The pavement under our feet was oily slick with rain as we disembarked the train in Hanoi, the sky above us a squid-ink black that blotted out the stars. At 4 a.m., the only light came from the long row of lamps running between the tracks. Their gaseous amber glow bounced back at us from the long, smooth panels of the train and up from the puddles below, flipping the world into an eerie darkroom negative.
“Ladies, it was a pleasure to meet you. We stay in touch, yes?” asked Emanuel, kissing us on both cheeks before running off to find his motorbike.
Outside the station, a group of men were clustered together, chain-smoking inside a milky blue haze. As we stepped into their line of vision, they hurled down their cigarettes and swarmed into action. They encircled and darted between us, shouting prices, grabbing at our bags, and trying to hustle us toward vehicles hidden on side streets. Emanuel had told us to find a driver who’d use the meter (“Otherwise, they rip you off—no more than 35,000 dong to get home, okay?”), but most flatly refused. Others acted offended that we’d dared mention the word.
Just as we were about to give in, one driver emerged from the shadows and agreed to use his meter. Falling down tired, we didn’t even consult one another before agreeing, trailing after the man in the wilted beige button-down as he tore down an alley. He deposited my bag inside the trunk, slammed it shut, then jumped into the driver’s seat. The three of us wedged ourselves in the backseat just as the ignition sputtered to life.
“Meter, right?” I confirmed, and he grunted in response, slapping the small black box perched above the dash. I watched transfixed as the glowing red digits began ticking rapidly upward, compounding, it seemed, every half second or 1/100 kilometer we traveled. 20,000 dong. 32,000 dong. 45,000 dong. Northward it spiraled, posting numbers that seemed nonsensical to me. Was that the price we were supposed to pay? In my fogginess, it didn’t make sense, but Jen—arguably at her sharpest in the predawn hours—instantly put two and two together.
The black box had been rigged. We’d been told that unscrupulous taxi drivers often fixed their meters to spit out prices that were five, ten, even thirty times higher than the standard rate, but we’d yet to encounter the scam.
“Sir, we can see that your meter is incorrect,” Jen said flatly. “You can either take us to our guesthouse for the fair price of 40,000 dong or let us out.”
The guy didn’t say a word. Instead, he jammed his foot against the gas pedal, sending the vehicle careening through the lattice of foggy one-way streets.
“Excuse me, sir, we’d like you to stop the car,” Jen continued, making her voice more forceful. “Stop the car and let us out.”
He ignored her, and I echoed Jen’s request. No response. I peered outside, trying to figure out exactly where we were. In about two hours, cyclos, motorbikes, pedicabs, cars, buses, trucks, vendors, and pedestrians would pack every inch of this pavement, but now the streets were utterly abandoned. The tightly packed rows of buildings were shuttered and locked, gates clamped down over entrances like rows of steel teeth.
Jen kept repeating her request, over and over, her voice increasing in pitch as the cab picked up speed. To my right, a now-lucid Holly clutched the door, ready to evacuate the second the cab slowed enough to allow her to roll into the gutter.
“Listen, I know you can hear me!” shouted Jen. “Even if you don’t understand my words, sir, understand my tone! Stop this car right now!”
She was screaming, and the message finally seemed to break through to the driver. But by the time he finally slammed on his brakes just off the centrally located Hoan Kiem Lake, our fare already exceeded 100,000 dong.
Just as Jen pulled 40,000 dong from her money belt, determined not to pay one bill more, it finally dawned on me that we had a problem. Every important document and valuable that I had was still sitting inside the trunk, tucked inside my overnight bag. The second Jen’s cash hit the driver’s palm, the man detonated.
“No, no! I say 100,000 dong! 100,000 dong! You give me my money!” He turned fully around in his seat, giving us a better view of the fiery lumps of coal burning in the sockets where his eyes should have been. This was no ordinary haggling situation. Jen, who’d seen enough TV crime dramas in her life to qualify for an honorary badge, later likened his behavior to that of a heroin addict crazed for a fix: the only thing standing in the way of his next high was our cash. Holly recovered quickly and yanked her door handle, ready to make a mad dash to safety.
“Wait, I can’t leave my stuff!” I pleaded, sounding like one of those idiot girls in horror films who deserve to get offed directly after the opening credits. I would have abandoned almost anything in the bag—my money, camera, credit cards, travelers’ checks, remaining plane tickets, even the damn albatross of a laptop, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t relinquish the visa I needed to enter Myanmar.
