Last day in Hanoi

Greetings again from Hanoi,

Today is my last day here in Hanoi and I shall be leaving for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

It’s been quite a trip. My friend C from Belgium, who works for the UN, is renting a nice four storey house with four bedrooms near one of Hanoi’s many small lakes. So I get to use one of her guest bedrooms, which is amazing. As she has lived in China for a year, she is quite used to the Asian way of life. So, with her, we eat on the little spots on the streets without a second thought, which not many tourists do; we had chicken legs for 8$ US – for 3 hungry people, two of whom were of the tall Belgian kind. Viet Nam is incredibly cheap. She also owns a motorcycle, which is very convenient as it is the main mode of transportation. I very much enjoy spending my evenings with her and her friends, living the expat way of life, which reminds me very much Cameroun and Up North: meeting nice people from all over who are very welcoming and eager to meet new faces and make new friends very easily. C’s friends are mostly Belgian and French and I am known as the Canadian girl who speaks a very bad Vietnamese.

Yesterday I accompanied my parents on an important trip. We visited the village where my Ong Noi (paternal grandfather) came from before he went to Hanoi to start his textile business. It is a tiny village outside of Hanoi where most people still make a living of growing rice. We saw in the village pagoda a decorative golden plaque with Chinese characters which was purchased with money donated by my Ong Noi. We also met second and third cousins still living in the village, and visited the ancestors' cemetary and mausoleum. Even if I do not feel like I belong here at all, it was important to see the origins of my family. We also did the same on my mother’s side. However there was much less to see as they were city people and high dignitaries who were expropriated when Hanoi became communist in 1954. My mum, who had lived the first seven years of her life here, back in the fifties, wanted to see the ancestral house of her childhood, still in the 36 historic craftsman’s streets in the old Hanoi. It had belonged to no less than four generations of her family - that is, until the communists came. We found it, but of course, it is unrecognizable as the communist separated what used to be a large house with an interior garden into several lodgings for several families in 1954. It now holds an souvenir shop, ironically selling T shirts with Bac Ho’s photo (Ho Chi Minh being the father of Vietnamese communism). The Vietnam of today has so little to do with the Vietnam that they left. Even my parents, who speak fluent Vietnamese, seem very westernized and different from the local Vietnamese. And even the Northern Vietnamese accent that I grew up with and that my friends use is no longer spoken here. It's as if we were stuck in time from the Vietnam of the fifties and things have changed here.

I do not know what to think of communism. Seeing as my parents’ families lost a lot to the war and that we count several Boat people in our relatives at home, communism is generally viewed as a terrible thing in the Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese). And here as well; some of the locals with whom I spoke, like the xe om drivers, still complain that they do not have much freedom of speech or movement, something that we take for granted in the Western world. However with the country opening up more and more and trying to attract foreign investors and tourists, there is definitely a facade of freedom and capitalism and happiness, which is all that the tourists and even the Western expats see. Cars are starting to appear, and generally speaking people work hard but do not seem to live in misery. But there must be things that I am not aware of, like spies and denunciation boxes, neighbours potentially spying on each other etc... etc... At the same time, even if my family suffered a lot from the war because they were part of the educated minority, I can see how the country overall improved the condition of the majority – the extremely poor country folk. Anyways, I will go home with a nuanced, complex picture – and will try to educate myself better on the topic.

As for my impression of Viet Nam as a tourist, I understand why most people are so enthusiastic about it: everything is dirt cheap, the food is amazing, and the landscapes outside of the city are like Chinese ink paintings: small rocky mountains, emerald green rice fields, and women in typical outfits with the conical hat. But my travel here was tinted by the fact that I wish I could have fitted in more or found more commonalities with the local Vietnamese. Mostly because my Vietnamese is quite weak, I felt quite awkward at times. The locals in general are quite blunt and more than once, they have asked me why I don’t speak a better Vietnamese. They are quite hospitable to foreigners (with money) but are quite more critical of the Viet Kieu. It is a strange, fairly close-minded culture, rather different from the open Canadian multiculturalism that I am used to. I would come back very happily – I have yet to see the Centre and the South – and I would consider working here as an expat, but with the full knowledge that it may hit sensitive points in my identity much more than, say, Africa or Afghanistan. And living with expats really gives me the taste for the expat life as well; once again... who knows what the future holds...

That is it for now. I may write more from Malaysia next week - between dives if I can find time. I hope that you are all well!