Falling Off the Map (16 page)

That kind of erratic infrastructure has, so far, helped to keep Vietnam relatively untouristed: 1990 was the “Year of Tourism,” my guide in the north dryly informed me, and it was also the year when the government decided to tear down all its hotels (in order to rebuild them). As a result, the country attracted exactly 187,000 visitors, or one for every twenty-five who went to smaller Thailand, next door. And the sightseer with even minimal expectations of comfort and ease may still find Vietnam more than he has bargained for: the spirit is winning, but the flush is weak. For the jaded traveler, however, who has begun to despair of ever finding anywhere fresh or unspoiled, the place may well be a revelation. Vietnam is amazingly short of amenities, but one goes to Vietnam today precisely to enjoy the qualities that the absence of such amenities encourages.

The only preparation you need to make if you plan to visit Vietnam is to sweep your mind clear of all preconceptions. To begin with, Americans need fear nothing except an excess of curiosity and goodwill, and the insults of children who mistake them for Soviets; these days, much of Vietnam is praying for a greater American presence. As for the Vietnamese army, though it is the fifth-largest in the world, the only sign I saw of it in all my time in the country was in the fifteen honeymoon cottages it rents out in Dalat, the “City of Love.” And the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is also one of the least ideological, or Marxist-minded, places I have ever seen, buzzing as it does with an enterprise that could not be freer, and principles mostly honored in the breach. In three weeks in the country, I saw almost no slogans, no billboards, no assertions of any principle save for a generalized veneration of Ho Chi Minh (whose poster you can buy for three cents, framed for thirty) and his relatively anodyne saying “Nothing is more precious than freedom and
independence.” And where in Cuba, say, or North Korea, police seem to be a part of every conversation and everyone is always looking over his shoulder, the Vietnamese I met seemed more than ready to air their grievances in the street. It is ironic that so many of us associate Vietnam with hardship and war; I found it one of the gentlest and most peaceful countries I have ever seen.

The wonkiness of Vietnam won me over as soon as I set foot in Hanoi: its tiny airport packed with dilapidated old warplanes and the weathered jets of Balkan Airlines and CSA; the local passengers filing out with “Operation Smile” buttons on their lapels; the small figures waving to us from the “See-Off Area.” Inside, the bare shed of an Arrivals Hall was flooded with manic French dance tunes played at top volume. Stick figures on slips of paper denoted the male and female rest rooms, and pretty customs officers seemed mostly to be inspecting foreigners for smiles. Outside, a few dutiful drivers were stroking their Toyotas with pink feather dusters.

Our car set off along the half-paved roads, past men on motorbikes in shades and army caps, their women riding sidesaddle behind them, past blasted, wheezing buses. “The last time I was here,” offered the Thai businessman who was along for the ride, “my friend’s room caught on fire: something to do with the air conditioner. I tried to find a bellboy or waiter to help, but the only way I could explain to them what was happening was by putting on my lighter. When I did, they offered me a cigarette. It was a very good experience somehow!”

Hanoi at first sight felt like a small town writ large, the ancient thirty-six-street capital pushed out just a little but touched still with a sleepy, leafy elegance. High-school girls skipped rope along the main boulevard, and boys banged rusted Foosball sets across the sidewalk. Students cycled hand in hand down the
busy streets. Around the central lake, Hoan Kiem, old men sat fishing, while others gathered over games of Chinese chess; in Indira Gandhi Park, teenage boys with inch-long thumbnails and twigs like studs in their ears crouched above the ground, playing cards. Outside the former U.S. embassy, boys were playing
takraw
(foot volleyball), using a flower as a ball.

Hanoi felt utterly authentic, very much itself and not a user-friendly replica of itself, let alone a Communist-planned Potemkin antiself: the only sign of Tourism was the name on the packs of local cigarettes. Yet even here, amidst this virgin quiet, one could feel a steady buzz of restless, mercantile energy. Along the tree-lined streets, pretty with shuttered consulates and overgrown old villas, there was still a furious commotion of
cyclos
, bicycles, and pedestrians, so crowded that a car could hardly pass; and along the age-old, sloping streets, a dizzying seethe of shops and stalls. In days gone by, the streets of the old quarter were called Cotton and Silk and Comb, each one offering a single commodity; today the names remain, but one street is devoted to motorbikes and one to Sony Walkmans; one has nothing but Seiko watches, one only fake bank notes, to be offered to the dead.

