You know you’re in Vietnam when the first thing you feel as soon as you step outside is the humidity.
Like being suddenly struck in the face by a gong, it can leave you feeling confused and disoriented. To add to that confusion, the streets in Vietnam are not in a grid-like pattern like it is in America. It’s more of a spiderweb, zigzagging and crossing with one another, to the point where you find yourself on a completely different street even though you’ve been walking in a straight line. This was more or less what happened to me.
There are street signs and traffic lights in Vietnam but it doesn’t mean everyone follows it. In fact, most people don’t. In Hanoi, I was surprised to find that the freeways were paved and lined, and everyone seemed to be following the rules.
Once we exited the freeway and enter the Old Quarter, however, the rules no longer apply. The sounds of traffic reverberated in our ears like a brood of cicadas. Cars and motorbikes came barreling toward us in all directions and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m going to die today.” But somehow, magically, the drivers all swerve at the just the right moment, sparing our lives.
This occurred more times than I could count, both in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, where I spent the past three weeks with my family. Crossing a street in Vietnam feels like a task in futility, and yet, a necessary one if you want to go anywhere or accomplish anything. Take a deep breath and just go for it, I told myself many times. Most of the time, I just cursed under my breath. My daughter gripped my hand and sighed, bored with my childishness. “Get over it, Mom,” she said. “You’ve been here for a week.”
The first time I went back to Vietnam was in September 2009. I’d left the country as an impressionable ten year old. Before I left for this trip, I even fantasized about the possibility of spending a few months in Vietnam. I thought (haughtily, of course) that I could survive there, if only for a short while.
Then I stepped off the plane and was hit with a dose of reality.
The reality, I soon realized, was that Vietnamese people work very, very hard. That sounds cliché, so let me explain.
I came back as a “Viet Kieu,” a term that Vietnamese people use to describe another Vietnamese person who immigrated overseas and came back as a tourist. And as a tourist, my perception of my birth country has shifted. When I say that Vietnamese people work very hard, I mean that they do not take breaks to visit other countries. This sounds like a generalization, I know, but from the way people’s eyes glass over and they smile weakly, sometimes not responding to the question at all, and only vaguely nodding along whenever my husband asked them if they’ve ever visited so-and-so country, I could tell it was a pipe dream. It’s like asking an average person in America if they’ve ever gone to Mars — it just isn’t possible, at least not without significant resources.
Going on vacations and visiting other countries is a privilege. I have this privilege because in America, your employer gives you paid time off. I have this privilege because I saved up the money. I have this privilege because the United States government gave me a passport. I have this privilege because I have freedom of travel as an American citizen. So many people want to take trips but due to their circ*mstances — mainly the countries they live in — they simply cannot go, even if they saved up money for it. This realization was so daunting to me that I had to take some time to process.
So yes, Vietnamese people work a lot, and for a good reason. They just don’t make that much money. The average Vietnamese person makes about $4,000 USD per year, another daunting fact that nearly broke my heart. Here we are in America, a developed western nation, complaining about our (low) salaries, even those who make close to the average middle class salary of $77,000 per year, and about our inability to take time off from work when in reality, people in less developed nations around the world, including Vietnam, make less than what some of us pay in a monthly mortgage.
Vietnam is still a developing country, as our tour guide in Hanoi informed us. Yes, we knew that and nodded along. That’s what most tourists would do, right? But do we really know what that means?
Being in a developing country means that the disparity between the rich and the poor is wide. It means there is hardly a middle class. Nowhere was this more prominent than when we visited my old village located in the Dong Nai province, about an hour’s drive east of Ho Chi Minh City.
Meanwhile, in Ho Chi Minh, investment money was poured into the city’s infrastructure within the past decade, resulting in an unsavory side effect — as more tall buildings and communities were built, including Thu Duc, a city within a city, more and more Vietnamese people were displaced from their homes along the river’s edge.
It was shocking to see shacks with tinned roofs (some with only a tarp for cover) so close to luxury condos and high rise buildings. Also unsettling: seeing my own village as it struggles to make progress.
Thanks to my husband who took this short video while riding on the back of a motorbike through my old village — what you see here is similar to what I grew up with.
Motorbikes are so ubiquitous in Vietnam that it outpaces cars, buses and bikes. According to one of our tour guides, there are about 13,000 (or is it millions?) motorbikes in Ho Chi Minh alone. It’s a mid-level option for those who can’t afford a car, but still has a need to get around and can’t take the bus, walk, or bike. Here’s a video of me riding in the back of one.
I don’t think I can ever get used to this — driving or riding on a motorbike.
Visiting the place I once lived brought out some complicated feelings in me. While much has changed — many of my relatives are no longer there; they’ve either passed away or immigrated to different parts of America — much has not changed either. For instance, the busy main road (which I’d never learned the name of, so I used to call it “the main road”) where I used to cross many times after school to get to my grandparents’ house. It’s called National Road 1A now, but still just as busy as ever. Cars, trucks and motorbikes fill the road and consistently honk at one another, and I shudder to think that I once walked past this road alone many times as a child, wondering how I managed not to get hit by a car or motorbike. It’s an exercise in vigilance and patience.
