So, I’ve been bouncing around, bouncing off of things. Literally, in one case. A couple of days ago I was crossing a street near my hotel in the established manner, walking slowly and letting the traffic flow around me, when a young woman on a new Honda Dream (with granny on the back) came barelling around the corner while talking on her cell phone, hitting me a glancing blow and knocking me backward a couple of steps, though I stayed on my feet. She stopped, said “Sorry” in English, then sped off, granny giving me a dirty look as they drove away. The traffic is perverse, drivers’ behavior apparently calculated to extract maximum short-term advantage at the expense of safety and order, to say nothing of simple courtesy. Among family and friends the Vietnamese are deeply cooperative and supportivcce of each other, but in the broader public spehre, such as driving, there seems to be no sense of an abstract set of rules to which one ought to adhere. Even walking on the sidewalk, there is no standing aside to let another pass, but always the pressing of individual advantage.

This attitude shows up in economic relations as well. Twice in the last week, I’ve been cheated by street hawkers. It embarasses me to admit that I was an almost perfect victim in both cases. In the first case, I decided to finally give in and buy a couple of tee-shirts from one of the hawkers who work the streets around the hotels south of the Old Quarter. The shirts have pictures of Uncle Ho or a cyclo, with Hanoi or Vietnam under the image. The shirts should cost about three dollars, five for one with embrordery. I bought one shirt and went to dinner. On my way back, I was approached by another hawker who had missed the sale. “I saw you before,” she said. “You work in Hanoi. Why you buy from that other girl, not from me?” she asked, putting on a big pout. That’s when I should have walked away. For one thing, I was tired; for another, I’d already let her begin to manipulate me. I wanted to be a nice guy. She was pulling out shirts and handing them to me and talking a mile a minute and I was asking how much for this one how much for that one.* Did I mention I was tired? By the time we were finished handing shirts and money back and forth I had paid eleven dollars each for two shirts, a fact that only fully came into focus for me when I got back to my hotel room and my calculator. When I saw her a couple of days later she tried to tell me I had agreed to pay her another ten dollars! I told her I could have bought two silk shirts at one of the big shops for what I had already paid her and she asserted that “Those shirts are fake — real silk shirts are very expensive” and offered to show me. But when I told her I was going back to the hotel to get the shirts she had sold me so I could give them back to her, she disappeared. Haven’t seen her since. I gave the shirts to one of her competitors, gratis.A couple of days later, it was the shoeshine and shoe repair guy. I had previously paid about three dollars for a shoe shine, which I didn’t really need, my shoes being a wreck. I had seen this guy work before, pulling his tools out on the sidewalk to repair the shoes of both Westerners and Vietnamese. He’s older than the shoeshine boys, who really are boys and who only clean and shine rather than repair. My first mistake was not establishing the price and the scope of the service at the start. I wanted to be a nice guy and so when I was approached I sat down on the HSBC bank steps and took my shoes off, where I was quickly shoed away by a security guard, so we moved across the sidewalk and the shoe guy got to work. He reglued a flapping bit of sole, and actually glued new rubber onto the heels, trimming it expertly with a knife, all the while talking to me about his children and asking where I was from and so on. I was standing there thinking, I’ll be happy to pay 100,000 for this, so one can imagine my surprise when he asked me for 800,000, about thirty dollars. I took out my pocket calculator and we went over the numbers again. In the end, I wound up paying him more than ten dollars for a five dollar job, with him all the while saying it was a “good deal, fair price,” but I also heard him laughing with the security guard as I walked away.

Both these incidents made me angry, not because of the money, which, while not negligible, doesn’t make that much difference to me, but because I felt my good intentions had been violated. Of course, the charge that I was being patronizing can be leveled, but I was after all being a patron, using a service or buying a product. Clearly, though, I was opperating under a different ethic than the tee-shirt woman and the shoeshine man. I think the ethic for the street hawkers is to extract maximum profit for the short term without any sense that there is either a social compact to play fair, or a practical insight that routine overcharging will simply ruin the business. (Another tee-shirt hawker who heard my story — word travels fast on Hang Trong Street — did have this sense, saying, “You can only cheat someone once, so the street ethic I’ve described is not universal.) There is something similar in the hawker’s ethic to the way Vietnamese drive. There’s no sense that such behavior “ruins it for everbody.” Perhaps this has to do with living in a society in which authority is seen to be arbitrary, which leads to the conclusion that rules (and social compacts) are for suckers. It stands in stark contrast, at any rate, to the way I’ve seen Vietnamese interact with friends and family. It may also simply be poverty. The shop owners with whom I’ve had dealings — a much more prosperous class — have driven a hard bargain, but there was alwas a sense that there was in fact a bargain, that is, a contract, being established between seller and buyer. There were rules. That sense was completely missing in the two encounters I’ve described here.

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*The basic unit of Vietnamese currency is the dong and the current exchange rate is about 1785 dong to the dollar, so the most common bills are denominated 50,000, 100,000, and 500,000 — 100,000 is a little over $5.00 US.

A Lecture on Vietnamese Culture

The professor tells the visitors
that today they will learn about
the betel leaf and the areca nut,
which is the history of Vietnam

in one small package, he says,
and then recites a song
for his audience, who have
been brought captive by a guide

to listen, though they would
be walking the narrow
streets lost in the heat blinded
by the haze of burning paper

from the temples, the sidewalks
filled with families eating soup
and gossiping, but they will
never be allowed outside –

today it’s the betel leaf
and the areca nut and slaked lime
for them, Vietnam as a quid
pro quo, their being here to hear

the lecture, offered many times
to others and polished smooth
as a Buddha’s toe kissed for
centuries, rubbed for good luck.

