The Real Vietnam

I know I’m painting with an overwide brush, but to my mind Asians are different from Westerners in important and unimportant ways. Even though I’ve had months to think about our trip to Asia, and about the people we’ll be getting to know there, this unoriginal thought occurs to me at 30,000 feet, just hours before landing in Vietnam—and actually meeting some Vietnamese.

We’re on the third and most exhausting leg of our journey (we rose at 4 a.m., then waited for hours at the Montreal airport; from there we flew to Vancouver, where we waited some more; after several more hours in a chair we departed for Seoul, South Korea, where we did some more sitting and waiting). We’ve just taken off for Vietnam. We’re aboard flight AC6973, operated by Asiana Airlines, on route to Danang, and by journey’s end more than 36 hours will have elapsed, 24 of them in the air.

My banal insight about the Asian character vis-à-vis the Western one occurs on that final flight, after the smiling, neatly turned-out flight attendants have ushered us to our seats. We are pointed southeast, headed for the South China Sea. Numb and bleary-eyed, we watch the safety video being delivered in several Asian languages, as well as in English (“In the unlikely event of…”).

I doze for a while. When I awake (a minute…an hour later?), the screens flicker back to life. An impossibly young and fresh-faced Asian girl in pastel tights begins to demonstrate a series of exercises. Passengers are invited to join in right from their seats—you know, to aid circulation and promote a holistic sense of wellbeing.

The exhausted, irritable, at-the-end-of-his-fucking-rope Westerner rolls his eyes. Who in their right minds, would possibly… Then watches as dozens of passengers, many of them elderly, all of them Asian, raise their arms and pump the air to, you know, get the blood flowing.

About Asians, and pretty much about everything else, the Westerner admits that he has something—no, everything—to learn.

* * *

The next morning, I awake with a murderous, predatory headache. The hotel offers a lavish buffet breakfast where West (bacon, omelets, Danish, smoked salmon) meets East (noodle soups, rice and pork dishes, sushi, smoked duck). There’s a pitcher of Vietnamese coffee, too, spiked with condensed milk. It is intense and cloying, with throbbing bass notes of chocolate. (You may as well be eating a fat wedge of cake.) I never take sugar or milk in my coffee, but I pour the Vietnamese coffee over ice and gulp it down. I return to the coffee station and try the drip coffee as well. Then for good measure I order a double espresso from the bar. The headache recedes

Varieties of authenticity

Intensely hot and humid, Hoi An is awash with tourists. In every direction, red sweating faces, outsize limbs and an insatiable need to, godammit, see and try everything.

I’ve traveled a lot in recent years and learned to not get too bothered about tourists. After all, these are my people. We’ve all made the same choices about coming here, which makes us exactly alike—give or take some minor differences.

Another thing I’ve learned: no one will ever again have an authentic experience, anywhere on earth, and yet this is precisely what these people, my people, are hellbent on getting: The authentic.

* * *

If you ask me, watching the traffic in Hoi An is far more absorbing than using Google maps to track down and take pictures of a seventeenth-century pagoda.

It’s a nice pagoda, but Hoi An is bursting with vitality now. Insistent, surging rivers of humanity pour through its streets at all hours, every single Vietnamese aboard a motor bike. Elderly people and pubescent girls, hotel managers in suits, ladies in traditional dress, shop assistants and shop owners with their entire inventory strapped to the backseat, dads with two-year-olds on their laps, and all of them scrolling on their phones at top speed.

You’ve been told about this place but no amount of talk can make you understand. You’ve been told that within a couple of days you’ll be slicing through traffic with ease, albeit on foot. Simply walk at moderate speed and without hesitation in a straight line across the road. Try it. Now try it with your eyes closed: See? Nothing happened.

What seems at first sight like chaos is in fact precisely regulated by custom, tolerance and patience, by a general accommodation for the other. There appears to be a lesson here about humanity and about a different, possibly Asian, way of ordering society. But I can’t quite make out that lesson. (Singapore is an important counter-example.) Wandering the streets, I never witness a moment of anger or impatience, never a close call.

Although, to be fair, when one of our group succumbs to the punishing heat and is hospitalized, the only other Westerner in the ER is lying on a gurney, covered with scrapes and bruises to his legs. By the look of him, he may have been drinking, but I’ll never know.

* * *

Everywhere you go, people in Hoi An are welcoming: their first impulse is to smile. Well, of course they will also try to sell you stuff—it’s how they make a living. But no one is ever insistent.

Not interested in this North Face hat? Well, then, have a beautiful day. Thank you for stopping in. Where are you from? Ah, I have a cousin in Vancouver. Hmmm, maybe later you’ll think again about this hat and come back. You’ll see other hats in Hoi An but none will compare to this one. You see, it is a North Face Hat, authentic. And if you do decide to come back, I will still be here, on this patch of asphalt. Because right here I have all I need. We live in back, you see. My daughter brings me cigarettes and lunch, and in the afternoon makes me coffee. I spend all my hours here, from dawn until late at night, when the tourists go to their hotels. Then I put away my hats and go in the back, where we have a television and our beds. Tomorrow is another day. If you return, I will remember you.

You’re told by seasoned travellers and guides that if you buy something, be sure to bargain. It’s expected—no, downright encouraged. But honestly, who has the heart?

* * *

After celebrating our wedding anniversary with a Vietnamese dinner at the hotel, we decide to take a walk. There’s a small shrine set up on a table at the hotel entrance, which is crowded with bowls of food, saucers of candy and chips, bunches of flowers and stacks of what appear to be Monopoly money. On the sidewalk below, a fire burns in an iron pot, releasing a column of smoke into the night sky. The air is fragrant with incense.

A young hotel employee notices us and comes over. He begins to tell us about his nation’s complex spiritual heritage, how two calendars exist side by side. The celebration we’re witnessing marks an important date in the more ancient measure of time—the lunar calendar. Today we are making offerings to the dead, he says, to spirits that continue to exist in a benign, parallel universe, spirits always available, always to be venerated and remembered. (Shari and I are thinking the same thing: it all remind us of an earlier wedding anniversary celebration, when we visited Oaxaca, Mexico during the Day of the Dead.)

Our Vietnamese host sees us glance at the fire. During the celebration we also burn fake money, he says, so their smoke will rise into the sky—another offering. He pauses for a moment and then adds, laughing, “Sometimes we even burn American dollars.”

His laughter is complex: Maybe he’s leaving a polite margin for Western skepticism, and possibly for his own. Politics may also play a role. We may or may not be stupid, ignorant and rude—but he gives us space to be or not to be all three. We are, after all, guests. He smiles and the smile is—authentic.

Before our walk, we pause again to study the flames in the iron pot. To follow the thin pillar of smoke as it rises into a starlit sky and, at last, cool and trembling over the licking flames, the full moon.

* * *

Still jetlagged and disoriented even after several days in Hoi An, we wake the next morning much too early for breakfast and the by-now-necessary Vietnamese coffee.

To pass the time we sit up in bed and watch a livestream on Shari’s phone. Halfway around the world, operating on an entirely different calendar, it is the final countdown. Along with countless millions, we’re watching Artemis II poised on its launch pad and pointing to the moon. Moments later, with a deafening roar, Artemis shakes off its earthly shackles and blasts skyward, fuelled by a burning mountain of American dollars.