Getting permission to enter the notoriously closed-off, military-governed nation had taken extraordinary efforts, not to mention a few white lies about my journalism background. I’d never be able to replace the sticker currently affixed to my passport in time. My family, who’d endured their own entry ordeal back in the States, would be flying halfway around the world to meet Holly and me there in less than two weeks.
Jen and I pressed the driver to release my stuff from the trunk, while Holly remained halfway outside the car, but the man was determined to hold the luggage hostage until we handed over the rest of the money. I’m still not sure why we didn’t just toss the additional 60,000 dong (about $3.50) over the seat, grab my shit, and run, but at the time, giving in to a lunatic’s demands didn’t seem like an option.
Thinking like a Westerner, I suggested that we should find a police officer to intervene. That’s when the driver went from ballistic to completely nuclear. Without a word, he whirled around in his seat and slammed the gas, driving us off into a shroud of foggy blackness.
“Oh, my God, we have to get out!” Holly screamed. “This man could be taking us anywhere! We’re definitely not safe here!!”
Her panic infected all of us. The guy, utterly silent, shot down a pitch-black side street that might well have been a portal straight to Hell. While one man might not be able to hurt all three of us, he could easily be driving us somewhere to find people who could. He might radio ahead for reinforcements, drag us off under the remaining cover of night, and extract some horrible revenge for our attempt to cheat him out of his money. Holly leaned out of her open door; I yanked her back before she jumped out of the speeding car.
“Sir! You are scaring us. We want you to stop this car, right now!” Jen said. “If you don’t stop, I will open up this window and scream as loudly as I can for help!”
The driver called her bluff, never deviating from his original path.
“HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLP! HEEEEEEELP!” Jen used atomic lungpower I had no idea she possessed to alert every man, woman, and child within a thirty-kilometer radius to our predicament. The driver slammed on his brakes. He snapped around in his seat and tried to backhand Jen with his fist, which only made her scream louder. Stumbling out of the front seat, the driver yanked the back door open and pulled Jen out. She stood there, feet planted, her resolve and strength stunning both Holly and me.
“Open the trunk right now, right now, and let us get our stuff, and we will give you the rest of the money,” she seethed, grabbing a fistful of bills and holding them up.
Visual confirmation of cash broke through the driver’s insanity. “You give me money?”
Jen nodded, and he moved around to the trunk and sprang the lock. I grabbed the heavy bag and, without thinking, reeled backward up the street. The driver was either terrified that I was trying to run or just crazed for his cash. He took a running start toward Holly, who happened to be closest, and kicked a foot in the direction of her gut.
Jen and I snapped. With no clear plan in mind other than defending Holly, we raced toward the driver. Seeing two furious women bearing down on him, the guy reeled backward, then thought better of it and charged again, hawking a huge ball of phlegm in Jen’s face.
Now it was Holly’s turn to lose it. She jumped between Jen and the driver to block her. He leapt back, then darted in to spit at us again. Finally, the schizophrenically unstable driver raced back to his car and slid behind the wheel.
We didn’t stick around to see what happened next. Jen and I grabbed Holly, threw some bills over our shoulder, and ran like hell in the direction of the lake.
Our showdown with the cabdriver rattled our cages, to say the least.
Holly, who strongly felt that we should have ditched the scene a lot earlier than we did, became distracted and withdrawn. Jen, who believed that we’d never been in any real danger, had no regrets that we’d stood our ground and gotten my stuff back. And I was grateful that both of my friends had stuck by me in a crisis, but I felt horribly guilty that I’d compromised their safety. I replayed the scene over and over again in my head, questioning how I could have done things differently. Eventually Jen told me to stop beating myself up. We’d gotten my stuff and everyone was safe, so we might as well put the whole thing behind us. And once we’d reinstalled ourselves in the Quanghiep Hotel and gotten a few fitful hours of sleep, that’s exactly what we tried to do.
According to the carefully plotted Excel chart schedule that Jen had created, we had nearly two weeks to spend exploring Hanoi, the longest stretch of time we’d devoted to any major city since we’d started traveling. While smaller villages and rural areas appeal to me more than population-dense metropolises (there’s a sameness to big cities, whether you’re talking about Hong Kong, Nairobi, or New York), I was fascinated by Hanoi, a place that during its thousand-year history has served as the seat of the ancient Viet Kingdom, the crown jewel of French Indochina, an incubator of socialism, the headquarters of Communism, and most recently, the cultural and political capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Like many cities across Asia, it’s in the throes of transition. Prior to receiving its current, somewhat unimaginative title of Hà Nôi (which means “inside the rivers,”), the city was called Thang Long, which means either “ascending dragon” or “to ascend and flourish,” depending on where you place the accent. Either way, the title seems to fit. Modern-day Hanoi has risen from its war-ravaged, impoverished third-world past to emerge as one of the continent’s most cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile cities.
