The Spirit of Hanoi

Americans tend to think of Hanoi as a no-nonsense communist capital, the dour headquarters of our one- time enemy in battle. But while the culture of this city was plagued by war, it was never guided by it. Hanoians have not forgotten the days of rice rations, evacuations and Ho Chi Minh, but if you ask a local person to tell you about the city's past, you will more likely hear a 1,000-year-old legend of an emperor and a magic turtle than anything about the city's recent experience of war.

Hanoi's ancient customs form the moments of daily life that nourish the city's soul.

Hanoi's culture revolves around the complex set of traditions that have guided Vietnam for centuries-traditions based not on politics or ideology, but on the changing of the seasons and the waxing and waning of the moon. This is the side of Hanoi's culture that until recently few Americans have had a chance to know.

"Of course we remember the bombs," a Hanoi friend said to me one evening when we were talking in a busy sidewalk cafe. "But we've had war with the French, the Japanese, the Americans, the Chinese, and the Cambodians." He paused and took a long drag on his cigarette, looking out at the traffic in front of us. "We're sick of thinking about war. People would rather talk about art, or how much money they need to buy a new motorbike."

As my friend went on to explain, Hanoians see their city in terms of the whole lengthy path of its existence. They grow up learning about the kings who founded it, the invaders who tried to destroy it, the citizens who defended it, and the martyrs who died for it. The 1972 Christmas bombings certainly take up a chapter in that history, but it is only a chapter, not the whole book.

If you want to understand the true nature of Hanoi, you have to spend time at the city's many lakes because life revolves around them.

As with Asian cities in general, Hanoi today is obsessed with economic change. In the city's new karaoke bars, behind the counters of its neighborhood shops, or in the quiet corners of its lakeside cafes, everyone speculates on how they can participate in making Vietnam the next Asian Dragon. Everyone, it seems, is bent on getting rich. Judging by the streets clogged with US$2,000 motorbikes, a lot of people are actually succeeding.

As the economy opens up, the government's hold on society itself is more relaxed than it has been in decades and people are taking advantage of that. But although they may be anxious to acquaint themselves with faxes and VCRs, they are no less keen on reacquainting themselves with the traditions of their ancestors.

Whether it is lighting incense at kitchen altars or popping firecrackers to celebrate the New Year, Hanoi's ancient customs form the moments of daily life that nourish the city's soul. Every holiday on the traditional moon calendar brings a throng of celebrants into the streets. On the evenings of the full moon and the new moon, people crowd the once disdained pagodas and temples to pay homage to their ancestors and to Buddha.

Some of the worshipers are old people, finally allowed by the more lenient government to return to the religion of their youth. But many are young, turning to spirituality for the first time in their lives. "The future is full of hope and confusion," one young man told me. He was learning to pray.

These days the signs of commercial rebirth are everywhere.

Capitalism is not new to Hanoi. Although the city missed a few decades of the daily grind of private enterprise, the routines of buying and selling are as old and ritualized as any other aspect of life. And these days the signs of commercial rebirth are everywhere. Running alongside the old Hanoi Hilton, the nickname of the famous prison that held so many captured U.S. pilots during the war, a street specializes in shops selling ga to, the Vietnamese derivative of the French gateau. Tourists coming to pay homage to the prison's past find themselves besieged by women trying to sell them three tiered birthday cakes decorated with pink sugar roses.

Even in business, Hanoi has its own particular style. Small family-owned shops are open seven days a week from morning until late at night. Sundays and holidays come and go, and are ignored. I know shopkeepers who, though faint from illness, can't face the prospect of missing a customer by closing their doors. But when the anniversary of an ancestor's death comes around, they will never question locking up early so they can go home and organize the traditional family feast.

A friend of mine opened a dress shop recently and made sure to pick an opening day considered fortuitous by the moon calendar. When that morning came around, however, the skies opened up and the streets were slick with rain. My friend knew that if he didn't go ahead and open the shop, he would have to postpone his grand opening until the next lucky day, which could be a whole week away.

