Gooooooood Morning, Vietnam!!!!
Not knowing what to expect, and somewhat expecting to see a more third world, developing nation, we were surprised by what we discovered in this nation. We will definitely return.
I didn’t know what to expect when we arrived one month ago in Hanoi, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Since leaving Austin back in June, I had a reasonable set of expectations, based on life experience, with every country on our itinerary for the remainder of 2023. I had never been to Vietnam, however, that didn’t mean that I was without any grid for it.
I was born in 1959, so I was a ‘well-aware-of-what’s-going-on-in-the-world’ kid in the 1960s. I was glued to Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the war every evening on the CBS Evening News. The Vietnam War was in my living room daily, so it just seemed that ‘doing war’ was what we Americans did. We were stopping the spread of communism, or so we were told. Then my brother was drafted out of college and into the U.S. Army during the war. Thankfully, that was during Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy, which no doubt spared my brother’s life.
The first movie I saw in a theater after going off to college was Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now - not exactly a realistic portrayal of the war, but it did make a significant impression on my 20-year-old brain. Coppola’s classic certainly didn’t win him any fans amongst the older veterans of the war at that time, i.e. the officer ranks. But it did strike a nerve with those younger veterans who had their boots on the ground in the rice paddies, hills, valleys, beaches, cities and villages of Vietnam that lay south of the 17th parallel. Sure, there probably was not a Robert Duval-lieutenant-colonel type forcing his men to get out into the rough surf simply because “Charlie don’t surf”. And did anyone really love the smell of napalm in the morning? Probably not. The whole film was a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness with a different set of characters in a different time and place. But for my generation, i.e. the ‘slightly-too-young-to-get-drafted’ teenagers of the 1970s, Apocalypse Now defined the cultural nuances of the Vietnam War that no amount of commanding officers’ memoirs could undo later on.
So how has our grid for making sense out of this country, particularly this city, evolved over the last four weeks? By design, we have remained in Hanoi our entire time this month. Have we encountered the psychological scars of an entire civilian population hammered by over 20,000 tonnes of bombs at the tail end of the American War, as it is known here? What have we discovered?
Much has changed since those dark days. Five U.S. presidents have paid personal visits to Vietnam since the war’s end. Heck, Obama even went out for a bowl of street noodles at the edge of the Old Quarter and wound up getting a menu item named after him. (Sidenote: We ate “Obama noodles” at the joint where he ate. They were scrumptious!) Even former prisoner-of-war John McCain, the late U.S.senator and former presidential candidate, visited Vietnam several times after his five years of captivity at the “Hanoi Hilton” (which we also visited), helping forge new ties between our two countries.
So, to paraphrase Walter Cronkite somewhat, “it is increasingly clear to this reporter” that Hanoi and her people are doing amazingly well these days.
Three Highlights
Hanoi is abuzz with life. Like most cities in Southeast Asia, Hanoi’s narrow streets are swarming with motorcycles, cars, buses, tri-shaws, and pedestrians from all over the world. Some areas of the city are clogged with foreigners from all over Western Europe, Russia, Ukraine, and all over the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Americans are few here but can be spotted occasionally. Shops and eateries line the sidewalks of Hanoi’s Old Quarter as one must tiptoe around tiny plastic stools and miniature tables galore. To cross any street in Hanoi, one must simply GO, as we have learned. You have to put yourself into the traffic food chain, or you will never make it to the other side.
English teachers have flooded Hanoi, and the rest of the country as well, it seems. We have seen ample evidence of skinny-jeaned young Westerners bouncing around from school to school, their teaching props poking out of their backpacks as they hustle a living here in Hanoi. Some have proper working visas, while others do not. One thing is clear, though: The appetite for English is great.
The great women of this remarkable country have literally made Vietnam what it is. We toured the National Vietnamese Women’s Museum and were blown away. We were told in advance that if we only toured one museum, that should be the one, and we could see why. The history of Vietnamese women and girls is unparalleled anywhere.
Two Ponderings
Foreign tourists are a huge boost to Vietnam’s economy. In order to ensure continued growth in the tourism sector, Vietnamese shopkeepers and restaurateurs need to step up to “the big embrace” of these visitors from all over the world. It’s hit-and-miss out there on the streets of Hanoi. While one can find an occasional friendly face and helpful soul, many vendors and wait staff treat foreigners as an annoyance. Whether we want to be or not, we are all ambassadors of our respective nations, both when we travel abroad and when we encounter visitors from other lands back home in familiar public spaces.
Will the Vietnamese eventually turn the corner on this critical dynamic? Like any capital city, national monuments and government buildings occupy some of the most beautiful and iconic spaces. Yet tourists routinely encounter far more “do not”s than “do”s in these areas, often without explanation.
As mentioned, learning English is THE THING. Finding a Vietnamese adult who can actually converse in English remains a rare find. Will the current massive investment in learning English pay off down the road?
One Great Unknown
In all our journeys thus far throughout south and southeast Asia, visible spirituality and religious expression have been the defining features of everyday life, eg., daily devotionals at Hindu temples in India; colorful offerings left along the roadsides in Bali, Indonesia; the call to prayer that beautifully drifts across the cities and villages of Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago; holding burning joss sticks while making supplications at Buddhist, Confucianist, Taoist and ancestral halls of honor, as well as the gatherings of Christians on Sundays everywhere in the region.
Where is this in Vietnam? Apart from one or two registered, historic churches, one mosque for expat Muslims, and a handful of Taoist, ancestral pagodas scantily tended to, we find the absence of outward spirituality, especially in this region of the world, to be surprising. How are life’s biggest questions handled here?
Here’s a question that does have a known answer: Will we come back to Vietnam? We sure hope so. We love this country. And there is so much country yet to be seen. Da Nang, Hue and Hoi An beckon from the middle, while Ho Chi Minh City (aka “Saigon”) and the Mekong River Delta summon us for a journey down south.
What a beautiful country. What a story. Vietnam, we shall meet again…
Photos
There was so much to look at and we captured so many interesting scenes that it was hard to narrow down photos to include in this blog; hence, we are using three separate galleries of photos. Click on any photo to enlarge it to full view.
Photo Gallery 1: Architecture of Hanoi
We are utterly fascinated by architecture around the world. Vietnam offered plenty for us to marvel at. We walked the streets of Hanoi wide-eyed with awe at the extreme variety of structure and design throughout the city. Modern, ancient, French-influenced, tall narrow apartment buildings (some no wider than 12 feet), colorful, fanciful, austere, industrial, etc.
Photo Gallery 2: Scenes From Daily Life in Hanoi
Photo Gallery 3: Specialty Streets with Nicknames
In the Old Quarter of Hanoi, there are several streets which are lined with shops all selling the same products. Over time, these streets became known by nicknames eg., “Kitchen Street” (shops selling kitchen products), “Shoe Street” (shops selling shoes), “Sewing Street” (Purchase all of your sewing needs on this street!), etc. The last photo is of “Christmas Street” which looked like an explosion of every kind of Christmas decor you could fathom. No pretty displays, mind you; just boxes and boxes of stuff layed out or piled high for the brave and determined shoppers who dared try to navigate through to find their desired treasure.
