Jason Devitt

Halong Bay at dusk. The two small figures in the bottom right, blurred by the long exposure, are women rowing from one tourist boat to the next selling drinks and snacks.

The Vietnamese are vigorous entrepreneurs, particularly in the south, where they see historical parallels between the poor but determined pioneers who migrated south to populate the Mekong delta in the 17th century, the pioneers who were at the same time moving to the wild and unknown east coast of America, and the descendants of both.

Ten years of collective ownership and the criminalization of profits following the war have been followed by twenty years of ‘doi moi’ - renewal, the re-introduction of a market economy. Now once again every home is also a business. Seventy percent of the population are still growing rice, but the opportunity to grow it for their own benefit rather than for the state’s has turned Vietnam from a net importer of rice to the world’s second-largest exporter in less than ten years. The rest of the population apply themselves to their furniture businesses and mini-hotels and online game companies with the work ethic of the paddy fields: seven days a week, dawn until dusk.

For travellers, this presents a problem. Seven days a week, from dawn until dusk, people are trying to sell you something. Their logic: you are not Vietnamese; you are in Vietnam; therefore you are rich. You may plead poverty, but in a country where the maximum prize on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" is 100 million dong - about $6,300 - you are lying.

As a tribute to the entrepreneurs of Vietnam, whose energy and determination far exceed my own, and ignoring the many store owners and street vendors who merely invited us to come over and take a look at what they had, I present a list of things that people tried to sell us off their own backs while following us around on foot, on a motorbike, or, on three occasions, in a boat:

Books (photocopied versions of bestsellers, properly bound with a printed cover), our weight (by someone wheeling a speak-your-weight machine around on a trolley), her own image (a smiling woman in traditional costume walked into my frame and posed while I was taking a picture of a building and later demanded payment), shoeshines, tiger balm, picture postcards, jewelry, watches, lighters, sunglasses, seashells, umbrellas and ponchos, newspapers in multiple languages (usually several days old and looking as if they have been read and discarded several times over, but the vendors always pointed indignantly to the original price), massage equipment, calculators, puppets, dong, chewing gum, coconuts, bananas, other assorted food and drink items, cyclo, taxi, and motorbike rides, bespoke clothing, wallets, scissors, hotel accommodation, sex (a girl stood in my way on the sidewalk and hipchecked me again and again when I tried to pass), drugs (just once, half-heartedly, after we refused to buy a lighter), and rock & roll.

Actually, never rock & roll, but more on that in a future post.

The Vietnamese will eat anything and everything, except - for the moment - chicken.

I have already mentioned raw duck’s blood pudding and snakewine. Andrew Pham in Catfish and Mandala describes a cocktail made by cutting the heart out of a live cobra and dropping it in alcohol, to chug while the heart is still beating.

They eat dogs. They eat cats. They eat duck embryos. They simmer the cocoons of silkworms to loosen and draw off the raw fiber and, waste not want not, they eat the half-formed moths. They feed coffee beans to a particular species of weasel and collect them, undigested, from its excrement, insisting that a subtle biological process has perfected the flavor.

And somewhere along the way they serve some of the best food in the world. One hundred years of French colonial rule has produced the world’s only indigenous East-West ‘fusion’ cuisine.

My favorite meals in Vietnam:

In a house on the banks of the Mekong, elephant fish, gently fried, which we wrapped with starfruit, pineapple, and cucumber in rice paper pancakes.

Everywhere, wonderful milkshakes; but, most unexpected, an avocado milkshake in Hanoi.

Pastries in Hanoi: fluffy white chocolate charlottes and chocolate mousse, a dollar apiece.

Salmon wrapped in bacon, baked and served over grilled, thin-sliced potatoes.

Pork stewed in coconut juice.

In Halong Bay, tomatoes stuffed with tofu and grilled until they tasted of caramel.

In Can Tho, lightly battered squid.

