Echoes of Old Asia in the New Hanoi

It is not yet 6 a.m. and my neighborhood, along with the rest of Hanoi, is stirring awake. Nine floors below my balcony, an old lady I see every day pedals her bicycle slowly down Nam Trang Street, clanging her bell and calling out, “Bread. Warm bread.” Behind her comes the newsboy, a pint-sized kid named Hung, announcing the day’s headlines over an amplifier attached to his bike’s handlebars. The market ladies have already arrived from the countryside, lugging their produce in large baskets attached to wooden shoulder yokes, and are hunkered along the curbs, surrounded by neat stacks of tomatoes, lettuce, onions and flowers. I am tempted to head down to one of the sidewalk cafes for a breakfast of noodles and green tea but, not quite awake, I instead turn on CNN, heat up a cup of yesterday’s coffee and peruse a week-old edition of the International Herald Tribune. Muffled street sounds reach up to me, and in the soft light of early morning, clouds of mist dance across the lake just beyond my balcony.

Even after two years in Hanoi, there are many moments like these, when life feels just right. From my apartment, I look out over West Lake, once the site of palaces for emperors and lords. Today, the palaces long gone, roses and peach trees grow in commercial gardens on the far side of the lake, and along its banks newly built villas are squeezing out the humble homes of fishermen. To the south I can see clusters of gracious French colonial buildings that ring the downtown core and narrow alleys covered by leafy canopies. Once again I am struck by what worldly wanderers have long known: Hanoi is the last of Southeast Asia’s magical capitals. It is the Indochina of a bygone era, graceful and seductively charming, approachable yet somehow distant, a place where the bittersweet pangs of finding love and losing love still whisper in the evening breeze. Were Graham Greene alive today, I have no doubt he would head to Hanoi in a heartbeat.

It was unsettling moving back to this country 30 years after I covered the war here, cut adrift as a young correspondent to tramp through places in the south with mostly forgotten names: Ben Het, Cam Lo, the A Shau Valley, the Iron Triangle. It was stranger still to take up residency in Hanoi, the former “enemy capital,” a city of which I held no images or memories and fully expected would make me, an American, feel about as welcome as another B-52 on the horizon.

Friends in the States were stunned when told I was moving here. “Hanoi?” they said, as though I had mentioned some far-off planet. “There are Americans in Hanoi?” Well, yes, there are about 300 of us, and there are scores of American tourists who arrive every month, and not once have I met anyone who wasn’t overwhelmed by the friendliness and warmth of the Vietnamese. To an amazing degree, they have put the war behind them and reached out to welcome the return of Americans, this time as harbingers of peace and economic development. Ironically, the most heartfelt welcome is saved for Americans who fought in the war. The bond is between those who have shared hardship and hatred, and now meet as friends to bury the past.

So let me tell you a little about Hanoi, because it is a city I have grown to love, and a little about my life here, because in many ways I still feel like a tourist on a journey of discovery.

*

More than 2 million people live in Hanoi, but the city feels more like a 19th century French provincial town or a sprawling cluster of quaint villages than a capital born along the banks of the Red River nearly a millennium ago. Lovely old French villas grace wide, tree-lined boulevards. Eleven lakes stand within the city limits. Bicycles clog the streets, though with the emergence of a middle class their dominance is being challenged by Honda Dream motor scooters. The Metropole Hotel, built in 1901 and dutifully restored in 1992, shimmers again, a grande dame of colonial style. Across the street, in the patio of Au Lac Cafe, you’ll find me every morning, late for work as usual, drinking Vietnamese coffee, reading the English-language Vietnam News (which is decidedly short on news) and talking to Dai, one of the young waiters. He starts each encounter with a list of questions from his English lessons. (“Now what about this? A needle in a haystack. What does that mean?”)

