Notes on a Trip to Vietnam

I realize I’m not the first American teenager to land in Vietnam wearing a shaved haircut, black combat boots, and his grandfather’s watch for luck. I’m also not the first to come home and write about my experiences there as if I were on a foreign planet. I’m a regular Tim O’Brien.

I came to the airport prepared. Here’s a list of items in my medicine bag: Advil; Dayquil; Nyquil; Benadryl; Imodium; malaria pills (take 1 every morning with breakfast); Zithromax in case of intestinal infection; Zofran; an old prescription of Lexapro; Neosporin; Band-Aids; shaving cream; disposable razors; Colgate whitening toothpaste; toothbrush; deodorant; 3-in-1 shampoo/conditioner/body-wash, 2.5 fl oz; a single packaged latex condom, probably expired—scratch that, definitely expired. A week before my flight, I went to a travel pharmacist and got a shot for typhoid, a shot for tetanus, and shots for Hepatitis A and B. Aside from the medicine bag, I brought about a week’s worth of clothes: jeans, linen shirts, swim trunks; a few books; and the essentials: wallet, passport, cellphone—all of this carried on my back. I was ready to travel the world.

I left home at 11pm on the 1st of January and arrived in Saigon on the morning of the 3rd. I flew first to Taipei Taoyuan International (TPE), ordered an espresso made by an animatronic, wandered around the terminal for a while, staring, mouth agape, at the prices marked on bottles of Korean perfume and Japanese whiskey at the duty-free shops, and waited at the departure board to check my connecting gate. Finally, I set off a few hours later to Saigon’s Tân Sơn Nhất International (SGN). I lost January 2nd in the time zone shift, the date disappearing somewhere in the howling wind, into the cold dark above the Pacific. I flew alone, trying for a few hours of sleep in a cramped coach seat, and met my friends on the ground in Saigon. There were three of us there, all roommates back in college in New York, two of us white Americans, one Vietnamese. Between us there’s a shadow where there should have been a fourth. He’s not dead or anything, he just couldn’t make it on the trip. We called him when we could.

Saigon was Paris if Paris spontaneously sprouted out of the jungle floor, then dropped a crop of seeds, and six other Parises grew up beneath it. Wide boulevards and French imperial-style frescoes collide with winding crookback alleyways barely wide enough for two to stand side-by-side, and apartment complexes made from concrete and cinder blocks with iron rebar frames still visible beneath thin coats of bright yellow and green and pink paint. It’s a city that sticks. Clothes stick to the body, skin sticks to skin, heat from cars and motorbikes clings low to the ground like a haze. The boulevards are lined with hundreds of ancient golden-oak trees, dozens of feet tall, stick-straight, their trunks wider in diameter than two people standing back to back. Occasionally, the leaves fall in flurries like snow, green and gold and brown, each leaf as large as both hands spread. The air in Saigon smelled like citrus and cigarettes and everything tasted vaguely of coconut.

At night, we went to live-music bars, where they played a lot of Western rock and pop music. Lots of songs about dancing: “Dancing Queen” by ABBA; DNCE’s “Shut Up and Dance”; “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest. There’s no signature liquor in Vietnam. This isn’t Mexico where you drink margaritas and tequila shots, or Paris where you sip wine and champagne. It’s not Russia, famous for vodka, or Jamaica, famous for rum. In Vietnam, they drink beer, and a lot of it. So we did the same, made all the easier by the fact that we could get bottles of Tiger beer—imported straight from Singapore—for less than a dollar each.

We paid a visit to the War Remnants Museum and read about all sorts of war crimes and atrocities organized by U.S. senators, congressmen, and cabinet members; carried out by the hands of the men who would later succeed them in power and leadership, men who took home the Medal of Honor. We gazed at M16s, Thompson submachine-guns, and M1 Garand rifles; flamethrowers, grenade launchers, and helicopter-mounted machine-guns in display cases, and saw our own reflections in the polished glass.

We jokingly made somber toasts to absent friends, wore straw hats even though it felt a bit racist somehow, made a pet of a waterbug that lived in our pool, marveled at the free flying Soviet flags and walls of shaggy brown cows blocking the road and fearless motorcyclists weaving in and out of cars on the highway. We wandered around a misty mountain-top theme park, the music playing on a perpetual, maddening loop: pop hits from the early 2010s—namely Carly Rae Jepsen and Rebecca Black—and every few songs repeating a horrible dance cover of ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Quickly, we became intimately familiar with the face of Ho Chi Minh—revolutionary and first prime minister and president of the modern nation—a communist devil in American textbooks, a saint and a father figure in Vietnam. His portrait was displayed in airports, bus depots, and post offices, waving from parade flags and banners in government plazas, smiling from street murals and countless photographs in museums, on posters in souvenir shops, and, of course, smiling up at us from the money, every bill. We rode the longest non-stop cable-car in the world, fed stray dogs that wandered into cafes, overshared in the backs of taxis, crammed three across the backseat of a 15-year-old Toyota Yaris or Hyundai Elantra or Honda Civic, our thighs and shoulders never not-touching. We drove past industrial parks, dry docks, hillside graveyards, old stone temples, rice farms, date farms, solar farms, bird sanctuaries, waterparks, red-painted watchtowers, wooden houses with corrugated tin roofs, groves of palm trees. We drove over bridges, causeways, winding mountain roads, dodging cement mixers and oil tankers and trucks carrying crates of Tiger beer on one lane streets.

