Paradoxes of Discovery

Old quarter in Bùi Xuân Phái paintings

The social forms and customs one encounters in Phố Cổ (Old Quarter) can be unsettling, but the human interactions, both between the residents of the quarter and between residents and visitors, can seem as familiar as walking down a street in one’s hometown. That is, basic human motives and attitudes can emerge from divergent social practices. Learning to negotiate this paradox in all its subtlety is what draws me back again and again to the ancient streets.

If you are looking for the core, the essence, the heart of Hà Nội, you will find it is Phố Cổ. It is a square kilometer of extremes – elegance and dirt, grace and chaos, friendship and anger. No other place I have been to, with the possible exception of the ancient Medina in Fez, Morocco, presents the difficulties of understanding thrown up by the Old Quarter in Hà Nội. I am speaking, of course, of the reactions of Western visitors, but the more I discuss the matter with Vietnamese friends, the more I am convinced that this little area also presents paradoxes of perception for people native to the place. One does not head into the Old Quarter for peace and quiet. Even some citizens of Hà Nội avoid the place unless they have a good reason for going there. My friend Quỳnh, for instance, has grown up in Hà Nội, but does not like to go to the quarter because it is crowded and noisy. Unless we are going to Hàng Điếu for bún bò (rice noodles with beef) or Chả Cá for chả cá (grilled chopped fish), she avoids the Old Quarter. My Vietnamese teacher, who with her husband has just built a house for her family out on the Red River dyke near West Lake, shudders visibly when she contemplates what it would be like to live there. She warns me against eating “on the street,” not knowing that my favorite places are open to the air, if not literally on the sidewalk.

Most of the time, I enjoy the bother and irritations of this part of the city. For two months in the summer of 1998, I lived on the northern edge of the Old Quarter and spent at least part of everyday losing myself in the frenetic ambiance of its narrow, shop-lined, oddly angled streets. The streets were initially laid down not by planners, but by the traffic of feet and wagons over the course of centuries as the city developed. That is why, unlike the French Quarter, planned by colonial architects according to their idea of the rational, the old streets retain their ability to surprise and delight – and sometimes frighten – pedestrians. The irrational is eternally interesting and there is nothing rational, in the Western sense, about the layout of the Old Quarter, though much of it makes perfect sense on its own terms.

It also makes sense to remember that the Old Quarter is at least occasionally irritating to the Vietnamese, who are, after all, mostly trying to make a living under difficult circumstances. And it’s not a bad idea to remember that you represent a potential sense of income for many of those who live in the quarter. Mostly, your encounters will be delightful, but the Vietnamese are as prone to human foibles as we tourists are, so make allowances – this isn’t Disneyland, where the staff is paid to be nice to you.

Before I came to Việt Nam, I read as much as I could about Vietnamese history and customs, and while these studies helped prepare me for what I would see in Việt Nam, my real education has come from walking the streets of the Old Quarter and the back alleys of Ngọc Hà. It is impossible to feel the texture of the customs of a country merely by reading about them. No doubt it is also impossible for an outsider to ever get completely inside another culture, but it is at least possible to pull back successive sets of curtains, revealing new scenes as one enters more deeply into a new reality. One of those curtains is language. If you going to stay more than a week in Hà Nội you really should learn to count in Vietnamese, to say chào – hello and goodbye – (It is the same!), and perhaps to say a few other phrases, such as “I don’t want to buy that” and “I don’t need a ride, thanks.” But it’s a difficult language for Westerners – its six tones almost impossible to hear without training. Learning to distinguish between the sounds of the words for “yogurt” and the words for “fix” or “repair” almost involves becoming another sort of person altogether – in my case, the sort of person who can sing, which I have never been able to do. Still, Tôi cố gắng nói tiếng Việt thật giỏi! “I try to speak Vietnamese very well!”

Intersection of Tạ Hiền and Lương Ngọc Quyến in the bustling Old Quarter

But if a visitor to Hà Nội cannot master the language of words and sentences, what about the language of food? Vietnamese food in general and the food of Hà Nội’s Old Quarter in particular offer the visitor both the familiar and the unusual. And much can be said in this language. One of the first things you need to do in your exploration of the Old Quarter is to recognize that it is likely to be different from anything you have seen before. This is especially true of – but not limited to – what the Vietnamese eat. In the West Vietnamese food has acquired a reputation for lightness and intensity of flavor, attribute no doubt to immigrant chefs. Most of the food you will encounter in the Old Quarter will bear little resemblance to the Vietnamese food you have eaten in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Montreal, or London. Take one of my favorites, bánh gối: a round wheat flour “tortilla” is folded over a bit of meat and vegetables in the shapre of a half moon or pillow and fried into a kind of Vietnamese taco. A couple of these served with salad and a beer will set you back one US dollar and a half, all of this seems familiar and comforting, which is no doubt why I return again and again to the shop at 29 Lương Văn Can. (I’m so fond of the owner and her little brown white dog.)

Through centuries of invasion, flood, drought and barely sufficient yields of staple crops, Vietnamese – especially those living in the north – have made a virtue of necessity, learning to use whatever foods were available to them. And after the bleak hardships of the French and American wars, many Vietnamese are taking great joy in returning to the traditional foods of their regions – foods that can sometimes bring a Westerner up short. There is of course thịt chó, dog meat, which you actually don’t find much in the Old Quarter – it is more common out on the Red River dyke. Then there are various members of the insect family. I mention these as a reminder that the language of food has a vast vocabulary, which different cultures use in different ways.

