The perfect lunch
When I married my wife she was the first of four sisters to find a husband.
On our way back to Vietnam we learn youngest sister is next up.
We hear the news when we text from Newcastle airport. We arrive jetlagged in Hanoi the best part of a day later.
Just as I start to take for granted the following day off, the last before work starts again, the family swing into action.
My wife is summoned to talk weddings.
We drive across town in now cold, damp and wet Hanoi. On arrival father in law offers me a brandy. I say no half a dozen times before I give up and just drink the thing.
They discuss the plan.
Since I have last been in the room the family had purchased a large flat screen TV. It plays continually over the top of the conversation.
I am referred to only once. Could I take the pictures? Every picture I have ever taken has been on auto setting. This is too much pressure but my protests fall on deaf ears. The decision is made.
A couple of hours later we return. It takes the best part of an hour through traffic. Hanoi is now wetter and colder still.
Soon-to-be-married sister follows us to try on my wife’s ao dai and wedding dress. A friend of my wife’s turns up to pick up the baby clothes she requested we purchase on her behalf when we were in the UK. They start a long conversation about how cheap shirts are in Britain. This will surely mean buying shirts for this lady’s entire extended family next time we travel.
Then an alarm goes off on my wife’s phone. A reminder. It’s her brother’s birthday! In all the wedding planning it has been forgotten. She rings the family home. Father in law isn’t happy at the oversight so invites us all the way back for an impromptu birthday dinner.
My wife, sensing that I may not fancy another trip across town and yet more wedding chat, plays up my cold. I am excused.
She goes. They eat hotpot with prawns and squid. I stay at home and eat half the “quiet dinner” I had prepared for the two of us before birthday plans evolved.
The engagement (an hoi) and wedding are scheduled between now and Tet. No time like the present. Nothing is finalised but I’m keeping my shoes shined and suit pressed.
My boss has been warned that family events could come at any point and I will need to be excused from work.
It’s good to be back.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year
Right, we’re out of here. Later tonight we’ll be catching a flight back to the North East of England to spend Christmas with my family so there won’t be much activity on the blog for the next couple of weeks.
I just wanted to say Happy Christmas to friends, family, people who take time to read this blog etc etc. It’s been a wonderful year all in all.
I can’t wait to get back to see everyone in the UK and yet Hanoi is currently stunning. We’ll back back for the cold of January.
Take care.
A Death Anniversary in the Countryside
There’s a balance when it comes to wider family events, particularly the countryside ones.
I know behind the scenes my wife makes my excuses and we keep our appearances to a respectable minimum. It wasn’t that this one was especially important so much as we hadn’t shown our faces for a while. When my wife said it would take half a day I thought we’d be back by lunch. It turned out she’d meant it would be 12 hours door to door.
I recall in KOTO days, visiting the countryside homes of the poorest kids. Food was a struggle but the sheer newness and oddness of the situation made it unmissable. Later as the experience becomes less novel the food becomes proportionately less palatable too. Likewise the drinking, that it’s hard to duck out of, is now a chore rather than just a tale to be mentally filed away for future travel anecdotes.
That said, all things considered, yesterday was fun. No one now is either surprised or offended if I just pick at the food and then fill up on my own smuggled in snacks. The drinking was beer, whisky and rice wine before noon. Having written off the day in advance, being drunk before noon was no hardship. There’s a brief couple of hours of euphoria before the inevitable afternoon fug.
For all my caution when it comes to attending family events I’m proud to be a part of these people. My wife has favourites among them and those she’ll only politely acknowledge. Good people and bad people, family feuds and debts of gratitude from the past.
Their own stories set against this incredible pace of change could be a book on its own and, in that respect, I don’t suppose they’re any different to any other family in Vietnam. I noted that while the oldest members of the family are farmers, the youngest include TV producers, an artist and a cafe owner.
I snored home hungover and slept for three hours. A friend called round late yesterday and said I was still stinking of cheap booze. This morning I felt poisoned and wondered, for the millionth time, what other than rice was in the wine.
But during the day the sheer absurdity of me, sitting cross-legged, eating and drinking deep into the Vietnamese countryside with my Vietnamese family and wife, wasn’t far from my thoughts. A beautifully ridiculous situation that, against all odds, still somehow turns a chore into something genuinely life affirming.
Life these days is very very good. Recently I’ve felt just as much in love with Vietnam as I ever have.
Working extra hard to get it wrong
It was all fun and games before we noticed the typos
There’s a moment after you receive newly printed documents here when your heart sinks as you notice a typo.