In Tay Ninh, spring rolls stuffed with spiced pork, double-wrapped in rice paper, and fried once for each layer. And fried dough-balls, like doughnuts, but stuffed with shrimp.

That’s without listing most of the national or regional favorites, like pho bo, bun cha, cao lau, cha ca, or fish cooked in a claypot or steamed in banana leaves.

And we haven’t even been able to eat chicken or duck. Most of Vietnam’s poultry has been slaughtered to contain the spread of avian flu. The government may be offering enough compensation to farmers for each carcass to induce them to fake an outbreak. This and tourist prudence has taken birds and usually eggs off the menu at most restaurants, even though there is no risk of infection from cooked meat and supermarkets are screening for the virus.

With no new reported infections in most provinces for three weeks, the government is about to declare victory.

A few days ago Msr. Gastel, the charming French proprietor of Hanoi’s Cafe des Arts, asked us "do you accept the eggs?", as if proposing marriage. Yes we said, and happily ordered our first omelette in weeks.

Postscript: poor country + food-lovers = security tags on extra virgin olive oil. Or should that be chastity belts?

Chung has a salary now, he tells us proudly. He works for his sister-in-law in Hanoi, minding her store and shaving ice to make lassies for the tourists.

In 1971 Chung graduated from the police academy in Saigon. By 1975 he was the chief of police in a provincial town. Corrupted by the degenerate Southern regime and their American masters, he was sent to a ‘re-education’ camp to learn about the superiority of communism, and has effectively been blacklisted ever since.

Not surprisingly, thirty years later his greatest dream is to emigrate to the US. When he learns that we are from New York, he runs to the back of the store and fetches a copy of a joint US-Vietnamese government press release from three weeks ago.

“You think I can come to US?”

Reading the release, it seems that the latest development in the rapprochement between Vietnam and the US is a new program under which former enemies of the state can emigrate to the US.

The language of the press release is diplomatic, legal, technical, confusing even to a native English-speaker. Candidates must have spent (a) three years in a re-education camp OR (b) two years in a re-education camp AND were trained by the US in the US or one of its territories OR (c) one year in a re-education camp AND were directly employed by the US.

There’s no mention of the war, no suggestion of wrongdoing or ill-treatment. It’s an offer of compensation without admission of liability.

Chung looks at me expectantly. I should play dumb and walk away, but I want to help. And while the content is alien to me, the form is very familiar.

Anyone who has immigrated to the US has seen language like this before. I have had, successively, a J1, an H1B (a category of visa open only to people with postgraduate qualifications in certain technical fields OR fashion models), an H4, an H1B (continuation), a second H1B, an extension of the second H1B pending adjudication of my E1B petition (seven qualifying criteria I seem to recall, of which the candidate must meet at least four), an adjustment of status to permanent residency, and as of February, seven and a half years after arriving in the US, a greencard.

I am English-speaking, highly educated, and able to afford one of the best immigration attorneys in the US. What chance has Chung?

“You think I can come to US?”

I ask him how long he spent in the camp.

“Two years. I have certificate.”

A certificate. I picture a graduation ceremony. The inmates gaily throw their caps into the air for the photographers.

“And were you trained by the US?”

“Yes, in Vietnam. See? Not (a), (a) no good, (b), Chung (b).”

He puts on his reading glasses and points to the second paragraph. I ask him some more questions to be sure, but I am worried.

In the precise, cold language of the press release, Chung hasn’t suffered enough OR for the right reasons. He spent two years in a camp, was trained by US personnel but in Vietnam, and was never directly employed by the US.

As Bill Clinton might say, it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘its’ is. Does the phrase ‘or its territories’ refer to Puerto Rico, Guam, and the other colonial possessions of the US? Or was Vietnam in the first few months of 1972 in some sense a territory of the US?

I doubt it.