Despite the downpour, he draped the front of his store with hangers full of the season's hottest fashion item, an A-line French-style car coat, and stood in the doorway, quietly willing the rain to stop. If the storm kept up, the precious merchandise, barely protected by the narrow edge of the roof, could be ruined. The new shopkeeper looked up at the sky and bit his lip. By noon, the sun came out and business was booming.

Nowhere is Hanoi's strange mix of tradition and change as obvious as in the thriving ancient quarter, the city's 36 original streets. Saved from modernization by the simple fact of Vietnam's poverty, the old city probably does not look that different now from how it appeared centuries ago. A famous restaurant on Cha Ca Street offers a food called cha ca, the fried fish dish that people have eaten here for centuries.

Economic revitalization and increasing tourism have meant that the traditional businesses now share the "Old 36" with the more recent enterprises springing up to satisfy new demands. These days the herb dealers and tombstone makers have neighbors selling fashionable imported sandals. The new travelers' hangout, the Darling Cafe, which offers bicycles for rent and Hanoi's interpretations of spaghetti, sits near a row of shops selling small family altars and the old-fashioned wooden molds Hanoians use to make special local pastries.

It only takes a few minutes on Hang Ma Street to realize that Hanoi residents have no problem with modern styles running up against their time-honored customs. They simply adapt. The shops that line Hang Ma sell paper products, an inventory which has grown in the past few years to include wedding invitations, party decorations and the latest imported designs in metallic wrapping paper.

But while the shopkeepers along Hang Ma have expanded their lines in recent years, they still specialize in the products that first gave the street its name: false paper offerings, known as ma. Vietnamese Buddhism asks believers to provide for the daily needs of their ancestors. If a person wants to send a suit of clothes to her dead grandmother, for example, she can buy a set of paper clothes, burn them, and thus transfer the goods to the world beyond. To make things more convenient, she can burn a few thousand dollars in false money so that her grandmother can provide for herself in the world of the dead. "Everything we have in this life they have in that life, too," one shopkeeper explained to me.

During the 1980s, when life in Hanoi was more austere, Hang Ma carried little more than paper money, paper clothes and paper horses (for transportation). The best one's ancestors could hope for was a cardboard model of a Soviet TV. Now Hanoians are sharing the fruits of capitalism with their ancestors. To beat inflation, the false money sold on Hang Ma comes in stable currencies or gold. People send paper models of whiskey, stereos and motorbikes to the great beyond. Nor are they limited to generic brands: Hang Ma offers cardboard versions of the latest offerings from Johnnie Walker, Sony, and Honda so that label-conscious Hanoians can guarantee their ancestors are getting the best.

Hanoians have a complicated sense of their city in comparison to the imagined metropolitan paradises of the Western world. Nothing could be a worse advertisement for this city, for example, than the way people here talk about the weather. The winters are cold, they say, a wet, drafty cold that enters the house like water through a sponge. In spring, they will tell you, it rains all the time. Summer is so hot and humid you cannot spend five minutes away from the fan. In autumn, when the air finally cools and the clouds part to reveal gorgeous, sun-filled days, Hanoians will say that the change in the weather will make you sick.

So relentless are local people in their condemnation of the city's climatic conditions that it's easy to believe that they hate this place. But there's more to their talk than that. Hanoians maintain a very deep and often hidden pride in the city itself-a natural paradox for a place that has historically been deeply affected by foreign influence and at the same time extremely good at taking care of itself.

"Vietnam is so ugly!" said the man who fixes my bicycle. We were sitting on a shady street lined with stately French colonial buildings (which could describe almost any street in the city). Two blocks down, at the Lake of the Restored Sword, people were spending the afternoon eating ice cream and floating on the water in dragon boats.

I shrugged, listening to him expound on the deficiencies of his homeland and hometown (not enough cars, everyone is poor) and trying to figure out a way to tell him that in the months I had spent away from Hanoi, I had missed the city with an intensity only comparable to the longing one feels for an absent lover. Finally, I tossed off a weak, "Hanoi is beautiful."