On my first night in Hà Nội last April, jet-lagged, I wandered into a sidewalk restaurant on Phan Đình Phùng Street and ordered a Halida Beer. I wasn’t really hungry – I just wanted to watch the world go by. There were two groups of young people in the restaurant – included both men and women, a slightly unusual situation in Việt Nam, where the sexes are generally more segregated in social settings. One group seemed to have finished dinner and was having a few drinks of something red in little short glasses. The other group sat at a table with a pot of soup simmering on a brazier. From my vantage point beside the pillar, screened from view, I was about to be introduced to two culinary practices Americans – me included – will find, well, exotic. The red liquid? Picking up the menu the waiter had left on the table I discovered that the folks over there near the door were drinking “goat’s blood with alcohol.” It is a beautiful color, by the way, the translucent red of hibiscus flowers, and is served in recycle Coke bottles – hardly the use to which the buttoned-down executives back in Atlanta Georgia might have imagined for the lef-over containers of this quintessentially American drink. The other group was having trứng vịt lộn with their soup, for which there is no really satisfactory translation into English, though it is usually called “half-hatched duck eggs.” It is boiled egg with an almost fully developed bird inside. Many of my Vietnamese friends swear by this delicacy, though a popular saying warns children to shut their eyes when they eat it.

Hàng Mã Street specializes in providing votive papers

My favorite streets in the Old Quarter are Hàng Mã, Hàng Quạt and Hàng Thiếc. Hàng Mã and Hàng Thiếc are among the few streets in the quarter that have retained their ancient trades, giving them perhaps a deeper history than other streets such as Hàng Đường (Sugar Street), which now sell mostly ready-to-wear clothing. The first two are natural choices – Hàng Mã sells colorful votive paper “ghost money” and other paper objects – such as houses and motorbikes – associated with the cult of the ancestors. The objects are burned in temples, pagodas, and communal houses on the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month as offerings to the dead. One of the most attractive and profound aspects Vietnamese culture is the way the dead continue to be members of the family. It is common to see ordinary Vietnamese burning votive paper on the sidewalks in the evenings, a way of communicating with parents and grandparents no longer living, but still very much present in the lives of their descendants. The rising smoke is a language the dead can understand.

Hàng Quạt, which originally sold paper fans, is now lined with shops selling altar furnishings. It and Hàng Mã are easily the most colorful streets in the quarter and the predominant color is red, the color of luck in Vietnamese cosmology and folk belief, much of which has been adapted from Taoist traditions filtered through centuries of village ceremonies and beliefs. In addition to banners bearing the Chinese characters for luck, health, long life, and wealth, one can find porcelain images of various Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist deities. Especially popular are Guan Yin, a female Buddha usually known as the Goddess of Mercy, and the dual figures of Ông Địa, the god of the earth and Ông Tài, the god of money. These two are the pair you see on small altars piled with fruit, incense, and votive paper near the entrances to shops all over Việt Nam. Inscribed on the altars in Chinese you will often find saying such as “The things of the earth bring forth wealth.” A distinguished Vietnamese scholar tells me that the two gods were traditionally not worshipped together and that their partnership is a result of the new entrepreneurial spirit of đổi mới (renovation).

y

Hàng Thiếc intersects Hàng Quạt, but it could not be more different. This is the street of tinsmiths. The noise of hammers striking metal begins early in the morning and goes on late into the night. Mostly with hand tools Vietnamese craftsmen extend an old tradition into modern times, fashioning a wide variety of kitchen utensils, boxes, and tanks for bia hơi (draught beer) and water with relatively simple tools. In Việt Nam, despite the birth of the market economy, labor is cheap and machines are expensive, which is why one sees so many people working with simple tools. But on Hàng Thiếc necessity is made a virtue and the result is the production of useful items that retain the marks of an older tradition of craftsmanship than the modern market usually makes room for. Not beautiful in the way of Hàng Mã and Hàng Quạt, Hàng Thiếc, still, can stand as a symbol of Việt Nam in transition, old ways feeding energy into new ideas, ancient techniques, and an immense capacity for work combining to produce creative and unpredictable results.

Finally, take the standard “one hour very cheap” cyclo ride if you must – it’s not a bad introduction to the Old Quarter, but after that stuff the guidebook in your purse and strike off by yourself. Don’t traipse along in a big group – you’ll spend so much time keeping your friends together that you won’t see or hear or smell a thing, which is as good as not being there at all. Eat phở (flat noodle soups), eat bún bò or bún chả, eat bánh gối, eat trứng vịt lộn if you’re brave. Get turned around, get completely lost. Let the noise wash through you like a wave. Walk till your feet ache. Walk at different times of the day, until you begin to sense the rhythm of the streets. And if you find yourself on Bát Đàn at eight o’clock in the evening, stop into Café Quỳnh, sit down and order a beer or a lemon juice. Don’t try to order food, there isn’t any. Café Quỳnh is the quietest place Phố Cổ - from there you can watch children play, you can watch the action at the phở kitchen across the street. You can sit silently in the heart of the oldest part of Hà Nội considering whatever amazing journey has brought you to this place, worshiping in your own way the god of luck./. 

By Joseph Duemer