It’s also one of the youngest. Thanks to a baby boom after the end of the Vietnam War (called “the American War” in these parts), nearly half of the population is under the age of thirty and a quarter are under fifteen, a demographic shift that we spotted as soon as we left the Quanghiep Hotel later that afternoon for a walk through the Old Quarter.
Spiky-haired, fashion-forward teenagers were all around us—they roared past on shiny chrome motorbikes, chattered animatedly into microscopic mobile phones, crammed into cybercafés to play online dance and soccer games. They were even break dancing to the nation’s own politically correct, cleaned-up version of hip-hop music in Lenin Square. The young people didn’t even acknowledge old man Vladimir’s towering presence as they threw themselves into gravity-defying, tendon-twisting moves at the foot of the square’s twenty-foot-high bronze effigy.
As Jen and I watched the dancers, Holly got to chatting with Allen, a college professor on a field trip with some communications students from Maryland. He explained that the statue, along with hundreds of other monuments built by the Russians in the latter half of the twentieth century, had basically become a relic of Vietnam’s political past.
Though the country technically stands behind its Communist ideology, during the past two decades it has granted an increasing amount of economic and personal freedom to its citizens. In the mid-1980s, the government instituted a series of reforms known as Dôi Mói (renovation), which essentially allowed people to have their own free-market businesses and conduct trade abroad. Not only did this help foster good relations with the capitalist West, it ultimately transformed the nation’s economy into one of the fastest-growing in Asia, second only to China. Capitalism and tourism have exploded here in almost equal measure, with the number of international visitors quadrupling in the last decade.
As Holly, Jen, and I wandered through the maze of streets just north of the lake, we saw firsthand how quickly entrepreneurship had gone from being a dirty word to the name of the game. New businesses—hotels, guesthouses, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, art galleries, clothing stores, souvenir shops, tour operators, and travel agencies—had opened to service the flood of foreigners, and we got the distinct sense that everyone wanted a piece of the action. And why not? As Tsu had explained in Sapa, catering to tourists is often a far more lucrative enterprise than, say, rice farming or fabric dyeing. It makes good financial sense for young people to switch from trades their families have practiced for generations to ones that may pull in fifty times the profit. And therein lies the tourism paradox: the greater a destination’s popularity, the less authentic it becomes.
In few places has the proliferation of tourism occurred faster than in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, a warren of thirty-six tangled lanes and double-knotted passageways situated just above Hoan Kiem, or Lake of the Returning Sword.
Though the Old Quarter fills only a single square kilometer, there’s more than enough humanity crammed into it to fascinate an observer for months, if not years. We had less than two weeks left to explore. So each morning, after getting scrubbed down and layered in our single set of mismatched winter gear, the three of us would step from the familial hubbub of our guesthouse and into the freewheeling pandemonium just outside our front door. Blaring horns, bicycle bells, high-decibel shrieking, and the ever-present rush of traffic provided the sound track as we navigated through the jumble of passageways between our lodging and the lake.
In centuries past, this area—a trading hub strategically located between the Royal Citadel to the west and the Red River to the east—functioned as the economic heart and soul of the city. Skilled artisans and craftsmen worked shoulder to shoulder on specific streets that eventually took on the names of the goods sold there—shoppers knew what they were getting on Sweet Potato, Bamboo Shade, or Pickled Fish road. These merchants lived with their families in ultraskinny buildings, known as tube houses. Because the residents were taxed on the width of their properties, many homes and shops were constructed to be just nine or ten feet wide—but could be five stories tall and up to 150 feet deep.
Back then the streets were frenzied trading floors where salespeople hawked their wares at earsplitting pitches, negotiated rapid-fire deals in order to edge out next-door competitors, and replaced hastily displayed merchandise as fast as it was sold. Today, other than the threat of getting nailed by a wayward scooter or losing one’s hearing from the nonstop honking, the only thing that has really changed is the variety of goods on hawk.
