South East Asia on a Hamstring – February 28

By: Marie Javins

Hanoi, Vietnam – February 28, 2000

At 7:30, I met the group for breakfast. I wasn’t feeling unusually social – I just didn’t want the group to get the impression I was being my usual aloof self and I was already skipping the day’s activities. The group was off to view hilltribes in small villages and I told Mark, “if I see any more hilltribes, I’ll cry.” He did not appear to be amused.

Fortunately, Mark was more cooperative about my request to fly from Hoi An to Nha Trang a day after the group. They were spending a day at the beach and I wanted to give Hoi An some extra time. I plan on getting a lot of silk clothing made there.

We went to Koto, a nearby restaurant run by a Vietnamese-Australian Intrepid ex-leader. The French toast there was perfect and I was slobbering with happiness. The restaurant employees are all ex-streetkids and they also exhibit their photographs on the walls there. Koto stands for “know one, teach one,” and the kids are quite devoted to learning the hospitality trade.

The group went off and I met up with Lochie, who was also tired of local villages. She was joining me on my day of boring errand-running.

My first stop was the Cathay Pacific office. I’d spotted it at the nearby Hanoi Towers. The friendly staff waitlisted me for a seat from Hong Kong to Los Angeles on March 13. I had not been able to get a confirmed seat, and still couldn’t, because I am traveling on a frequent flyer ticket and only a few frequent flyer seats are allocated to each flight. The clerk told me that it shouldn’t be a problem so I went to the internet cafe and sent an e-mail cancelling my reserved dorm bed at the Hong Kong YMCA for that night.

Right in the shadow of the modern, new Hanoi Tower was the old French prison – otherwise known as the Hanoi Hilton, home to countless American GI POW’s during the “American War.” It was closed on Mondays but an enterprising guard appeared to have a sideline business charging tourists to go in when it was closed, so we paid the man a dollar each and went in.

It was small and dark and utterly creepy. The exhibits barely acknowledged the “Hanoi Hilton” moniker and told almost exclusively about the cruel imprisonment of locals by the French at the turn of the last century. Mannequins of Vietnamese citizens in manacles were in the cells and most of them didn’t look too happy. I squinted and pretended the were American soldiers and then I felt kind of ill.

It was a horrid little place – giant cement rooms with tiny windows with bars across them. All was deteriorating but solidly built by the French. The only acknowledgement of the American POW’s was the little sign that told about the Americans being locked up after committing horrible crimes against Vietnam, but they were “all treated with respect and dignity in spite of this.”

Lochie was feeling queasy too and we were both relieved to leave. We walked next to the ANZ Bank and I resupplied myself with U.S. dollars, the currency of the world and second currency of Vietnam (ironic, no?). We visited DHL, Airborne Express, and the Vietnam post office, pricing the various methods of sending packages to the States. Lochie had stopped a street kid to look at his postcards but hadn’t wanted any. She had tried to say no, but he had attached himself to her and wasn’t giving up.

After he tailed us for several blocks, I interceded and told the kid “khong, khong.” This means “no, no” and is supposed to make the kid listen. But he ignored me and kept hassling Lochie, begging her to buy his postcards and appearing to be on the verge of tears.

She firmly told the boy that she didn’t want his postcards. I told him to go away. He continued to follow, never straying more than a few inches from her and continuing his running tirade of “buy my postcards I need money.”

New Yorker that I am, I was getting ruder and ruder, telling the kid to “GO AWAY, she doesn’t want any,” but he was getting cheekier and cheekier. We continued to walk away and he continued to walk next to us. Ignoring didn’t work. Telling him to take a hike didn’t work either.

Finally, Lochie pulled a 5,000 dong note from her bag (forty cents or so, a decent amount in this country) and handed it to him.

“I don’t want any postcards. Here is some money, please go away,” she said.

The kid went into a frenzy, pocketing the money and begging her to buy the postcards. He got up in her face and pretended to cry. He started yelling at us.

“Why are you losing your temper?” I asked him. He continued to yell. He had moved on from “buy postcards” to obscenities at this point.

I grabbed the kid, thinking that perhaps I would strangle him. He flinched, and Lochie looked uncertain… what was I going to do?

I wasn’t too sure either, so I stuck out my hand and said, “you are being rude. Give back the money.”

He said, “fuck you mama.” I grabbed at his baseball cap, or maybe his shoulders, thinking that he needed to be sternly reprimanded or perhaps spanked. He flinched again and repeated his obscene refrain over and over.

A number of vendors were coming over and they weren’t just going to grab him. They had seen me holding out my hand and seen the kid hassling us… they weren’t likely to just sternly reprimand the kid. He handed back the money and split, quickly disappearing.

Lochie and I continued to walk, relieved and confused. The kid didn’t want money, he wanted to sell postcards. What could that possibly have all been about? Lochie asked me what I had been planning on doing to the kid and I said that I wasn’t sure. Certainly, I didn’t intend to really strangle him and I wasn’t emotionally overwrought or anything. It just seemed that words hadn’t been too terribly effective so perhaps actions were more in keeping with the kid’s character. It was ironic that I’d spent the morning at the street kid restaurant, contributing to the upkeep of street urchins, and the afternoon thinking about strangling one.

At 3pm, I went back to Hanoi Towers for my hair-color appointment.

I had been in a rush to leave New York and one thing I hadn’t gotten around to doing was getting my roots dyed to match the rest of my hair. I’ve been blonder than usual every since little streaks of gray started kicking in and since I started this trip in Indonesia, I’ve had to go to great lengths to disguise the massive difference in shade between my roots and the rest of my hair.

So far, I had been reluctant to try to get my hair colored in a place where NO ONE has brown or blond hair. Everyone has very dark hair. But what the heck, it was becoming a crisis.

A few hours later, my hair matched nicely and I had a haircut, scalp massage and blow-dry to boot. All for the exorbitant local rate of thirty-four US dollars. At any given time, there were at least three people working on my hair. It felt really decadent, having three people pulling my hair in different directions at once, each armed with a hair dryer.

I walked back to the Viet My Hotel and ran into Lochie. The rest of the group had gone to see the water puppets and we were on our own tonight. Our other leftover from the last group, Tom the Missourian, had gone to see the water puppets for a second time but he had reported that the day at the hilltribes had been a washout. It had been cold and muddy and the hilltribes had demanded money for photo-taking. Lunch had been Spam and processed cheese.

Lochie and I negotiated with a cyclo driver to get to Moca Cafe for dinner. It was just in the shadow of St. Joseph’s Cathedral. We shared pumpkin soup and garlic bread. I had a mango chicken curry and carrot juice and it was all delicious and outrageously priced – $6.50 a head, quite a bit for Hanoi.

We walked home down the empty streets. During the day, there were people and traffic everywhere. I was constantly about to get killed in traffic by the zipping motorbikes by day, but at night the streets were nearly empty and even the sidewalks lacked their usual parked bikes.

We passed by a number of small, open storefronts. The stores served tea or fruit or candy bars and consisted of three walls, a roof and floor, and a metal grate that would cover the front during closing hours. The proprietor invariably lived in the back of the store with their family.

“Can you imagine living your entire life in that small box?” asked Lochie. “They work there and live there forever while we run around the entire world.”

It was a sobering thought. Even more disturbing – the locals seemed quite content with their three walls. So what’s our problem? We can’t even stay in the same country for very long.