How It Feels in Hanoi

The first hour was a blur. You run a gauntlet at the airport and then find your face pressed against a taxi window, trying to make sense of what you’re seeing. But it takes a while to get into the Old Quarter, and as my eyes darted frenetically, I caught a glimpse of a scene on a passing scooter that helped me focus.

At the machine’s helm was a man who might have been 50 years old. He wove through the thundering traffic wearing a pair of rubber slip-on sandals, branded with the letters ‘V.I.P.’. His left foot had slid partly out of the shoe and it was delicately arched as it rested on the floor of the scooter, his toes holding the sandal in place.

I can’t say exactly why this vignette had such an effect on me, although I will say this: if you pay attention to the postures and gestures of those around you, no matter how unlike you they may seem, you will begin to understand something of how it feels to be them. Because whatever differences there may be in culture, you share the experience of being a human body.

I have come to Vietnam in a busy period of my life. I’ve barely been at home at all this year; now that I’m here, my mind is partly back there, as I focus on a writing project that has been slowly building for some time now. In some ways I’ve never been less prepared for an overseas arrival. I booked in advance a one-star hotel in what seemed a central location, then drew a map in my notebook of how to get there. That was about the sum total of my research.

If I did anything to attune myself to what I might find in Hanoi, it was reading the short stories of Pham Thi Hoai. Remarkably, a few months back I found her book Sunday Menu by chance in an op-shop near home. The stories in Sunday Menu are exquisite. One thing that stood out to me is that Pham writes, with great detail and control, about the fundamental activities of workers in Hanoi and in other Vietnam settings. There are street food cooks, blind masseurs and a cohort of seamstresses, just to name a few.

These short stories reminded me that any enquiry into new place that doesn’t ask what work means to its people misses a crucial point. Vietnam has a vast and complex economy, which is confusing to an outsider, but it’s hard not to notice that apart from the tourists who, like me, shuffle around with a sublime lack of purpose, pretty much everyone I see is at work.

Out on the street, as I hoed into my first meal in Vietnam – beef stewed with pineapple and onion, on rice – a cyclo driver pulled up in front of me. Two English tourists unattractively tried to haggle with him; when he wouldn’t budge, they climbed onto the bench seat fixed to the front of the bike. Then, one of the girls (getting wrong both the language and the meaning of the word) yelled, “Adiós!”

I watched the cyclist’s calves and thighs bulge as he shunted his cargo – 150-odd kilos of human flesh and bone, I calculated – down the road.

Cyclos are a part of the city’s culture, I suppose, and perhaps I miss the point by thinking that the tourists who use this service lack taste. It’s a gig, after all, and there are innumerable forms of hard labour to be found in south-east Asia. But in this case, the difference in class between cyclos and tourists is so graceless and glaring that I can’t indulge in it. It doesn’t surprise me terribly that the cyclo has a colonial touch, too, having been invented by a Frenchman and introduced to Saigon in the 1930s.

Mornings here are charming. I’m not really well suited to cities, so it’s good to be out early, when it’s cooler and less chaotic. There will still always be something happening. Some take an early breakfast, slurping phó or plucking apart noodles with chopsticks. There are small bonfires, the burning of ritual papers and counterfeit money. The possibility remains of getting ploughed down by a scooter.

I stroll slowly between the vegetable and fruit vendors, who wrestle with heavy trolleys or else push bikes rigged with home-made trays. They are loaded up with rambutan, longan, jackfruit, cabbages, gourds, flowers. Meanwhile, street chefs prepare for a day of cooking, arranging slabs of meat on metal trays, chopping chillis and lemongrass, hoisting chicken frames from bubbling vats and tossing them into old paint buckets. Blue and red flames bloom from beneath gas stoves as woks are shaken, and fried morsels are extracted from pans of fizzing oil with long-handled ladles.

Later in the day, I’ll see a child florist spritz his petals with a water bottle that has been adapted expertly for the purpose. A bunch of fine holes have been punched into the plastic – in the neck, just below the lid; turned upside-down and squeezed, it becomes a basic sprinkler, sprucing up the roses and lilies.

Nearby, on a busier road, there’s a child who might be eight years old. Strung about him is a display belt, like a bandolier. Toys and trinkets hang from it, of interest to no-one in the vicinity. The boy pauses, mesmerised, his mouth agape as he watches a group of kids play football in an adjacent park. It is easy to read the envy on his face.

I also wonder how it has felt, throughout history, to live in Hanoi, and how the past has influenced the present.

One morning I interrupt another arduous walking route around the city to go into a museum, at the imperial citadel of Thǎng Long. I’m usually overwhelmed by the curators’ attempt to cover many centuries at once, so I find myself taking it in slivers, trying to extrapolate the overarching events of history from broken stoneware, fragments of manuscripts, jewellery.

As with the man’s arched foot on that scooter headed for the Old Quarter, I sometimes find an artefact that seems like an anecdote, a detail that tells a story bigger than itself. In the museum of Thǎng Long, one such item is an apothecary’s pestle from nearly a thousand years ago.