Rather than tracking down coffins, charcoal, fish sauce, and chickens on their respectively named streets, Jen, Holly, and I had an easier time finding knockoff handbags, fussy stiletto heels, bootleg DVDs, cheap plastic toys, bins full of fruit-flavored candies, tins of chocolate, paper fans and lanterns, kites, baseball hats, and piles of mass-produced sportswear separates that had likely migrated down from factories in China.
Commerce congested every passageway. Pushcarts, stalls, and tables full of merchandise hogged space along the main arteries. Barbers offered haircutting services (complete with chairs, mirrors, and draping cloths) right on the pavement. Farmworkers in conical hats slipped through the crowd balancing slender wooden poles on their shoulders. Along the way, they tried to unload the produce—bananas, green beans, tomatoes, pineapples, and grapes—from flat bamboo baskets suspended from the ends of the rods. And, as I learned the hard way, if you want to take their picture, you have to don the pole and hat yourself, then pay for a few pieces of fruit.
What little sidewalk space wasn’t taken up by parked bikes, motorbikes, and baskets was used to create makeshift cafés. Plastic kiddie chairs and miniature stools no bigger than a single butt cheek were organized around equally tiny tables under bright blue tarps. Nearby, men squeezed fish paste over strips of sizzling meat and chopped vegetables inside woks; women squatted over hubcap-sized pans of glutinous white rice and tended to enormous cauldrons of pho bo soup above open wood fires.
As they stirred, a beefy blast of steam, richly scented with cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves, swirled into the atmosphere, seducing anyone who happened to catch a whiff. Since we’d arrived, I’d become almost manic about getting my hands on soup as often as possible. I’d even started eating the stuff for breakfast, standard operating procedure for the Vietnamese.
Traffic lights were nonexistent, which made crossing the major streets surrounding Hoan Kiem into a daily death wish—if we waited for a break in the traffic, we might as well have waited forever. The only way to make it across safely was to step off the curb directly into a raging river of oncoming chrome and steel, staring down helmeted drivers, who would then part around our bodies as if we were Moses and they were the Red Sea. Every time we made it to safety without being hit or dragged under the wheels of the rampaging vehicles, it felt as if we’d experienced a miracle.
After our run-in with the heroin-crazed cabdriver (whose reputation had swelled to almost mythical proportions in the retelling), all three of us were now motivated to forge a more positive connection with Hanoi. In all our months of travel, we’d yet to meet a destination that we didn’t like—or at least one that we couldn’t get along with—but the harder we tried to get on Hanoi’s good side, the more roundly we were rejected.
Still ill equipped for the freezing cold temperatures, we ventured to the city’s discount-clothing district to layer ourselves in even more coats, sweaters, gloves, scarves, and pants. Initially, we had a blast sorting through the piles of fabric and outfitting ourselves in a ridiculously mismatched combination of colors, patterns, and textures, but I was taken off guard when the women working one stall refused to let me try on a pair of pants, indicating that my five foot four, 125-pound butt was far too enormous to yank them up. Considering that a goodly percentage of the ladies around me barely cleared five feet and might have weighed 90 pounds with their boots on, I could understand that they might worry that I’d stretch out, rip, or otherwise damage the merchandise. But when I finally tracked down a pair of size XXL workout pants, the stretchy Lycra kind that could safely contain an elephant’s quivering saddlebags, one of the women snatched them away, shrieking a string of Vietnamese phrases at me as another held her hands out wide in front of my hips in the international sign language for “fat ass.” Holly tried to reassure me that being called fat was a compliment in Vietnam (“Even though it’s not remotely true! You look amazing!”), but my obesity had clearly affronted their sensibilities.
The fun didn’t stop with clothes shopping. Vendors who’d set up wooden carts and stands along Ngoc Quyen Street completed rapid-fire transactions with local customers but often ignored me when I tried to place an order. One man stonily agreed to sell me two forlorn-looking oranges for several times the local price, but when I countered with a more reasonable number, he hissed at me to get away from his cart. Bargaining and negotiating, an integral part of public marketplaces worldwide, didn’t seem to be universally accepted here. We knew it wasn’t uncommon to charge locals one price and outsiders another, but here the discrepancy almost felt like a form of punishment, some retribution for our general pasty-skinned, wide-hipped, big-nosed offensiveness.
