but also highly symbolic. M and I were taking a boat upriver to see where a bridge under construction would soon, alas, be eliminating the traditional ferry service. We passed part of the citadel where there were small, round sentry posts made of concrete, somewhat like miniatures of the multi-storey affair we had seen going over the pass. I couldn’t get anyone to confirm that the French had left them, but such was my intuition. Later, I learned that the Vietnamese had recently turned them into public toilets. The genius of that! Here, located in the areas of busiest pedestrian traffic, were these private little kiosks, semi-subterranean and obviously almost indestructible, with slot-like firing holes high up near the roofs to provide good ventilation. There’s something quintessentially Vietnamese in that idea.
Another and rather famous example of Vietnamese resilience can be seen in Hanoi. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, only one bridge, the Long Bien span across the Red River, linked the city with Haiphong, its vital seaport. The bridge was designed (by Gustave Eiffel no less) for rail traffic as well as foot and vehicular use. It is 2,500 metres long and looks like a giant Erector Set construction. Between 1965 and 1975, it was attacked numerous times by American warplanes intent on cutting off Hanoi’s food supplies. The bombers concentrated on the centre sections, which would crash into the deepest part of the channel. They went so far as come up with new types of bombs for this purpose. But each time the bridge was attacked, the Vietnamese rebuilt it, sometimes using American prisoners as part of the labour gangs to ensure the repairs would go ahead without interruption — only to be knocked down again. In this story, many people see confirmation of the view that the Vietnamese are realistic, pragmatic, and pugnaciously businesslike people: apostles of the doable.
I’ve mentioned earlier in certain parts of central Vietnam, where the Americans used the same sort of carpet bombing as they did in Laos, residents have incorporated the craters into their irrigation system with enough ingenuity to give themselves an extra crop of rice. It is as though they said to themselves, “The gods have given us all these free holes. How can we turn them to good account?” I’m also thinking of one of the famous places to eat in Hanoi, a family-run restaurant called Cha Cha La Vong, located in an old building at the top of a gruelling flight of worn wooden stairs. It serves only one dish, made from whatever fish the family has caught that day, prepared cha cha style, ground and highly seasoned. The dish has given its name to Cha Cha Street, which is now full of other establishments of the same type. When eating in one of these places I chanced to admire the little altar on the wall honouring the owner’s ancestors. Beside the customary incense, paper offerings, and fresh oranges, was an unopened bottle of Mekong Whisky. I enjoyed the meal so much that I returned the following evening. Everything was just the same except that the whisky bottle was now only half full.
As I say, an immensely practical people.
— DOWNPOUR —
M and I made our way to Hanoi both knowing that as I will never be able to write as well as the English traveller A.A. Gill, I could at least quote him. “If the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference,” he has said of Vietnam, “the opposite of war isn’t peace; it’s prosperity.” For more than a decade, the Vietnamese economy had been growing by as much as 10 percent annually. In such a young and busy population, focused on this day and the next, we were actually surprised to find some throwbacks to the wartime period almost as soon as we arrived, such as my being offered marijuana or the services of “boom-boom girls.”
Every day we gingerly crossed boulevards, sidestepping crowds of Vietnamese women on motor scooters. They had on the traditional ao dai, those silk dresses worn over trousers and slit up both sides. When putting along in heavy traffic through the polluted streets, they also wear masks over their mouths and what look very much like eighteen-button opera gloves. One day when I reached the other side, I bumped into a fellow who I thought was pulling a switchblade on me. In fact, he was an innocent knife vendor demonstrating his wares only a step or two from my throat, though this wasn’t immediately apparent as he didn’t have his tray of knives in front of him, but kept it under one arm where I didn’t quite see it for what it was. There was a tense moment until I figured out what was happening. And shortly afterwards we saw something wonderful.
We had taken what looked like the maid’s quarters in a small hotel in the Old Quarter: a minuscule slot-like room with a teak floor, under the eaves five storeys up, one more than was serviced by the lift. We had just left the lobby for the extreme hubbub outside when suddenly the street sellers began gathering up their goods and disappearing somewhere. In what seemed an instant, they were gone, and their potential customers with them. Believing that this indicated simply that the day’s instalment of the torrential rain was set to begin, we naively thought people were over-reacting, even as leaves, twigs, and other debris started to swirl about the empty intersection as though trapped in a wind tunnel. Being sensible Vancouverites, we went back upstairs for our umbrellas. Before we even reached the room, the sky was as dark as though in a total eclipse. A great tropical storm was well underway.
We stood in our rickety lodging overlooking perhaps two centuries’ worth of red-tiled rooftops as gale-force winds came from the west, blowing the rain in such a way as to send it speeding up the streets, which soon flooded. Antennae — bamboo and even steel — toppled off roofs into the lanes below. Tarpaulins rudely torn from one building became tangled in another. Windows shattered. The most amazing feature was the way that the thick curtain of fast-moving rain obscured all the luxury joint-venture hotels and other high-rise construction in the distance. All evidence of the city’s new wealth was blacked out. What was left looked like a Doré engraving of Paris illustrating a work by Victor Hugo. For the couple of hours the storm lasted, we were transfixed by the unexpected glimpse of what nineteenth-century Hanoi must have looked like. This was as close as we had come thus far to understanding that there is still a French atmosphere in Hanoi, as the tourist authorities always insist.
The streets round St. Joseph’s Cathedral, for example, are described as a lingering expression of the old colonial culture, but time and again we were disabused of the notion that the francophone heritage we were seeking actually exists. In practical day-to-day terms, the greatest experience of French culture that M and I had come upon in Hanoi was a pair of backpacking Québécoises living in the same run-down pension as ourselves. They were travelling together. Although not related, they were identically dressed, and identically tattooed and pierced from top to toe, and were both named Véronique. This naturally led to confusion that seemed uproarious at the time, especially to them.
The storm ended as abruptly as it began, and we went looking for a place to have a congenial drink. We found a jazz club where a four-piece Vietnamese band — tenor sax, bass, keyboard, and drums — was working itself into quite a lather while waiters slithered up to all the little round tables with trays of intimate antiquarian cocktails such as Sidecars and White Russians. I remember that the music, too, was attractively of a certain period, as though we had time-travelled back to classical modernism. It was the kind of nightclub where you could ask the bandleader, in almost-correct French, “Est-ce que vous connaissez le ‘Muskrat Ramble’?” and the answer would be yes.
Yet I could not quite place the familiar-sounding melody line running beneath what the saxophonist had been pounding out for the past twenty minutes or so. It would have come to me, but my concentration was broken by what I believed might be incipient violence. Two tables away, in another throwback moment, sat an obvious example of the former American military man returned on a mission of exorcism and nostalgia, what I have heard the Vietnamese call a vietnamman, all one word. He was about sixty-five, bull-necked, with a white buzzcut, and must have been drinking much of the afternoon. His heckling of the musicians became so loud that the sax player was no longer able to drown it out. He was, it seemed to me, only one Scotch away from standing up and screaming some imprecation about dog-eatin’ sonsabitches. I thought I’d better get M out of there and myself with her.
Later