The heart of Hanoi, a 10-minute walk from the Metropole and the restored Opera House, is Hoan Kiem Lake. Here, legend has it, a golden tortoise once snatched and returned to heaven the magical sword Emperor Le Loi used to drive the Chinese out of Vietnam in the 15th century. It’s a small, enchanting body of water surrounded by a walking path and two-story shops that once served as French residences, and a wonderful place to stroll in the early evening amid crowds of Vietnamese. The Vietnamese rush around all day at a frantic clip, but here, in a setting that feels like something out of the 1940s, there seems to be a deliberately leisurely pace to their gait. One perceives in their dress and demeanor a sense of well-being, as though the hard days of war and deprivation and famine are long past.

Reaching out behind the lake in a catacomb of narrow, bustling streets and alleyways is Hanoi’s Old Quarter, where for 400 years artisans and merchants worked on 36 streets that bore names reflecting their businesses: Silk Street, Broiled Fish Street, Jewelers’ Street, Paper Street. These lanes are now a hodgepodge of different shops and small hotels favored by backpackers and other low-budget travelers, but the quarter is still picturesque. With a turn-of-the-century atmosphere unspoiled by the press of modernity, it symbolizes Hanoi’s desire to avoid the unbridled development that turned cities such as Bangkok and Singapore and Jakarta into canyons of skyscrapers.

I’m not much of a shopper, but for bargains and the fun of looking, my wife will tell you to head for Hang Gai Street, at the north end of the lake, near the stone gates that mark the entrance to the Old Quarter. Among her favorites: the silk tailor at No. 111, where you can buy a custom-made woman’s pantsuit for $16, a man’s shirt for $11; the art gallery at No. 15, which displays works of Vietnamese impressionist artists who are starting to make a name for themselves worldwide; the shop at No. 115, specializing in ceramics, embroideries, lampshades and stools produced by Vietnam’s minority tribes.

There are a handful of comfortable taverns in the Old Quarter, too, where a Western visitor wouldn’t feel misplaced. My favorite is the Polite Pub, with a long, well-stocked bar and a billiard table in the back room. One night over a beer I fell into conversation with the bartender, Dung. I asked what he liked about his city and will never forget his reply. “Hanoi,” he said, “is like being in the center of the universe.”

Few non-Vietnamese would put it quite that way. The city is, in fact, pleasantly quiet and dull, far removed from the center of anything, but Dung’s reply reflects the reverence the Vietnamese--even those in Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is now called--harbor for Hanoi. If Ho Chi Minh City is New York, with its up-tempo beat and economic clout, Hanoi is Boston. It is smaller and more refined than its southern sister city. It’s a place where the arts flourish, and who your family is counts more than the size of your salary. The entrepreneurs live in Ho Chi Minh City, the poets in Hanoi.

Battered by war, invaded, occupied, colonized, this is a city whose people move with the confidence of victors, warriors who time and again defeated more powerful outsiders: first the Chinese, occupiers on and off for nearly 1,000 years, then the French, colonizers for the better part of a century, and finally the Americans, whose bombs rained down on North Vietnam from 1965 to 1973.

Pentagon planners, intent on avoiding civilian population centers, spared most of Hanoi in the U.S. blitzkrieg. Bombs never fell around Hoan Kiem Lake or in the Old Quarter. Hanoi survived remarkably intact. Its architecture--tall, narrow windows with green shutters, wrought-iron gates, high-ceilinged rooms with fans, small balconies overlooking parks and plazas--still reflects a French influence. Its skyline is low and pleasing to the eye and, except for a downed B-52 bomber that rests rusting in a pond off Kham Thien Street, unnoticed by shoppers in the nearby outdoor market, there is hardly a scar left of the long, costly war. Yet the Long Bien Bridge that spans the Red River downtown and the factories and power plants to the south were hit hard, and by 1972 three-quarters of Hanoi’s people had evacuated, moving into the countryside.