Insofar as any Marxism is to be found in Vietnam, Hanoi, of course, is the place, yet even in the capital it is hardly strident or insistent. A statue of “Le-nin” stands forlornly in one park, and a vast open space surrounds one of the few new buildings in town, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, an eerily illuminated chamber, guarded by ramrod soldiers, which sightseers can visit only with a white-gloved military escort. “Ho Chi Minh would have hated it,” said my guide. The Cuban-built Thang Loi Hotel has all the standard Cuban amenities (no water in the swimming pool, no staff at the counters), and at night, in the bar, I watched beefy Russians toasting one another tearily over thirty-cent bottles of vodka and negotiating for the night with
local girls. Groups of peasants from the countryside troop all day long around the Ho Chi Minh Museum, but the main subject of interest for them may well be the corner that features a Coke sign, a plaster-cast Packard, and Don McCullin’s photo of a shell-shocked grunt. Outside the house of Uncle Ho, former pastry chef at London’s Carlton Hotel, they were selling copies of
Totto-chan
, the memoirs of Japan’s female Johnny Carson.

For most of the people in Hanoi, with their cash-register quickness and low-key patriotism, there are more urgent concerns than ideology. My guide to the city, a friendly, cherubic fellow in a baseball cap, with a ready grin, had been a Vietcong platoon commander for four years, but even his accounts of the war were matter-of-fact and hardly partisan. His greatest challenge, he implied, had come when he was sent, as soon as the war ended, to Bulgaria and, on his second day there, after four years of fighting in the jungle, had been told by an eighteen-year-old Bulgarian girl, “I love you.” He also seemed cheerfully unillusioned about the system. Had Bulgarian served him well in his job? “In eleven years,” he said, “there have been only two Bulgarian tour groups in Vietnam. I was assigned to neither.” The present moment, with its promise of economic openness and its freedom from strife, was the sunniest period in his forty years, he said. But still he started every sentence with “The problem is that …” and, on the rare occasions when he tried to make a political point, somehow got the words all wrong. “During the war, the North Vietnamese were very barbarous—I mean, courageous.…”

Besides, the nominal principles of the Party are contradicted all day long by a cacophony of deals. Everywhere seems a marketplace in Hanoi, and every street is bubbling over with free trade: one block given over to a stack of black-and-white TVs, one to a rack of bicycles. In another block, thirty barbers were lined up with their backs to traffic, their mirrors set along
the wall before them. Old men puffed Hero and Gallantes cigarettes over pyramids of Nescafé bottles, bookshops exploded with stacks of Madonna fan mags, copies of
Ba Tuoc Mongto Crixto
(and, of course, piles of TOEFL Preparation Books). In the covered market, fifteen-dollar-a-kilo turtles and fat snakes sat next to
MARADONA JEANS
caps and shirts with
ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS
on them. And out on the streets, the stalls were loaded with knockoff Casios, Disney T-shirts, Hong Kong watches, Chinese fans, Snoopy bags, flashing clocks, and pills guaranteed to save one from “addiction to narcotics.” An absence of external resources is more than made up for by inner: a teacher in Vietnam earns nine dollars a month, yet half the households in the country, according to my guide, have VCRs.

In Hanoi, I soon learned to do as the Vietnamese do: hope for the best. A taxi ride into town, I learned, might mean a motorbike race, clinging to the back of a young soldier; laundry service meant flinging your clothes upon a bed and hoping you might see them sometime later. Prices varied wildly, and inexplicably, from one place to the next, with some articles costing eight or twelve times more in one place than another. Hanoi had certainly not resolved itself into the International Style.

And nighttime was the best of all in the old, and stately, capital, as something ancient began to come forth from the shadows. I loved to bump along the lamplit alleyways after dark in a
cyclo
, a perfect pace at which to see and smell the spicy nights. In the gloom, the town was more mysterious than ever, the streets too dark even to read by, the little stalls half lit, the faces eerie in the blackness. Lovers were eating ice cream by the waterside, and children traded cards of movie stars. Whole families sat at tables on the sidewalk, eating elaborate meals by the flicker of oil lamps. Couples sat cradled by their bicycles, or in the hollows of large trees. The air smelled of mint and a
festival spirit. And it was easy to feel that lamps were burning inside the people too.