Though some vendors wanted nothing to do with us, others were dogged in their determination to sell us something, no matter how politely and repeatedly we declined. Each afternoon as we walked around the lake, laser-eyed men hawking stacks of illegally photocopied guidebooks and paperbacks would hustle into our path, using their copies of Lonely Planet: Vietnam, The Killing Fields, and A Short History of Nearly Everything to barricade our movements.
At one point, frustrated that she couldn’t walk a hundred yards without being accosted, Jen set her chin and decided that she was going to stick to her route, no matter what. For a few seconds, she and one of the guidebook guys played chicken on a stretch of the sidewalk: he bore down on her, frantically rattling off the names of the paperbacks in one long unbroken string of words; she continued looking straight ahead, no more interested in buying them now than she’d been on her first three laps around the water. At the very last second, when they were just inches away from colliding and sending thousands of poorly photocopied pages directly into the lake, the tout flung himself left and hurled a few “fuck yous” in her direction. It was as if Jen had committed the vilest of offenses just by minding her own business. To my amazement, when we’d lapped the lake the next time, the same sales guy moved in to approach our group again. We leapt off the path and called it an afternoon before it came to fisticuffs.
In each instance, the three of us wondered if we could possibly be imagining things—the undercurrent of hostility, the uncanny sensation that certain Westerners were tolerated as long as they were interested in parting with their greenbacks at every possible opportunity—or worse, if we were doing something to bring misunderstanding and misfortune upon ourselves. It was entirely possible. We’d been traveling at a breakneck pace for the last few months, crammed into tiny rooms on top of one another, and we’d all grown road-weary and snappish. The initial freshness and excitement of the trip had long since worn off, and the reserves of humor and energy we had so often used to deflect aggressive touts, money changers, tour operators, postcard salesmen, beach boys, T-shirt hawkers, and taxi drivers had been all but drained. We tried our best to blow off the bad apples, to remain calm no matter how frustrating the interaction, but we didn’t always succeed.
We’d decided to stay in Hanoi for as long as we did in part to give ourselves a chance to rest and to rebuild our reserves before continuing with the trip. But we’d chosen to stay in the most highly trafficked part of the city, and one that we later learned is notorious for the prevalence and sophistication of its scam artists. Most attempts to get visitors to part with their money involve overcharging for rides, returning incorrect change, or rerouting travelers to a different restaurant or hotel from the one they intended to visit. Others were more direct: Holly’s purse was slashed while she was walking through one of the markets.
“This women just kept bumping into me and bumping into me,” Holly said later, retelling the story. “I remember feeling irritated that she was walking so close to me that she was actually hitting me, but I felt rude telling her to back off. Eventually, I just got fed up, turned around, and stared her straight in the eye. That’s when she turned and ran. I didn’t really know why—until a few seconds later, when I felt my wallet slip out of my bag.” Apparently, the woman had been razoring through Holly’s shoulder bag as she walked but hadn’t been able to grab the contents before getting caught.
After that, we considered whether it was wise to continue trying to force-fit a relationship that clearly wasn’t working.
“I mean, it’s unrealistic to think that we’re gonna love every single destination that we visit,” Jen reasoned. “Maybe Hanoi just isn’t our kind of town.”
We chewed on that idea for a few minutes, and I felt a little defeated. Could we really have such irreconcilable differences with an entire city? The three of us quietly considered packing up our stuff and making our way back to Bangkok. And we might have done just that—retreated nearly a week ahead of schedule, trying the whole way home to rationalize our hasty departure—except that, as it turned out, Hanoi wasn’t ready to give up on us.
That night, in pursuit of what might be our last meal in town, we stepped inside a mysterious little lounge we must have passed by half a dozen times during our forays in the Quarter. I was startled to find the place packed and steamy warm inside. Our eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dimness of the room, which was barely lit by a few scattered candles, when I heard our names called out in the darkness. I could make out the silhouetted mop of rambunctious curls and the distinctive French accent long before I could see the face.
“Jennifer! Holly! Amanda! You’re here? I thought you had already gone!” Emanuel shouted, throwing kisses in every direction. He’d tried to e-mail Holly, but the messages had kept bouncing back.
“But this does not matter now. You must come over to meet my friends,” he insisted, pulling us over to his table and introducing us to a hip-looking crew of local Hanoians, a couple of his European expat roommates, and a cute American guy in a blue baseball cap. Emanuel explained that the group was celebrating the inaugural issue of a national magazine that his Vietnamese friends Ngoc and Tuan had helped launch.