Barely more than a decade ago, before Vietnam began its cautious steps toward a free-market economy and long before I ever imagined living here, this “The City in the Bend of a River” still felt like a semi-ghost town, devoid of the zest and buoyancy with which it pulsates today. It was drab and barren, gray in mood. The streets were empty save for bicycles and a few Russian trucks. The Metropole had fallen into such rat-infested disrepair you could see the next level’s floor through holes in the ceiling. The only stores were run by the state, and they were empty except for the rations of rice Hanoians stood in line for hours to receive. The government forbade residents from speaking to foreigners. Owning a television set or a refrigerator was beyond the wildest dreams of all but a handful of well-connected party members. Famine threatened, and only one or two drab restaurants catered to foreign residents. There were no tourists.

Then, after the nation “reopened” five years ago, major lodging chains rushed in--too hastily, perhaps. Last year’s Asian economic crisis left many new hotels unfinished or abandoned, including a Hanoi Sheraton that was boarded up just weeks before its projected grand opening. Enough rooms were built and refurbished, however, that there is now a glut, with some lodging that would have cost $200 a night 18 months ago going for $90, and accommodations in other luxury hotels available for $50 or less. Indeed, Hanoi is still one of Asia’s last undiscovered cities (friends who stayed recently at the city’s new 269-room Hilton Hanoi Opera swear that they were the only guests). But change is afoot. The tourist industry is growing as travelers recognize, as I do, that this is a city in the springtime of renaissance.

Good restaurants and pubs abound. Stores along Hai Ba Trung Street are now piled floor to ceiling with TVs, refrigerators and electrical appliances, and when my wife and I held a Thanksgiving dinner at our apartment last November for 20 friends, 16 of them were Vietnamese. The U.S. ambassador, Pete Peterson--the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam since the Americans fled Saigon in 1975--is so popular that Vietnamese stop him on the street and ask to pose with him for pictures.

*

Much of Hanoi still harbors echoes of past struggles. The ghosts are everywhere. There is, for instance, the mausoleum, modeled after Lenin’s tomb in Moscow, where visitors view the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh resting under glass. Three decades after his death at age 79, Ho is an eerie sight. It is impossible to look at this small, frail man, his stringy beard still intact, his pale face relaxed as though in sleep, without remembering how much he influenced the lives of those of us who lived through the Vietnam War era.

After leaving the mausoleum, it’s only a short walk to the Ho Chi Minh Museum and the modest house on stilts where Ho worked and wrote, refusing to move into the grand mansion once used by the French governor of Indochina. There is a 30-foot-deep concrete bomb shelter near the stilted house, and behind the bunker is the hut where Ho died in 1969. Anyone interested in Vietnam’s wartime history--as many American visitors are--will also want to see the dark French-built prison that American POWS morbidly called the Hanoi Hilton. The part that is still standing is now a museum. The rest was torn down to make way for a luxury high-rise office and apartment complex. The Army Museum is just a five-minute cab ride away. This war relic is not as shocking or sobering as the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (where two-headed fetuses in formaldehyde are displayed as evidence of the alleged effects of Agent Orange). But I am drawn to the Hanoi museum because the war seems so distant now and so removed from any life I ever lived.

Nearby, another of Hanoi’s revered monuments connects visitors to a more distant time. The One Pillar Pagoda was built in 1049 by Emperor Ly Thai Tong, shortly after his wife bore him a son. Lotus-shaped, with dragons running along its elegantly curved tile roof, the shrine has been rebuilt on several occasions, most recently in 1955 after the French withdrew from Indochina. The temple is stunning in its originality and, as the name suggests, is supported by a single concrete pillar.

It shouldn’t take more than a day to visit these and other major tourist attractions: the History Museum with its emphasis on archeology; the Botanical Garden; the new Museum of Ethnology, which depicts the cultures of Vietnam’s 54 ethnic tribes; and the Temple of Literature, which was built in 1070 as a seat of Confucian learning and is today the site of a lovely ancient temple set among tranquil courtyards. In my view, such sights as the zoo, the presidential palace and countless pagodas touted by guidebooks are not worth taking time to visit. Better to get quickly to the fun stuff that begins as you set out in search of Hanoi’s soul.