In Hanoi, I came to see how much the Vietnamese are still a people of simple, romantic pleasures, making do with what they have: playing badminton on the streets, or going for walks along the lake, or simply taking in the softness of the night air. Gambling and photography are still as popular as in Norman Lewis’s lyrical accounts from the fifties; and soft-laughing girls still promenade around the lake at night. In stores I entered, owners offered me tea and lotus-seed cake; in the distance, Johnny Guitar was playing “Romance d’Amour.”

Of course, Hanoi is changing with every passing season. Along Hang Ga Street, more and more places now are sprouting the magic word, in English, “restaurant” (and offering cognac and Cyndi Lauper, though their menus still have sections headed “River Tortoises” or, simply, “Birds”), and proprietors are more and more likely to invite you inside to see their lambada videos or discuss Samantha Fox. The famous mantra “Eric Clapton Number One” can often be heard in Hanoi now, and along the candlelit streets at night, crowds can be seen in houses, lined up in rows as at a cinema, their faces lit up by a new Nintendo screen. On this page of the local paper,
Hanoi Moi
, I found a discussion of
Pretty Woman.
Yet still there is an unhardened sweetness to the place, an innocence of the pleasures it is giving.

In the countryside, the changes are even more pronounced. Brand-new brick houses are popping up in every village, TVs are lighting up the dark, scooters are closing in on water buffalo. Every other child seems to be wearing a baseball cap that announces, enigmatically,
THE
RATS
WON
. And yet, and yet, there is a real sense of unexpectedness on the road, as one slices through the clouded mountains in the north, around a series of narrow switchbacks, the only figures materializing in the mist
the tribal Montagnards, clad in their red and blue and yellow scarves and belts. We stopped for lunch at a tiny hut, eating, cross-legged on a platform, the standard street-stall fare of beef and pork lit up by mint and lemongrass; in the distance, ridge after ridge of dark-blue mountains receded into outline, the same color, almost, as the teeth of the tribal crone who served us tea. The minority Montagnards still measure their lives by the essential village rhythm of cockcrow and chopping wood. Exquisite, swan-necked beauties, jangling silver bracelets, draw water from the well or work old rice pumps with their feet; others go down to the water to bathe, and chatter away in classic, antique Thai. As visitors increase, the tribal peoples are beginning to learn how to play themselves (the altar in one hut I saw contained a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red, a can of 7-Up, and a packet of Gitanes), but they are still at least five years behind their more photographed cousins across the border.

The single most beautiful sight in all Vietnam may well be Halong Bay, five hours south of Hanoi—a local version of China’s Guilin—its waters dotted with three thousand misty islets in the shape of tigers, unicorns, and fighting cocks. On the day I visited, it was rainy, and I spent most of the afternoon wandering around the deserted colonnades and lazy balconies of a French colonial hotel I had entirely to myself. Yet, despite the rain, one could still make out the watercolor beauty of the area, billow-sailed junks outlined against jagged outcrops, kingfishers skimming low above the water. In the early light, fishermen casting nets glided silent across the silent water.

Like most tropical countries, Vietnam gets up with the light, and one of the greatest pleasures you can find is to go outside at six in the morning and see the whole town out stretching its limbs, playing badminton or soccer in the streets, ghosting its way through tai chi motions. When fishing boats go out at midday, fireworks herald their good fortune. And at night, everyone
heads for the water again, assembling at video cafés that sometimes offer “300-inch screens” (or Richard Chamberlain miniseries doing battle against kung fu classics).

It was gray and rainy every morning I was in the north, yet every morning, as I looked up at the sky, someone would assure me, “A very propitious day. In Vietnam, the rainy season lasts from September to January.” It was now mid-April. “This is the best season of the year.” Yet the gray only intensified the country’s matchless greens. All of us probably know by heart the classic landscape of Vietnam: the tiny stick figures in lampshade hats silhouetted on the hilltops, the quilted emerald rice fields, the slow-moving, pendulous water buffalo. Village girls still carry water in two-handled buckets, and men sell rice packed in banana leaves along the streets. And the streets themselves are a crazy gallimaufry of unlikely props: Japanese buses from the Kansai countryside and creaking De Sotos, Minsk motorbikes and carts loaded with rattan, Peugeot bicycles and ancient GMC trucks, “moving kitchens” and cross-country buses that break down only once every forty minutes. Wherever I went, 95 percent of the people I passed would stare at me, 75 percent would try out “Hello! Where you come from?” and 60 percent would break into the most radiant of smiles.