Chung hasn’t enough command of English grammar to understand the significance of the word ‘its’ - he reads the phrase as ‘or other territories’, which would clearly include Vietnam. I wonder if there is an official Vietnamese translation of the release, or if the governments have agreed not to provide one so as to cut down on the number of applicants.

“You think I can come to US?”

Disappoint him or lie? I want to be angry with him for putting me in this position, but it’s my fault; I should never have suggested that I knew anything about this.

“Maybe. I don’t know. You need to call the US embassy. Maybe yes.”

Chung beams. If you can see past the rotten teeth that all his countrymen seem to share, he has a beautiful smile.

One of many surprises here is that ten per cent of the population are Catholic. Tonight, on a stage outside St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Hanoi, the congregation are putting on a Christmas show. Sixteen little girls in cheerleader outfits dance and sing along to Christmas carols. A crowd of doting relatives and perplexed foreigners cheers and claps. Then a group of teenage girls in santa-red ao dais perform almost exactly the same demure routines. As a finale, a local priest sings Silent Night, in Vietnamese, while the children dance around him and a brave pianist tries to keep up with the frequent changes of key and tempo.

And then the coup de theatre: a fan blows styrofoam snow over the crowd. Most of these boys will never see real snow, but instinctively they know what to do - scoop up the small pieces and dump them over the heads of squealing girls, and throw the large pieces at each other’s heads.

Mung Chua Giang Sinh: Merry Christmas everyone, or as we say in Irish, Happy Christmas.

The view across Hoan Kiem Lake by night.

We asked Mr Hoi, a civil engineer from North Vietnam whom we met on the way here, to tell us the difference between Hanoi and Saigon. He said simply "Saigon is only three hundred years old."

Hanoi is a thousand years old. She moves more slowly than Saigon and even goes to bed earlier, with most businesses shuttered by 11 p.m. or midnight, bars and restaurants included. She is too dignified, pompous even, to hustle for a living and she’s poorer as a result; the President of the Party* said yesterday that Hanoi ‘must do better.’ But tighter controls over construction, more measured growth, and the intangible benefits that accrue to a capital have made Hanoi the more beautiful city.

We’ll stay here for a while.

N 21 deg 1.871 min E 105 deg 51.070 min

* There is only one.

"This is lemongrass," says Huy. "We use the roots for cooking and mix the leaves with eucalyptus in boiling water to treat colds and flu."

"And what’s that?"

"Ah, that is the flower of the banana tree. The banana tree has many uses. Of course we eat the fruit, but we also use the leaves for cooking. Fish steamed in banana leaves is a famous dish. We make soup from the flower, and we use the wood for furniture."

"Very thorough. What’s that sweet little blue flower?"

"Oh that’s just some wild flower. Look here; this is a coconut tree. The coconut is very useful. We drink the juice. We make candy from the pulp, and burn the husk for fuel. The wood is good for furniture, and we dry the leaves and weave them together for roofing."

"Er, no waste there then. Hey, what’s that orange flower?"

"Just a flower."

"Uh-huh. That’s a pretty bush. Is that a hibiscus?"

"I suppose it is pretty. We like it because it makes a good fence. Now this over here, this is the chilaca tree. We burn the wood for fuel, eat the fruit, and make clothes from the bark, which we dye using extracts from the flowers. We chew the leaves to get high, the excess seeds make good ball-bearings, and the dried root is a low-cost substitute for palladium in the triggers of our nuclear weapons."

These are practical people.

Yes, I made up the chilaca tree.

When I first saw this sign at our hotel in Bangkok I wondered if durians and mangosteens were ethnic minorities. In fact they are types of fruit. The mangosteen is a fragile creature that rots if it isn’t eaten very quickly. And the durian smells like rotting fish even when it’s fresh.

Yesterday Summer spotted the following regulation posted in our hotel in Hoi An (paragraph 7):

Bicycles, motorbikes, pets, fire-arms, explosives, inflammable, stinking things and even prostitutes aren’t allowed in the hotel.