*

What delights me most about the city--and what strikes every first-time visitor--is the street life, for Hanoi is a city to be discovered at ground level. The best way to explore is on a bicycle, as long as you’re not faint-hearted, because the streets are chaotic despite the lack of cars. My wife and I, like about a million Hanoians, get around on $65 Chinese-made single-gear bikes that are indestructible and a perfect match for Hanoi’s flat, teeming streets. You can rent such a bike for about $1 a day at numerous locations, and you don’t have to worry about flat tires or breakdowns. On almost every corner you’ll find a repairman, sitting on a stool with his wooden box of tools. I pay the equivalent of five cents to get my tires pumped, 30 cents to get my brakes adjusted or my chain tightened, 40 cents to get a flat repaired on the spot.

On a bike you can make a giant loop around the major tourist attractions, wind up the twisting alleyways of the Old Quarter, stop at Caravel on Hoan Kiem Lake for a cone of homemade banana coconut ice cream and sidetrack a few blocks to Quan Thanh Street for lunch at Seasons, a remodeled villa where my favorite dishes include soft-shell crabs, banana flower salad, sweet and sour fish soup and sauteed morning glory with garlic. Then take your time pedaling down the great boulevards, such as Dien Bien Phu, passing glorious old mansions that were converted into embassies (and, in some cases, remain as such) for the formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe that supported North Vietnam throughout the war.

On other streets, shops are packed shoulder to shoulder, and it’s time to put the bicycle aside (you’ll find roped-off sections on the sidewalk, where an attendant will watch your bike for the equivalent of five cents). Each shop is narrow, maybe 8 feet wide, but 30 or 40 feet deep, a style that dates back to days when owners were taxed on the basis of street frontage. These stores double as homes, and as I walk, passing wide front doors open to the street, I always have the sense I’m strolling through the city’s living rooms. The tailor’s shop may also be his dining room, the brass-maker’s, his bedroom. In the afternoon the quieter residential streets become playgrounds for soccer and badminton, and in the evening the sidewalks are transformed into cafes where families and friends gather on foot-high plastic stools around portable wooden tables for dinner and conversation.

From the north end of Hoan Kiem Lake, head up Gang Hung Da Street, past the jewelry shops specializing in intricately designed silver necklaces, bracelets and belts, by little clothing stores and souvenir stands selling fake Zippo lighters engraved with GI slogans (“Chu Lai 1971-’72. You’ve never really lived until you’ve nearly died.”), by women peddling delicious French bread for 10 cents a loaf and stalls offering chicken noodle soup--yes, it’s safe to eat--for 40 cents, along sidewalks jammed with men lugging sacks of rice and copper tubing or pushing bicycles loaded with pottery or crates of chickens. No one is idle here. It is as though the whole world is hammering, hauling, selling, sewing, sawing, welding, cooking, repairing, building. This goes on 12 or 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and has helped me understand why the Vietnamese never caved in to France or the United States: They are simply too industrious and patient to ever be subjugated.

Vietnam still hangs on as one of the world’s last Communist countries. But communism has a distinctly Vietnamese flavor here, and in many ways is more about nationalism than Marxism. You won’t see hammers and sickles anymore or hear tired slogans about the evils of imperialism and capitalism. Nor will you see soldiers on the streets or policemen toting guns, even though the government keeps a tight reign on its people. The press is little more than a government mouthpiece. An extensive network of undercover agents pokes about, public dissent is muted, and Amnesty International and other groups are critical of the nation’s human-rights record. Yet anyone who comes to Hanoi expecting an authoritarian atmosphere is in for a big surprise. The days of re-education camps are long past.

