HANOI- Long Dark Night
Trip Start
Jan 01, 1998
1
5
14
Trip End
Dec 31, 1998
Hanoi, Vietnam
Sunday, November 8, 1998
Having been to Vietnam at least several times by now, I resolve to start acting more like a local, just as I did many years before all over Latin America and am in the process of doing in Thailand. This is an important step in acculturation and an absolute necessity for long-term residence. This means eating the local food in local markets, living in places where locals live, and living your life here, rather than just passing through and taking snapshots. That’s 101. More advanced phases involve the local cultural life, to whatever extent it exists, and, hardest of all, making local friends, not just hangers-on to the hand out, but real friends, people you’d trust your life with. Despite its generally benign and even welcoming attitude toward foreigners, Asia is the most racist of all places, and that says a lot. Fortunately it also says that racism isn’t about hate first and foremost. It’s about stupidity… and fear.
So I go to the local market, out on the outskirts of town close to the river. It’s hardly a cheery place by Latin American standards, or even Thai or Indonesian, but some of the grimier inner-city Thai places have accustomed me little by little to that somewhat squalid ambiance. So I dive in and order up, 'pho’ (that’s an ‘o’ with a little truncated Asian erection attached to it and a pubic hair hanging over it, falling tone, pronounced ‘phuh’), the national dish of Vietnam, though spring rolls run a close second. So much for Viet cuisine… though the mound of greens that accompany the rolls are quite nice and must be seen to be believed. If that ‘pho’ pronunciation seems bizarre, realize that you’re also shopping in a ‘cho,’ same seri-erect ‘o’, so prounounced ‘uh’, low tone if I remember correctly.
Later, I hook up with some locals smoking out of a bamboo ‘bong’ on the street, tobacco that is, a peculiarly Vietnamese tradition that may very well have propelled the instrument to its subsequent fame in America. It’s passed and shared, the whole male bonding schmear, loading up plugs of stringy tobacco one after the other. There is always one available on any city block, and entire booths are devoted to it in rural markets. Of course to do this you must squat on your haunches like the rail-thin protein-starved Viets, your butt hovering about two inches off the pavement and your knees suffering damage from which they will never recuperate. We try to communicate using my basic tieng Viet and their pidgin English, the ‘pidgin’ reference most useful as a link to the fact that they, and now me, look like nothing so much as a flock of buzzards cleaning a bone. The women with their conical hats look more like fresh mushrooms springing out of fresh cow shit after a morning rain. It rains a lot in Hanoi. The roses are beautiful. The people are edgy, even in the countryside, like wired on caffeine or Communism or MSG, not to be confused with SMS. Then we start trading shots of something out of a plain glass bottle. Never known for being an alcohol heavyweight, I quickly start acquiring a buzz to call my own. I better take it home, while I can still remember where my hotel is.
I get a place in the Old Quarter that’s not much more than a house converted into a ‘mini-hotel’. The Old Quarter is pretty crowded and intense, and my second-floor room hangs out over the street so far that I think if I reached out I could hold hands with someone in the room across the street. Buildings go straight up in Vietnam, even in the countryside, as far as they can go without reinforcing steel, at least four or five storeys. Whether this saves rent or taxes or space as of prime importance I don’t know, but in the cities it produces noise and crowding, in the villages extra room for farming, not a bad idea for a small nation of eighty million people… and counting. The noise echoes up to my room and just stays there like a standing wave pattern, amplified by reverb. I lie down to go to sleep…
…but it ain’t happening. I don’t feel so good. I think I’m getting sick. There are bugs crawling around inside me. What exactly did I have to eat and drink? Oh my God, that’s a horrible thought. Then I realize that the bugs are actually crawling ON me, not IN me. Is that good or bad? And then I realize that I don’t know what’s happening to me, but happen it will. Somehow my entire life, all forty-four years, has somehow led up to this point, and I don’t know how the story ends. I toss, and then turn, but nothing changes. Then I try to get up but can’t even move. I’m becoming paralyzed. I’m dying. Something I ate or drank is slowly but inexorably killing me, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. I can’t even call for help. I see light coming in beneath the door, and tell myself to go over there and crawl down the stairs. My self isn’t responding. I pray, whatever I can remember of the prayers I learned as a kid fresh out of the womb, which is not much. It’ll take more than that to save me, so I create a new God, just so that I can pray to him/her/it, so that they’ll save me and I can serve them with all my soul for the rest of my life, which hopefully has just been renewed with a new lease. Right about now I should be dropping off to sleep. Just give me a sign, God, God the Creator and God the Creation, just give me a sign that I’m not alone… that you really exist…
Nothing happens, neither bad nor good, backward or forward, so I lie rolled up in a little ball all night, witing for the inevitable… which never comes. Finally sunlight re-enters the window and I realize slowly that I’ve survived… whatever it was. I move my fingers. They work. I move my arms and legs. Everything works. Right now I know only one thing- I’ve got to get out of here. With that single goal I jump out of bed and gather my things. This is no time for half-way measures. The activity and motion make me feel better, as if I’m re-gaining some control over my situation. I get outta’ there lickety-split. The family’s kid is sorry to see me go, since we’d hit it off pretty good. I don’t think they get too many foreigners here. So now what do I now?
Of course one of the most important things about ‘settling in’ is having a decent place to stay, a quality hard to define. I usually only know when it’s all wrong. So I look… and look… and look. These sandwiched-in little mini-skyscrapers may save physical space, but don’t do much for my psychological space. Finally I find an older-style hotel in a quieter neighborhood bounded on one side by Hoan Kiem Lake. They show me the room that occupies most of the top floor, open with widows on three sides, breeze blowing through, less than twenty bucks. This’ll do. I pull my things out of my pack and make myself at home, tentatively at first. I turn on the television. Hanoi TV is nothing great, a combination of news, Communist propaganda, educational programming, and whatever they can get for free. Strangely enough there is a program of music videos playing. The very next song is one by Patti Smith, ‘Summer Cannibals,’ intoning ‘eat eat,’ the pictures themselves all smeary and dis-jointed and exsistential, like some shamanic ritual. I can’t believe it. You don’t see videos by Patti Smith on MTV. When the final credits come on, it reads, ‘directed by Robert Frank.’ Thank you, God, for hearing my call.
