Omnivending
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.