The Communist Party’s Old Guard may cling to power, but Hanoi increasingly belongs to the postwar generation--the first generation in many, many years to be raised in peace and nurtured by the prospect of prosperity. These twenty- and thirtysomethings zip through Hanoi on their Hondas, cell phones in their pockets, dressed in jeans and shirts emblazoned with the logos of the Chicago Bulls or Oakland Raiders. They are obsessed with education and full of entrepreneurial spirit. A whopping 80% of their 77 million fellow countrymen are younger than 40, and their enthusiasm for life, for the future, for the betterment of Vietnam is contagious. It is for them and their future that the United States and Vietnam must continue on the path of reconciliation.

The wind of change is rustling through Hanoi. I can feel it every evening on my balcony. I can see it on the streets and in the faces of the young Vietnamese. It leaves me with both a sadness, remembering the bitterness of our shared history, and a sense of comfort that this old riverside city has taught me so much about the traditions and dignity of Vietnam that I didn’t understand 30 years ago. It leaves me thinking that Hanoi and I encountered each other at the perfect moment.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guidebook: Heading to Hanoi

Telephone numbers and prices: The country and city code for Hanoi is 84-4. Most local numbers are seven digits. Prices are in U.S. dollars, which are accepted in all hotels, restaurants and better shops. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night and exclude a 15% tax, unless noted. (Lower rates may be available if you book through the hotel directly.) Meal prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: There are no direct flights from Los Angeles to Hanoi. Cathay Pacific, Thai Airways, Singapore and Malaysia airlines have connecting flights from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. Visas are necessary for Americans and cost $65.

Where to stay: Sofitel Metropole Hotel, 15 Ngo Quyen St., telephone 826-6919, fax 826-6920, e-mail sofmet@netnam.org.vn. One of Southeast Asia’s oldest and best hotels. Four restaurants, entertainment, three bars, a swimming pool, fitness center and business facilities. Rate: $160. Hilton Hanoi Opera, 1 Le Thanh Tong St., tel. 933-0500, fax 933-0530, Hilton reservations (800) 445-8667, Internet https://www.hilton.com. The city’s newest five-star hotel and the only hotel in Vietnam operated by an American chain. Prime downtown location next to restored Opera House. Rates: $135-$950.

Sunway Hotel, 19 Tham Dinh Ho St., tel. 971-3888, fax 971-3867, e-mail sunwayhanoi@hotmail.com. Luxury at an affordable price. Rate: $70, including taxes and breakfast. De Syloia Hotel, 17A Tran Hung Dao St., tel. 824-5346, fax 824-1083, e-mail desyloia@hn.vnn.vn. Charming 33-room hotel with restaurant, mini-gym and business center. Rate: $50, including taxes and breakfast.

Prince Hotel, 88 Sang Bac St., in Old Quarter, tel. 926-0150, fax 926-0149. Twelve rooms with restaurant and bar. Rates: $15-$25. Quoc Hoa Hotel, 10 Bat Dan St., also in Old Quarter, tel. 828-4528, fax 826-7424, e-mail quochoa@hn.vnn.vn. Restaurant and coffeeshop. Rates: $25-$35.

Where to eat: Press Club (which actually has no connection with the press), 59A Ly Thai To, tel. 934-0888. One block from the Metropole and the Hilton. Patio dining, impeccable service, innovative international cuisine; $40. Indochine, 16 Nam Nug St., tel. 824-6097. Vietnamese food in garden setting; $16. Nam Phuong, 19 Phan Chu Trinh, tel. 824-0926. Vietnamese food in delightful old villa; $10. Seasons, 95B Quan Thanh, tel. 843-5444. Vietnamese food, full bar, seafood particularly good; $10. Al Fresco’s, 23 Hai Ba Trung, tel. 978-0007. Ribs, pizzas, enchiladas and everything you miss from home; $8.

For more information: Vietnam has no tourist office in the United States but a government organization in Falls Church, Va., Vietnamtourism, tel. (703) 641-7738, fax (703) 641-7739 can help plan group tours. Vietnam’s Web site https://www.vietnamembassy-usa.org offers tourist information and visa applications that can be printed out.