“I could have sworn I checked and double checked that,” you say to yourself.
Then you see another, then another, then another.
“How could I….” you start, before you realise you hadn’t missed these mistakes, someone has re-keyed in all your words and got them wrong.
It happened on several occasions while we were readying signage and menus for the new Cart. I found nearly 20 spelling mistakes on the menu signage.
When I asked a friend, who’d worked locally in the hospitality industry, if it had happened to him he replied: “Every single menu we ever had printed”.
Like us he always sent over the computer files with the instructions just to print it as is. Every time they re-keyed it with added mistakes.
“One time,” he said, “I stood over them and watched them re-key it while all the time they were telling me they don’t do that”.
Cutting corners I can understand. But this seems like making extra work for yourself while also ensuring the end product is of no use whatsoever. Though obviously we’re missing something.
The obvious answer is we are sending it in the wrong format. But with one sign they finally relented and gave us our original computer file blown up as we asked for – and it was perfect.
And if the file was really wrong then why not ask for it in another format? Or at the very least why not cut and paste the words from one file to another?
It’s a common experience and no one appears to have come up with a reason why it happens. And this wasn’t something lost in translation – this was Vietnamese to Vietnamese with my wife making the arrangements
Also in this area, see printers of passport photos that airbrush out distinguishing features.
A passport photo without distinguishing features is really missing the point.
Old Hanoi makes new phone cam look good
Drink responsibly till dawn with Heineken
Run a blog and you get some odd requests but this is odder than most. It’s hard to know where to start…
Hello,
I’m working with a team that’s about to kick off a global campaign for Heineken, and I’d really like your help.
To encourage responsible drinking, we’re taking an approach that I believe will interest your followers/readers; namely the campaign promotes the benefits of responsible drinking rather than emphasising the negatives of drinking too much.
We’ve created a TV ad and placed beautiful custom-designed sofas in major cities so that people around the world can enjoy their own sunrise moment. Although the sofa locations are not being publicised until Dec 12, we’re sharing it with you to save you the effort of hunting them down: San Francisco, Ho Chi Minh, London and Rio.
What’s in it for you?
Our Facebook page has 4.5 million fans, and any tweets you submit will appear on our interactive Facebook map. Plus, the best contributors will be retweeted and posted on the Heineken Facebook Wall for all our fans to admire.
So what are we asking for?
- · Tweet your contribution by 11 December – just be sure to use the hashtag #mysunrise.
- · Your tweet can either show a sunrise-henge (a sunrise framed by a structure, object or person – anything that frames the sunrise in an interesting, entertaining or spectacular way). Or if writing’s more your thing, tweet us a sunrise story or moment. Anything of wit or wisdom will do, as long as it fits within 140 well-chosen characters – and be sure to geo-tag the tweet with your location, so we can place it on the map.
I must stress that this campaign is not about selling more beer. Our intention is to promote responsible drinking during the festive season, because if you drink in moderation you can see out the night and celebrate the sunrise in style.
On 12 December the full campaign will be launched, but we’d love you to get involved before that date. We’re keen to get as many tweets and posts as possible, so if there’s anything else you need, please let me know. It would be good to talk.
Thanks!
Vietnamese men need to be empowered too
Some posts/columns you live with for a while and others you write in five minutes. This one has been knocking around my head for some time. It was going to be a blog post, then I decided it worked best as a column for my regular Word Hanoi slot. I wrote it with that in mind but, for whatever reason, it didn’t make the cut.
It’s written to provoke debate and is a little mischevious. If I don’t 100% believe my own argument, I guess what I am trying to say is this – biggots and NGOs alike tend to gender stereotype. I don’t believe western stereotypes can even begin to explain roles here in Vietnam. Neither east nor west is perfect we are just different and we have different ideas of what is right.
I am in awe of Vietnamese women but I also believe that if Vietnam is to change then both sides need to adapt. What I don’t mention below is that I fear more for Vietnamese men. Women seem to be far better at adapting to Vietnam’s fast pace of change.
***
I’ve been threatening to write this for a while – even going so far as to test drive its arguments over drinks with friends.
So far it hasn’t gone down well.
So I’ll say it quickly then I’ll do what I can to justify it. Hopefully we won’t be as far apart in our thoughts as you might imagine and yes it might appear to go against traditional thinking but here we go….
It’s men that need to be empowered in this country. Not women.
Yes, you will rightly point out that in 99% (made up but hopefully accurate figure) of key government and industry jobs men are at the helm. No argument there.