They are allowed nothing else.
Not the State’s music spilling
from the loudspeakers nor
the singing from the Cathedral

punctuated by the air horns
of tourist buses and the tinkle
of cyclo bells, the calls of women
hawking fish and fresh bread.

Tomorrow it will be coconuts
and when they are finished with
nuts they will move on to fruit
and flowers. And if they come

every day, before long they will
be allowed to discuss weather
and international relations,
which are very like the betel leaf.

(Hanoi, April 2009)

Update: I’ll have to do a little more work on displaying Vietnamese characters.

Update: This morning I went to lunch with Vietnamese friends who speak English, along with an American who speaks the language well. I find I can ear quite a few individual words in conversation and thus begin to get the drift, but it still moves so fast I get lost. And the American was easiest to understand, perhaps because her Vietnamese was a beat slower and somewhat more textbook clear.

Vietnam continues to exert this weird pressure on my psyche. It’s hard to describe, except to say that it has always, in each visit, forced me toward self-appraisal. Maybe it’s just being cast into a city by myself where I speak the language only haltingly and where everyday customs are so different from what I am used to.

Because I put little faith in the idea that any particular event is meant to be, I have a hard time accounting for my love of Vietnam and its effects on me. Philosophically, I am committed to the idea that contingency rules our lives as human subjects. I have no rational belief in larger purposes or patterns; I take a more Sophoclean attitude toward the relationship between humans and the world, that we make our fate in the face of contingency. That is, we do the best we can with what is given to us. (No piety intended here by the slightly pious language.) So I have been given Vietnam and it’s necessary to make something out of the gift. Poetry in my case, or sentences, at any rate. Sentences as gestures toward comprehension. Given by whom? Given by chance, which I think makes my responsibility more imparative that if the gift had come from the gods or the predictable machinery of fate.

Still, even in the absence of the gods, I am here to make my soul.

After breakfast I came back and used Skype to call Carole. Amy was visiting in South Colton, so I got to talk to her too. In fact, I got to see both Caroel and Amy because Carole has a little video camera on her Mac. Skype is awesome — it’s completely amazing to be able to see and speak in real time literally half-way around the world. The first time I was in VN a little over a decade ago, I had to go to a special telephone “station” to make a very expensive international call. When I was talking to Amy and Carole, I mentioned the copies of famous paintings turned out by local craftspeople for the tourist trade, some of them astonishingly bad. There is also a kind of hyper-department-store genre as well, in which the paintings are generic rather than being based on models [Here's a slide show that includes some of the paintings and narrates my trip so far -- I'll be adding images as I go and I need to go back and put the Hong Kong airport images in, too.] One wonders what Plato, so afraid of copies, the copy always being inferior to the original, would have made of these paintings. They are certainly inferior by almost any standard, but interesting.

Eight years ago, standing on Tran Hung Dao St. here in Hanoi, Lady Borton and I were having a conversation about people we knew who had come to Vietnam — Americans — and been changed is various ways by the experience. There was Lady herself, John Balaban, a bunch of writers. I was a few days from going home and I had come through a rough time that I still can’t quite explain, a period of several weeks where a few minor health problems had spiraled into a bout of obsessive-compulsive thinking, restlessness, lack of apatite, and sleeplessness. All this just under the surface while I was apparently functioning pretty much normally in public, though a couple of friends sensed something weird was going on. At one point in the conversation, Lady remarked, “This place has healed a lot of people.” And it’s true, though I’m not quite sure why that should be. Writing this just now I can hear the dawn birds just staring up and in the distance a rooster crowing. My heart is at ease.

Funny, I lived here a year without every getting pickpocketed and now someone touches me on my second day in town. It’s not the money, of course, but feeling I’ve been made to look foolish. Well, I was foolish, but I’m not fretting about it. Ironically, I discovered the loss when I reached into my pocket to pull out some change for a beggar. Well, that will certainly teach me to be considerably more cautious.

In happier news, I arranged to get some language lessons starting next week. Perhaps I’ll begin by learning how to say, “You little thief.” I think it would be something like “Em la ke trom nho.”

Update: Now I’m not so sure. Looking through my wallet just now I saw a bunch of small bills — I may have put them there (instead of my pocket) when I left the book store a few minutes before my encouners on the way home. Maybe I didn’t have any money in that pocket. A nice little ambiguity there!

Hanoi is a wonderfully friendly city, a city with a sense of humor. The young woman who sold me bananas smiled ant my language skills and was very sweet, even as she insisted that, no, I did not want two bananas but three. How could I disagree? They cost about 25 cents each and are of the medium sixed, medium sweet variety. I didn’t see any of the tiny. thumb-sized and intensly sweet variety that I’ve only ever had in Vietnam.

My everyday life in New York is so quiet and regular that it’s quite a shock to the system to be set down in the middle of Hanoi; but it’s a salubrious kind of shock that does me good, gets me out of myself. It is terribly easy to fall into the habit of thinking that one’s own way of life is the only way — not even out of a sense of superority (though that’s common enough), but out of habit — and it is good to be reminded of the wild variety of human modes of being. I am fortunate to have found this place.

I’m still tired from my trip here. It’s only 9:30 in the morning and I already feel as if I’ve had a full day. I’m going to read, then do some language drill on the computer, then go investigate taking some cooking classes, though it looks as if it might rain this afternoon. Real work can wait until Monday.