Once upon a travelogue...: An Introduction To Hanoi...

Hanoi, Vietnam

il 23 novembre

Explored Hanoi on my own today; was given a map and directions from the hotel concierge and spent the day walking for hours and breathing in polluted air. The streets are filled with scooters and cars and the cacophony of honking horns is constant; crossing from one sidewalk to another is a challenge because, even when the light is in your favor, you’re still a target for vehicles that never stop coming and can’t slow down because there are so many of them following one another. Needless to say, today was an experience.

Up until a few years ago,I had no intention of visiting Vietnam. For me, this country represented the war that was on the nightly news during my high school years and then continued while I was in college. It represented the Memorial Wall in Washington and thousands of Americans killed and I didn’t want to come. I began to think differently after hearing how beautiful the country was, how enterprising its people, and seeing all the manicurists in my nail salon going back and forth to visit family and always happy to talk about their trips. Before I left home, I read a book written by an American journalist who was in Vietnam during the war and returned many years later to revisit people and places of the past. I started thinking about how many Vietnamese were killed and the tragedy of this war and what it did to our country and to Vietnam. I decided that, on this journey, I would talk with as many people as I could to learn from them about how they saw the past; I wanted to get a sense of what this country is about.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, one of the managers at the Ana Mandara in Nha Trang, was born two years before the end of the war and so she has no real memory of the bombs and the carnage. Her father was a translator for the American Army and didn’t want a war, but, in her words, “he did the best he could.” She told me that she knows of people in the rural areas who bear the scars of napalm and have not been “right” ever since. Lan Anh said that there’s no use looking back (the war was a long time ago) and she faces the future of Vietnam with hope and great expectation.

I learned that the opinions in the north may differ from those in the south. Locals I spoke with while in Nha Trang generally said that the war was a long time ago and the past is the past. For the north, however, we were the enemy and there are still those who harbor resentment against the United States, although my sense is that this comes from the generation who was directly affected by the horror of battle.

Without wanting to generalize about people’s opinions because that would be foolish, I will say that what this trip would, ultimately do, would be to take me back in time and have a real-life history lesson. Vietnam is a beautiful country and I met so many warm and gracious people here. It is a country full of industrious hard-working men and women who live under a corrupt government, pay exorbitant taxes, and have little decision-making power because, even though there are elections, there is only the Communist Party to choose from. The trip was yet another lesson in the privilege of being an American and living in a country with a Constitution that guarantees our freedom.

Hanoi is a mixture of many things; there are the crowded areas where people live in very close quarters, the markets and stalls where throngs come to shop, the mobile carts selling street food, the manicurists who work right on the sidewalk, the never-ending noise of vehicles, and the Pho restaurants where one can eat a terrific meal at a bargain price. (and I did) There are stately residential areas with tree-lined boulevards, one of which is home to foreign embassies in what were once private mansions lived in by the French, there are the expensive shops and hotels, the soothing parks, the impressive historical monuments;

Hanoi is a city on the move... you can feel the energy wherever you are.

Street Scenes