And yes you can also tell me that Vietnamese men don’t have the best reputations – and I will gladly agree. I briefly tried to outline my thoughts on this on Twitter and was told that women had better things to worry about than men – they were too busy keeping the house and family together while men were heavy drinking, gambling, chasing prostitutes etc.
Yes, yes, yes but…
This is my point.
It’s time that men didn’t have time for any of those negative activities. The devil will find work for idle hands and all that. But women need to change their attitudes too.
Sisters, give your man a broom and tell him this time it’s his turn to sweep up. Stay with him, encourage him. Point out what he is doing wrong and what’s he doing right.
DO NOT stand over him tutting and shaking your head after 30 seconds before kicking him out the door to the local bia hoi and doing it yourself.
Now repeat that with a fair share of the cooking, cleaning etc.
Kicking that workload up the chain surely then results in those corporate high fliers suddenly having a load more daily tasks to get through. Right, now we have an even playing field.
In Vietnam, women control the money which limits men’s freedom. When I hit my teens my dad starting giving me pocket money. A couple of year’s later he started paying it monthly reckoning that a larger sum would be a better test of my ability to manage cash. I think he was right.
Too many men here only manage their daily lunch money. I’m one of them. Once you get used to it it’s a luxury. Your wallet magically fills itself almost daily and meanwhile I never give rent or bills a thought.
And yet it’s making parts of my brain as flabby as the rest of me.
My office is dominated by women. Genuinely the smartest, most hardworking, friendly, kind, intelligent people I have ever met. I leave work worn out in the evenings aware, from conversations, that the rest of their day will be taken up not only by domestic chores but also tutoring kids, attending gyms, studying for further qualifications etc.
Perhaps Vietnamese women are just too incredible. They need to shrink in order for Vietnamese men to grow. They need to raise their expectations of their other halves. More pats on the backs and a lot less tuts.
Can’t we raise our expectations rather than letting men become a self fulfilling prophecy of uselessness? While we’re at it we should also remember that the cliche is far from representative of all men.
I don’t believe Vietnamese women are not empowered enough to put their foot down regarding a few chores. Vietnamese women are fearless. Following this line of thought, the problem must lie instead in their lack of belief in their men. Men can’t do anything because they’ve never been allowed to. How could they help when they’re only men?
Of course men should be encouraged to do more – but more importantly they need to be *allowed* to do more.
Women, empower your man.
Men, trust me, this works out better for all of us
Silence is spooky in noisy Hanoi
As usual the fan was whirring. Well, there was the whir, the additional clinking of the chain that hangs from it and a slight clacking noise that I assume must be internal ball bearings.
On top of that there was the dehumidifier buzzing. On other occasions, at warmer times of the year, there is also the noise of the air conditioner.
And then the dehumidifier stopped dead and the fan slowed. My phone charging by the bed lit up. It dawned on us the power had stopped.
In the summer, when this happens it is hell. The heat means you lie there sweating with the choice of losing the net and opening windows to catch the minutest breeze while getting eaten alive, or you continue to dehydrate on damp sheets.
But this time my only discomfort was the silence. Silence is spooky in noisy Hanoi.
My wife, as ever, fell asleep straight away but suddenly I was aware of everything. My breathing. The compressing of the bed springs as I rolled over.
Our house is down an alley too narrow for cars and while there are houses on all sides, Hanoi sleeps early. If I strained my ears I could just about hear a distant peep every 20 seconds or so from the dike road a few hundred yards away. I could just make out the generators from our neighbours at the Sheraton.
But for the most part the silence was overwhelming.
I’ve heard of Vietnamese simply not being able to stand the silence on trips overseas. A friend who went to study in my home city of Newcastle called it incredibly quiet. I’ve heard Newcastle called a lot of things but never quiet.
There was a time in my life, not such a happy time, when I realised I had developed the habit of turning on the TV or radio on entering every room. I came to the conclusion that it was a way of jamming my brain to stop myself mulling over problems. About the same time I realised that walking home from work gave me unwanted thinking time.
Here it’s hard to miss the Vietnamese compulsion to create noise. The peeping on the roads is obvious, less so is the constant clicking of safety belt catches on planes or a TV blaring in the background of a shop. The tinny speaker of a mobile phone between a group of teenagers by the lake.
So much of modern noise is now created by the constant building and development but is this largely tolerated as part of a acceptance, culture and even welcoming of noise?
If noise has become a habit what started this?
And if these are the good times, then when will the silence return?