His expression changed instantly, breaking into a wide grin. "You like it? You think it's pretty?" he asked, then took another look around. "I guess it's not so bad," he said, and I got the feeling that he had been waiting for me to say that all the time.

Often, visitors to Hanoi first notice those qualities that make the city seem like someplace else. They see Chinese bikes, French architecture, and one of the world's last standing public statues of Lenin.

Local people readily admit a fondness for the styles of other cultures. A well-known saying, meant to suggest how to get the best out of life, goes: "Eat Chinese food, take a Japanese wife, and live in a Western-style house." Only after a short time here do outsiders begin to understand how Vietnam has taken 1,000 years of foreign influence and transformed it. After all, this is the culture that gave birth to Nguyen Du, the poet who took a mediocre Chinese story and turned it into The Tale of Kieu, Vietnam's great national epic.

In the same way, Hanoi people have taken models from other cultures and molded them into their own. They love French-style baguettes, for example, but Parisians would be surprised to find the bread served deep-fried with a medicinal herb-laden chicken stew.

Likewise, Hanoi artists first learned oil painting techniques from the French, but they take their inspiration from local life. They paint old women in conical hats, village dogs wandering down empty streets, pagodas at dusk. Their palettes incorporate the luminous greens of the rice field, the muddy rust of the Red River, and the stone-gray Hanoi sky in spring.

I once showed a local friend a magazine article in which an American journalist claimed that the fact Vietnamese like to drink Coca-Cola proved the United States had ultimately won the war against Vietnam. My friend laughed and rolled her eyes. "Americans drive Hondas," she said. "Does that mean the Japanese really won World War II?"

Vietnamese seem confident that pride of place comes from a sense of one's own capabilities, not from one's ability to reject the customs of others. After all, this is a people who not only beat the French and drove the Americans back across the ocean, but also changed the nature of Coke by mixing it with Vietnamese beer. They even have a name for the concoction: the Vietnamese-American Friendship Drink. It actually doesn't taste too bad.

If you want to understand the true nature of Hanoi, you have to spend time at the city's many lakes because life revolves around them. At Truc Bach, the lake into which a U.S. pilot once parachuted during the war, Hanoians now make celebrations out of eating shrimp cakes and drinking beer. Hidden among the shadows at the edge of the West Lake, young couples who have no cars manage to turn parked motorbikes into settings for love.

And so we come now to the famous story of the emperor and the turtle. The center of Hanoi, both geographically and in spirit, is Ho Hoan Kiem, the Lake of the Restored Sword. As legend has it, the 15th-century ruler Le Loi drove the Chinese out of Vietnam with the help of a magical sword he had received from the heavens. One afternoon after his victory, he went boating on this lake and a giant turtle rose up out of the water, took the sword from his hand, and disappeared again into the depths, thus restoring the heavenly weapon to its rightful owners.

One can stroll the circumference of Ho Hoan Kiem in less than 30 minutes, but the role it plays in people's sense of their city is enormous. Each dawn the joggers converge on the lakeside paths, while the grassy areas fill with people doing tai chi and playing badminton. On sunny afternoons, students sit in circles on the grass, eating oranges and sunflower seeds in the hours before they need to be home. And on every weekend and every holiday, a thousand motorbikes and bicycles take to cruising around the shores of the lake.

At a recent local photography competition, no subject was as popular as this little lake, captured by day, by night, under fireworks, in the springtime, by boat, at the Tet New Year celebrations, and even in the rain. Tourism officials use images of Ho Hoan Kiem as a symbol for the city of Hanoi. The lake is indeed a convenient symbol, but not so much for its easy graphic simplicity as for the way it embodies the spirit of Hanoi itself. Like the lake, the city has the ability to reflect change in the world around it. But in the most profound ways, the essence of the place remains the same.

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Published on 10/1/94