“Yes, please, sit down,” said Tuan as everyone shoved over to make room for the new arrivals. Several oversized issues of the magazine were spread out between everyone’s half-empty pint and wineglasses, and I couldn’t resist picking up a copy and flipping through the pages to examine the images of girls in deconstructed shift dresses and sexy interior shots of Hanoi’s lounges and nightclubs. It hardly mattered that I couldn’t read the fine print or even make out the Vietnamese words in the dim light. There was something thrilling about holding a freshly printed full-color glossy, a feeling I can trace directly back to the sixth grade, when I first got my hands on my cousin’s copy of Seventeen magazine.
The promise that the pages held back then—that just by reading, you might discover the one critical nugget of advice that would transform you into an entirely new, prettier, more popular person—had blown my eleven-year-old mind. I didn’t know who dispensed these powerful truths about life, boys, fashion, and lipstick, but I was pretty sure they must be all-knowing goddesses, tapped into a knowledge bank to which we mere mortals would never have access. It was only after getting my first assistant job in publishing years later and realizing that the women penning these extraordinary works of literature were twenty-four-year-olds like me that I felt a teensy bit hoodwinked. What next—The Wall Street Journal is written by college business majors?
Still, my fascination with the printed page and the people who created the stories had never entirely waned, and both Holly and I were dying to ask Ngoc and Tuan about their experience working in the publishing industry in Vietnam. They were equally as curious about our magazine jobs in America, whether working in New York City really was like The Devil Wears Prada. Almost before we knew it, the three of us had been pulled into the middle of the conversational mix, trading our tales of long hours and tough bosses and learning that things weren’t really all that different on this side of the Pacific.
A couple of bottles of Tiger Beer later, I ended up getting sidetracked into a discussion with the boyishly handsome American guy in the backward baseball cap. Andy, who was an expat photojournalist from San Francisco, had been living in Hanoi on and off for the past few years and had been doing extended assignments for editorial heavyweights like The New York Times, Newsweek, and the International Herald Tribune. His work had taken him all over Vietnam, where he’d reported on social issues and, with the help of a translator, explored corners of the country that even most locals never got to see. He’d snapped photos of Agent Orange orphans, documented the conditions suffered by peasants in rural hospitals, and recorded the gruesome work done at Vietnamese slaughterhouses (“kinda tough to stomach for a vegetarian,” he told me).
His face glowed in the digital display as he showed me picture after picture of scenes that he’d lain in wait to capture for hours, sometimes days. I found myself riveted—by his passion for his work, the abiding respect he had for the local people, his sense of quiet determination and purpose. This was one American who’d literally viewed Vietnam from thousands of different angles through the lens of his camera and had developed a deeper appreciation for it as a result. Andy admitted that even now, after years spent trekking all over the country, he still had a lot to learn about the culture, the language, the social interactions, and the people.
That made me pause. The girls and I had barely left the Old Quarter, and we’d already decided we’d seen enough of Hanoi to cross the border and leave early. Suddenly I realized what a mistake that could be.
Though we’d run into some bad luck here, we’d also made some pretty novice mistakes. We’d let exhaustion get the better of us. We’d taken cultural differences personally. And we’d been basing most of our assumptions about Vietnam on our limited experiences in the Old Quarter, a single square kilometer that probably revealed as much about Vietnam as Times Square does about the rest of America.
Even though we didn’t have much time left (even by Jen’s original Excel chart calculations), I hoped we could stick around Hanoi and give ourselves an opportunity to see another side of it. I figured that I might need to do a bit of a sales pitch to convince Holly and Jen, but to my surprise, they were both quick to agree that we should stay. While I’d been wrapped up in Andy (in his photographs and stories, I mean), Emanuel and his Scottish roommate Katie had given Jen and Hol a little perspective on our experiences during the last several days.
Katie confirmed that we weren’t imagining the edge of hostility and said that when she’d first moved to Hanoi, she’d encountered a seriously cold shoulder. “As odd as this sounds, ya really can’t take it personally. Young women, especially foreigners traveling with no husband or guy to speak of, they just aren’t given much respect here. In a lot of the cases, men would still rather negotiate with another man. That’s sad, but it’s a fact.”
“And if you look like a sloppy backpacker, you’ll definitely get treated like one,” added Emanuel. “The vendors here know the packers always try to haggle down prices below what stuff is actually worth, so they don’t even want to deal with them. Regular tourists, they just charge them some crazy price hoping that they don’t know any better.”