Banh is tiny but strong, leathery, almost hairless, with eyes and teeth that seem too large for his head. He could be twenty, he could be sixty. He tells me that he is forty-five years old, and for the last twenty-five of them he has driven a cyclo.

Picture a giant tricycle, ridden back to front, with a passenger seat mounted between the two front wheels. In other countries’ version of the cyclo, the passenger seat is typically behind the driver. Riding in a cyclo in Vietnam is like riding in the shovel of a very small digger, a digger that at any moment may dump its load into oncoming traffic. Driving a cyclo around a city whose major landmarks are scattered over an area of 25 square kilometers is … hard.

It’s not a sought-after job anywhere, but for many of the men - always men - who drive cyclos in Vietnam, the job is a form of internal exile. Soldiers, sailors, doctors, tailors, they were supporters of the defeated South Vietnamese regime. Many were ‘re-educated’ following the war. Even then, driving a cyclo was the only job that they were allowed to hold.

Banh’s crime was to be the son of collaborators. When Saigon fell Banh was only 15. Proudly, he tells us that both of his parents worked at the American embassy. What happened to them, we ask? Ho Chi Minh kill them, he claims.

Things have improved a little for Banh in recent years, since the Vietnamese government began its program of economic reforms and courtship of the west. For most of the last thirty years the cyclo drivers were denied property rights and lived on the streets, making a family impossible. Banh now has a wife and two kids, aged 5 and 7.

But capitalism has left Banh behind too. Thanks to the free market there are now many fine schools in Saigon, but Banh can’t afford to send his children to any of them.

If Banh has a lean and hungry look, Bao is plump and well-fed, with a full head of hair. Coming from America, it’s oddly familiar - the successful small-town businessman who was a football star in high school, but now has love handles. It’s not at all familiar in Vietnam.

Bao was no football star. He drove a cyclo for eight years. While Banh and most of the other drivers go wide - with a few words of English they can pitch most of the world’s tourists - Bao went deep, specializing in Japanese passengers and teaching himself the language from a book late at night.

Then he began to organize coach tours for them. That needs no money down if you can fill a bus by word of mouth, and Bao could. His reputation grew, and when Asahi TV decided to make a documentary about touring Vietnam, Bao was interviewed.

Some Japanese place a very high premium on foreigners who can speak their language. I once asked a Japanese businessman - hypothetically - whether he would rather work with a first-rate supplier in the U.S. who required an interpreter, or a second-rate supplier who spoke Japanese.  Without hesitating he said the latter.

So it doesn’t surprise me that Bao’s appearance on Japanese TV led to dozens of inquiries from firms seeking partners in Vietnam. Among other things, the cyclo-driver-turned-tour-operator was asked to source local furniture manufacturers; shoot photos of Vietnamese landmarks for a Tokyo newspaper; and recruit textile workers for short-term contracts in Japan. When we met him, he was sitting in a cafe, with a laptop and a webcam, waiting for a web conference with one of his Japanese clients.

Bao doesn’t talk about the life before. Only the future.

There’s a worm in your tequila? Whatever. Dude, there’s a freakin cobra in my rice wine. And wait, wait, check this out. The big snake is eating … a little snake! It’s like a cannibal snake! Awesome. I am so stoked to drink this.

Without lifting my elbows away from my chest, I can press my hands flat against the side walls. The clay feels warm and hard. I am squatting as low as I can, but I still have to lower my head to avoid the roof. The air down here is thick and heavy, and breathing is as hard as crawling. A few feet in front of us, a tiny lamp flickers in a niche. Summer passes between me and the light and suddenly I can see nothing: total darkness. Fifty feet from the tunnel entrance, we are all but buried alive. Oh no, I think. Not again.

