and gift shop. You hike about 10 minutes to a rally point to get a jeep a little further up the mountain. Then you hike for about 90 minutes through the forest to about five different sites like the one pictured. Some of them are closed off for archaeologists to work on. There is limited opportunity for actually learning much from the tour guides, so if you are going you'll want to study up on Google, Wikipedia and your guide book before you go.

On the return, we opted for a boat trip. The coach bus dropped off about half of us on a tour boat that cruised on the Bu Thon River back to Hoi An. It was relaxing and cool under the awning.

Along the way, we stopped at a "handicraft village." These are communes set up with government support with a lot of people working on the same industry--silk weaving, candy making, etc. This one was wood carving, on a small island on the Bu Thon River. Frankly, it was pathetic. This one was worst than most, but all of them show the unintended consequences of ghettoizing any kind of land use from other uses. (I'm always an ambassador for mixed-use zoning, and next time I come to Vietnam I'm bringing a stack of Jane Jacobs books to pass out to my friends here.)

What you see at a handicraft village like this is about a dozen shops and studios, a lot of shopworn merchandise, the faded signs of some government investment that happened years ago, and a lot of people resentfully dependent on the small number of unimpressed and hungry tourists who are being force-marched through by the tour operator.

Again, Julie arranged the one authentic experience out of the visit. When the tour guide gave us 15 minutes to look around, everyone else just shrugged and headed back to the boat to wait. Julie took us to a back street and found a little shack that served as the neighborhood refreshment stand. When we showed up back at the boat with plastic baggies filled with shaved ice and coffee, we were the envy of the group.

-Robert

Che!

This is Che--pronounced JAY-uh. This version of it we enjoyed on the streets of Hoi An is one I hadn't had before and which I much prefer to the version that is often offered as a treat in Saigon. Both have in common tapioca and a kind of sweet bean paste that is used in lots of deserts here. This one has just a little of those ingredients swimming in sugary water and ice cubes. It was very refreshing on a hot afternoon.

Ilene is crazy about the kind we have here in Saigon. It's more like a tapioca pudding--thick like a very sweet yogurt. You usually get it to go in a little plastic bag with a spoon and it's pretty common for friends to show up a grocery sack full of them as a gift.

-Robert

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

Sidewalks in Hanoi now "only for walking"

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

Mixtape challenge for music fans

Special open discussion topic today for music fans. Is it possible to do a satisfying survey of American popular music for a mostly uninitiated audience in one CD?

Some of the conversations I’ve had with people here are about American music, and so far all people know about are Michael Jackson, “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” and the soundtrack to The Titanic (and Celine Dion is Canadian!) Unlike in Japan, I haven’t found any fanboy types who take pride in knowing more about American culture than their peers. Maybe they just aren’t that interested.

But I’m going to try and spur some interest. With the library of music on my computer I’m making a mix tape for a couple of friends, to be titled American Essentials. We’re talking about an audience just about totally unaware of American popular music.

Here are my parameters:

-American only. We’ll tackle The Beatles, Neil Young, Culture Club, and AC/DC another time.
-Representative of something essential about American culture or the history of American music.
-Youth-oriented: transgressive, disruptive and thrilling in its time.
-Obscurity is no virtue. The more one could follow up on an interest by hunting on the internet, the better.
-It has to fit on an 80-minute CD.

I've been sticking to popular music apart for jazz for now, and that still only leaves about 3 songs per decade. I haven’t gotten much further than Bob Wills, Big Mama Thornton, and Wilson Pickett and I’ve filled the CD. I don’t know how I’ll ever find room for Liz Phair, the Pixies and The Fugees.

Let me know what would be on your American Essentials Mixtape.

-Robert

Beating the heat in Hanoi

The first thing I have to say about Hanoi is about the weather . . . I can’t stress enough how hot it was. Killer hot. Much more difficult than Saigon.

I had a personal tour guide during my first afternoon there, a friend of a friend who picked me up at my hotel and took me around the city on his motorbike. We zipped past some of the major sites like East Lake and the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. We stopped and toured the Temple of Literature and Ngoc Son Temple in Huan Kiem Lake. He took me to an amazing lunch at what is advertised as the oldest restaurant in Hanoi (more on that later) and to a terrific coffee shop hidden behind a souvenir store where you climb to the rooftop and get a great view of downtown.

I stayed at the Citygate Hotel, so named because it’s next to the eastern gate to the original city walls, in the oldest part of the Old Quarter. In the mornings, a bare-bones street market busts out in the surrounding streets that is fun to witness—just tarps on the ground with all the usual meats and produce being sorted. The sounds of people shouting in the market woke me up by 5:30 a.m. in my 5th-floor room, though the kid who sleeps on the hotel lobby floor slept through it and I had to get him up to unlock the chain on the door and let me out.

I spent most of Monday just walking, taking pictures and trying to manage my dehydration and exhaustion by balancing my iced coffee breaks with water breaks. I got thoroughly turned around in the old quarter a few times and was amazed to see how far off-track I was once I did get my bearings. (I think the dehydration might have had something to do with that, too.) One place I went into for coffee wasn’t serving because the electricity was out. “Too hot,” they said.

During my walk, I made stops at a restored old-time merchant’s house, at about a half dozen temples and at St. Joseph’s Cathedral. Twice before dinner I went back to the hotel to chug a liter of water, shower and wash another sink full of clothes to hang up in my window.

For dinner, I went to a place recommended in the guidebooks, a very old stone and wood house converted to a bar and restaurant, and when I stepped inside, it was HOT. No air con. They seated me at a bar table by the door and I watched the tourists come in, and a fair number of them turned right around and left when they felt the heat. I enjoyed a long dinner and some iced tea, watching the waitresses give each other a hard time, and when I was just about ready to leave, I felt a puff of cool air come in the door, then another stronger puff, and then a tremendous rain came down. In about 20 seconds flat, it wasn’t hot anymore.

I ordered ice cream to wait it out, watching Inspector Gadget on the t.v. over the bar, muted with Vietnamese subtitles. The rain made people giddy, and the best entertainment was watching two American sisters traveling with their kids get laughing fits trying to wrestle themselves into very cheap plastic ponchos that the waitresses were handing out. When the rain let up about half an hour later, I walked back to the hotel, dodging drips off the shade trees, and sat in my room in the dark watching the lightening storm over the rooftops south of the city.

-Robert