It’s a simple stone disc with a hole drilled through the middle. The mortar is a kind of thin boat – the shape of a banana – with a groove carved into it. This is where the medicinal herbs would go. A stick passed through the hole in the disc, which was subsequently rolled up and down the groove. An illustration under the display case showed it being operated by the feet of a woman who, in the sketch, looked utterly exhausted. As I suppose she might have been.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that I am finding Vietnamese feet a source of so many stories. As always, I spend hours walking around the city; it is not always easy to come to rest. At intervals I stop for a coffee or a meal, and linger as long as seems reasonable, but then I am off again, on hoof, on the broken pavements strewn with large veined leaves and purple petals. My sandals are being worn to nothingness as I hike around the city, twenty, thirty kilometres a day, in a daze as so many new sights and sounds form a giant, agitating mass of stimulation.

Scooters are also a medium for meditation. There are so many of them and they are such a part of the majority of the lives here that the answer to the question, “How does it feel in Hanoi?” must have something to do with these machines. I have seen all sorts of movements and mannerisms as they snarl through the streets.

At night, I saw a couple canoodling around the handlebars, creating a kind of hybrid – two-parts human, one-part Honda. Using the reflection in his wing mirrors, a round-faced man dealt with a pimple. A woman reached behind her to hold her boyfriend’s hand (although she may also have trying to wrest a phone off him). On another day, a young man passed his glasses back to his companion, so that she could wipe their lenses clean.

The scooters, of course, are also part of the ceaseless flow of work. Bags of herbs are tethered to them, water containers to them hanging by the dozen from an array of frayed thread. Delivery drivers are everywhere, some in mint-green uniforms, but most of them anonymous: cardboard boxes are stacked behind them, styrofoam tubs full of food swing from a hook between their legs. A seedy weed dealer circled me several times on the same day, as if unconvinced by my lack of interest.

It must train your body into a certain shape, travelling on scooters every day. You tilt your wrists a certain way, flex your muscles, brace as you ease your way into unpredictable traffic. No wonder when he got the chance, the man I had noticed on my first afternoon in Hanoi had tried to put his left foot into a comfortable position – to relax his tendons, to give respite at least to one part of his anatomy.

In the sultry heat, I am using all my senses, ceaselessly. Outside one afternoon, I’m wrestling with my bánh xèo – a delicious crispy omelette that I awkwardly squish into rice paper with salad – when the staff from the little eatery I’m seated begin to deal with a blocked drain. A young man in gumboots wields a crowbar; a man who seems to be his boss has found a length of hose; the chef who’d just made my omelette dips a common kitchen colander into the rancid drain.

I stride around habitually, covering a lot of ground – even in a city of some nine million people, my gait is still that of a bushwalker, and there’s so much that I might see. Plus, my hotel room is pretty grotty, so I don’t hang out there much.

A welder sets his focused heat onto a piece of metal; sparks splash about as I walk past and I wonder how flammable my leg hairs are. Outside a ritzy café, a masseuse works over a bloke, who is slumped over a seat with his shirt rolled up. A small pile of grey-blue paint shavings forms on the footpath between two women, one of whom is overseeing a souvenir stall while he nails are filed by the other. The preoccupations of such people are not the same as my own.

I rest briefly at an al fresco bar, with a bottle of Hanoi beer at hand. A shoe-shiner comes up to me with his eyes firmly on my scuffed-up sandals. He pulls out a small tube of superglue. I shake my head and wish I knew how to say, in Vietnamese, that I will toss this pair in the bin as soon as I find a replacement. The man shakes his head as if to tell me that I’m preposterous.

To me, big cities feel akin to huge art galleries, epic ballads, ambitious frescoes – think of works by Michelangelo, or Tamil temples. The whole world is stuffed into them. A stranger in its midst, I try my best to empathise with for whom such an intense place is home. It’s a far cry from the quiet patch of bush that is my address. Every so often I see a butterfly zig-zag through the chaos and suspect that I have seen a useful role model.

I want to draw nearer to the life here – even if, inevitably, I’ll fail in any attempt to fully find common ground with the locals of Hanoi, if only because I cannot speak with most of them. But I have learned over the course of many travels that paying attention, and even using my imagination, will go a long way. If nothing else it helps me go deeper into myself.

There is tightness in my shoulders and neck that comes from my own work. I am spending hours hunching over my notebook, trying to sort through my experiences and whittle them into something comprehensible. Stretching, I think of the vendor I saw today, leaning over to cut lemongrass, her body bent like a pocket-knife. Likewise, my aching legs at the end of a long day’s aimless traipsing remind me of the fatigue of the cyclo drivers, as their shifts of soliciting work around the Old Quarter come to an end.

These anecdotes are not entirely without value, but I know that how it feels in Hanoi is, for those who live here, different than it is for me.