Three months ago, Summer and I were in Turkey for a friend’s wedding. After a few days in Istanbul we flew east to Cappadocia, an ancient volcanic wonderland famous for its fairy chimneys and cave churches. A lunar smurf village, as Summer put it. Apart from a few miraculously verdant valleys, the land is barren. But the rock is of a rare consistency, soft enough to work by hand, hard enough that caves and tunnels don’t need reinforcing. For six thousand years people have carved structures out of the mountain rock: homes, storehouses, bakeries, wineries, and, in the Christian era, churches and monasteries. It was probably easier to dig caves than to quarry the rock for free-standing buildings, but more importantly it was safer. Turkey was swept by one wave of marauding invaders after another: Hittites, Mongols, Arabs, Crusaders, and of course the Turks (who stayed). With a ravening horde abroad, would you rather bolt the door of your house or pull up the ladder and roll a boulder in front of your cave entrance, which is, by the way, halfway up a cliff? Many an ox-cart back then bore the bumper sticker ‘I may be a troglodyte, but I’m a live troglodyte.’

Near a town now called Kayseri, the locals compromised. They spent most of the year in more stone or wooden houses, but also built an underground shelter, a bunker. An underground city. Big enough to hold say, four thousand people. For six months. Six storeys deep. Complete with ovens, granaries, wineries, meeting halls, 200 foot-high ventilation shafts, and multiple lines of defense. All hacked out of the rock with hammers and chisels.

The oldest part of the Kayseri city dates back four thousand years; it was abandoned at least a thousand years ago, and forgotten until some kids stumbled across an entrance in the 1960s. Now it’s a major tourist attraction, and we were able to spend forty minutes or so underground exploring the first three levels, wondering who these people were, how they could have accomplished this, and what were they so afraid of. Although it’s easy to stand up in most of the tunnels and chambers, and the ancient ventilation shafts somehow deliver fresh air throughout the system, claustrophobia mounts.

Until Bin Laden’s complex at Tora-Tora in Afghanistan is open to tourists, there’s only one place on Earth that is comparable to Kayseri, and it’s Cu Chi in Vietnam, about an hour’s drive from Saigon.

Like Kayseri, Cu Chi began as a place of refuge. Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh guerillas dug the first tunnels in the 1940s to hide from their enemies. But as the tunnel network expanded, its role quickly shifted to offense. From their underground base just 30 miles from Saigon, the entrances concealed in dense jungle or even underwater, the Viet Minh could strike against the French and their South Vietnamese allies and then vanish. By 1965 the French were gone and what were now called the Viet Cong were on the point of defeating the anti-communist South. Then the Americans came, and the killing began in earnest.

But the Americans couldn’t find the tunnels either. The 25th Infantry Division unwittingly built their base directly over part of the network, and wondered how the VC were able to shoot at them from inside the perimeter.

In countless Vietnam war movies the inscrutable Viet Cong, the undifferentiated Charlie, are portrayed like ghosts, evil spirits who melt into the cursed Asian jungle. That may be how it looked to the poor misbegotten GIs who fought against them, but there was no magic, just an extraordinary feat of engineering. Over 100 miles of tunnels, three storeys deep. Underground field hospitals, meetings halls, kitchens, and weapons factories. Ventilation shafts hidden under fake termite mounds. Cooking smoke piped out and diffused over large areas so that it looked like mist. And everywhere booby traps: mines recycled from unexploded U.S. bombs, pits lined with metal spikes, spinning wheels edged with swords, mediaeval in their simplicity and viciousness.

Unlike Kayseri, Cu Chi was never intended to be a long-term shelter for families. The men and women based here crawled into action on their hands and knees, and slipped in and out through holes no larger than the widest part of their bodies - see the photo above. The stretch that Summer and I went through is only 120 feet long, and has been enlarged for tourists, but we couldn’t wait to get out.

When U.S. forces finally did penetrate the tunnels of Cu Chi, they sent soldiers in to fight hand to hand. They called them sewer rats. As I haul myself to the surface, I wonder what it must have been like, down there in the blackness, to fight a man with bayonets.