The best way to earn respect in Hanoi, our friends explained, was to avoid looking as if you’d just rolled out of bed in your sweats. Dress up a little, smile politely at the person you’re dealing with, and never, ever lose your cool. If you act as if the person is going to rip you off (and apparently, a lot of Westerners like us did), they’ll probably treat you with an equal amount of negativity or just act as if you’re not there at all.
And if you really want to get on equal footing with the locals, said Emanuel, rent a motorbike. “There’s no better way to see the city, and avoid being harassed by random guidebook touts and postcard sellers, than when you have your own set of wheels.”
He asked us to stick around town until at least the weekend, so he and his roommates could invite us to their house in the suburbs of West Lake, make us dinner, and show us another side of the city. “You’ll be the only Americans around for miles,” he assured. We promised him that we would come.
Early the next morning, we got up, put on the outfits that we typically saved for dressier occasions, styled our hair, and walked out into one of the warmest winter days we’d experienced since arriving in the city. We took a long walk south of Hoan Kiem Lake, leaving the Old Quarter for the first time, heading beyond the Opera House, past all recognizable landmarks, museums, and tourist attractions, bound for some distant, undetermined point. Block after block passed under our feet, and eventually the whine and rush of the traffic, a sound that filled my ears even at night, tapered to a low rumble. I could no longer pinpoint our exact position on the city map.
People on the street, sitting on the curb, and standing inside shops watched us as we passed. They peeked out of doorways, over chessboards and stew pots, their looks more curious than anything else. Maybe they figured we were lost, tourist refugees from some foreign country, but everyone left us to our own devices. Whenever we smiled at people—schoolboys, fruit vendors, bicycle mechanics, old women tending grandchildren—some people looked surprised, but a lot of them smiled back.
Later that afternoon, we passed a small boutique with silk dresses, scarves, and purses displayed inside the window. Just beyond the glass, two salesgirls were laughing and chattering as they folded up squares of jewel-toned fabric and set them out on a table.
“Can we go inside?” Holly asked hopefully, already heading for the door.
Tiny bells chimed to signal that customers had arrived. The salesgirls looked up.
“Sin jow,” said Holly, “good afternoon” in Vietnamese. Emanuel had written down a few phrases phonetically spelled for us to supplement the ones in our guidebook, and we’d been trying to use them as much as possible.
“Xin chào,” responded the girl wearing a white puffer coat.
“Cay neigh gee-ah—” Holly said, trying to remember the rest of the phrase for “how much is this?” as she motioned toward one of the dresses she’d seen in the window.
“Cái này bao nhiêu tiên?” The girl in the puffer coat walked over to see which item Holly was pointing at. She began speaking in Vietnamese, and Holly shook her head to show she didn’t understand. The woman motioned for her to wait, then shouted something into a back room. A few seconds later, a young woman in a black blazer emerged.
“Hello. I am Lan. You—ah—need help with something?” she said slowly as she approached. Holly indicated that she’d like to try on the dress and showed her which one. The woman nodded, pulling a similar dress from a nearby rack and handing it to her.
“You Australian lady?” Lan asked. “U.K.? German girls?”
“Americans,” Jen answered.
“Oh, yes? American?” she responded, sounding more curious than anything else. The girl in the puffer coat asked Lan something, and she translated the question. “You—three-ah-sista?”
We smiled and looked at one another. Since Jen and I had similar coloring and were the same height, we were often confused for sisters (and sometimes even twins, depending what country we were visiting), but no one had ever thought all three of us were related. I loved the idea that we were all part of the same family, but we confirmed to the women that we were just friends.
“And are you?” Holly asked, looking around at the young women. “You are sisters?”
Lan translated, and the other two burst into laughter.
“No, we are friend. Good friend. Like you.”
I’d like to report that during our final few days in Hanoi the girls and I experienced one incredible life-altering event that forced us to see the error of our ways. We didn’t. Instead, it was an ongoing series of simple, positive interactions, like the ones with our magazines friends Ngoc and Tuan, Andy the photographer, the women at the dress shop, the people we’d meet during our walks, and even Emanuel and his quintet of expat roommates, that subtly adjusted our original negative impression of the country and helped us feel a little more at home in a place that had initially seemed so unwelcoming.
By the time we left the city, the three of us wondered if we’d return someday. And if, after all we’d experienced, maybe we’d gotten it wrong. Maybe Hanoi was our kind of town after all.