My old house is no longer there, having been sold to someone else, but we visited my grandparents’ house, at the same place it always is, and suddenly I see a flash of little me being embraced by my paternal grandmother, telling me that I was her favorite grandchild. This was obviously not true, as she had many grandchildren and thus, how could she possibly pick a favorite? Still, I relished in her acceptance, her gentle hands. She was such a nice person; so great was she that when she passed away in December 1999, my grandfather couldn’t handle the loss and died 34 days later. They had been married for a very long time, and both were very old — he in his 90s, she in her late 80s — and so, my family has always believed that he died of heartbreak.
The late Anthony Bourdain claims Vietnam to be one of his favorite places on earth, so much that he went back several times to film his TV show. In a Parts Unknown clip from 2014, he marvels at the street food of Vietnam. In describing it, he says, “All of the things I need for happiness — low plastic stools, check. Tiny little plastic table, check. Something delicious in a bowl, check.” I detected a hint of humor in his voice. After all, the idea of sitting on a tiny plastic stool next to an equally tiny plastic table eating hot soup in one of the most humid countries in the world is probably not everyone’s cup of tea. But Bourdain was serious. He loved Vietnam and now, I can see why.
As a chorus of beeps from motorbikes and cars ring out behind him, he declares himself to be “a giddy, silly, foolish man beyond caring,” a perfect encapsulation of being in Vietnam. Being in Vietnam forces you to be more mindful of the present, not just because you could get hit by a car or motorbike if you don’t, but because life is both fast and slow at the same time.
Despite the heat, the chaos, and the poverty, Vietnam has a particular allure that draws me in. I thought to myself, “Why, yes, I would go back.” Just like Anthony Bourdain did.
“All of the things I need for happiness — low plastic stools, check. Tiny little plastic table, check. Something delicious in a bowl, check.” — Anthony Bourdain
That’s because when you’re in Vietnam, you see things differently. You find yourself comparing the world you left and the world you’re currently in. And you ask yourself questions that probably cannot be answered with a Google search.
For example: Why is the traffic in Vietnam so chaotic? Why is there such a disparity between the rich and the poor? How do people stay in business when they have to compete with so many others? Does the government help its people? And so on.
This experience, along with an overnight cruise we took to see the beautiful limestone islands at Ha Long Bay, to hike up a mountain and go inside a cave and boat to a beach nearby became some of the most transformative experiences I’ve ever had while traveling. But nothing could prepare me for the emotional dam that burst when I saw this lady while on a stroll along Nguyen Hue Walking Street.
She was selling mangos, which is nothing extraordinary. There are many fruit vendors selling on the streets in Vietnam. She was no different. But I noticed that unlike other sellers, she crouched on the ground with no stool and no shade. When she glanced up, I was surprised to see in her big, bright eyes that she looked quite young — perhaps in her late 30s or early 40s. Suddenly, I saw my mother in her.
Seeing this woman with no stool in the heat trying to sell unripe mangos, I was suddenly overcome with grief. Grief because my mom died, but also because she used to do the exact same thing. For years, she carried her goods everywhere on two baskets that hung precariously on a pole between her shoulders. I remember that she woke up early in the morning to make the snacks she’d planned to sell for the day and would be gone before I left for school. It was back breaking work for not a lot of money.
And so, when I looked at this woman, I felt such an intense rush of emotion that I wanted to give her an entire week’s salary. But I had no idea how much she needed. $10,000 VND? $50,000? $100,000? So I did what an ignorant person would do — I bought two unripe mangos from her for $60,000 VND, knowing that it probably wasn’t enough. Then I walked away, tears rolling down my cheeks, sad that I couldn’t do more. I lamented on my own privilege and stroke of luck. Because my family got the opportunity to come to America, neither I nor my mom struggled in the same way that this woman struggled everyday, living in Vietnam. I wondered, will she ever get the same chance?
It’s another one of those unanswered questions.
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Want to learn more about Vietnam?
To synthesize everything I’ve learned from this trip, and to ensure that your email provider doesn’t truncate this post, I created what I call “Hoang’s Vietnam Travel Guide.” It’s a long one — almost 9,000 word Google doc1 filled with (what I hope to be) useful tips that you might not know, designed for those who’ve never been to Vietnam and are trying to decide whether or not you should go. It’s things I wish someone had told me before I went. I’m not trying to convince you either way; rather, I wanted to give you a holistic, honest approach to making a decision, things that you won’t find in other travel guides.
P.S. I’ve had a lot of fun posting photo & video snippets of my trip on Notes — along with some accompanying information that you might find interesting. Go check it out!
Hoang's Vietnam Notes
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What can I say? I’m a fan of Google docs.