I like to read books when I travel. But I never like to read about the place that I’m in. I saw so many tourists reading Ocean Vuong and Marguerite Duras on the beach or on planes. I understand the impulse, the desire to be fully immersed in a place and its people, its words and lives bled onto the page, but that’s not me. It’s like reading movie reviews before I see a movie I’m excited about. I never do it, because I want to form my own opinion, have my own experience. Instead, I read books from where I’ve been when I get home, as a sort of comparing notes with others. While in Vietnam, I read about anything but Vietnam. I read books about the end of the world and evolution and a cruise ship stranded in the Galápagos, about dead women and monsoons in Mexico, about Oxford and the Opium Wars in British Canton. I read short stories about Ireland and Antarctica and Phoenix, Arizona. I read essays about Paris and Los Angeles and Honolulu, Hawaii.

We shared rooms in houses that were too big for us, leaving entire floors empty. These were houses that scared us with their emptiness, their transience, houses with the water still pooling in the bathtub from the night before, the people who came before us. What is it to step in a puddle of water that had run down a stranger’s back, that had washed bug spray and sunscreen and sweat off of someone else’s skin? What is it to smell the cologne that someone else left behind in the air, or to touch the fingerprints left on the windowsill, your hand in theirs, to open the beer someone left behind in the fridge, only to pour it down the drain because it felt wrong to drink? It sends a chill down the spine, lights the nerves on fire. But why? From fear? From an unsettled sense of moving into someone else’s space, slipping into another’s skin? Is it the chill of a remnant, the chill of walking on hallowed ground, of someone walking over your grave? Or is it an intimate chill of connection across space and time, like the chill of a first kiss?

We drank coffee. Hot, iced, with milk, sweetened condensed milk, milk foam, cream, syrup, cane sugar, salt, egg whites, egg yolks, butter, caramel, almonds, peanuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, coconut, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, mint, saffron, chai, matcha, eucalyptus, lavender oil, palm oil, marshmallow, ice cream, yogurt, cream cheese, tofu, ginseng, honey, lemon, lime, orange, passionfruit, mango, apple, melon, banana, rum, whiskey—we even learned that, unless you specifically ask for Kahlua, an espresso martini consists of a single shot of espresso coffee poured over a glass of cheap, lukewarm, airport vodka.

We were the first ever customers at a restaurant down by the beach. A rat ran out of the kitchen of the first place we went to—a diner out on the main road—darting over my roommate’s sandaled feet. Slightly disturbed, we left. We walked aimlessly down a dark back road between the beach and the highway, the sides of the road lousy with beer cans, old motorcycle parts, and wild hens. Finally, we came across a restaurant, built out of the first floor of a family home, and wandered inside. We were seated out in the backyard on plastic stools, under the light of tiki torches and string lights, and ate one of the best meals of the whole trip: beer-steamed squid, pineapple fried rice, and sweet egg coffee for dessert.

At each subsequent airport, we lost items deemed dangerous by security officers: razor blades, lighters, shampoo, bug spray, belt-buckles. We argued each time: ‘but we brought these through last time—it says they’re allowed online—come on man it’s only 2.5 fluid ounces—’ and we lost every time. We made friends: some interns wasted at an after-work social—pressed white shirts, glasses, slacks and all—in a bar in Saigon, craving female attention and attention from their boss, not knowing which they wanted more; a 29-year-old software engineer wading in the surf in Da Nang; a singer on her break at a bar in Hội An, compulsively fluffing her bubblegum pink hair in the reflection of a bottle of Tiger. We endured lizards and centipedes and jumping spiders crawling out of bathroom drains, quicksand at the beach, canceled flights, delayed buses and trains, exorbitant upcharges, and lingering stares from older locals; we tried to take these all in stride. We noticed lotuses carved into everything: door handles, spoons, chopsticks, pavestones, painted on the sides of buildings and the wings of airplanes. We contemplated spontaneous matching tattoos while waving away mosquitoes and horse flies and moths at restaurants.

We spent a sleepless night in a train-car decorated in turn-of-the-century colonial style, down to the gilded door-locks and faded wood-paneling. Outside our ornately-framed window was a blur of Vietnam’s industrial district, smoke-darkened factories and textile mills, freight depots and shipping canals. In the countryside of Sa Pa, we clambered down miles of rain-soaked mountain paths, dodging wayward water buffaloes and hidden mud pits with the help of friendly village guides without whom we would have slipped and died a hundred times before noon. We picked up the very basics of Vietnamese: chao (hello), cảm ơn (thanks), lối vào (entrance), lối ra (exit). We slowly collected a stack of receipts in Vietnamese currency, 105,000VND for coffee, 426,000VND for dinner, 198,000VND for a taxi to the airport.

In Hạ Long, we stayed in an apartment complex in an undeveloped resort district. From our window on the 13th floor, we overlooked a construction site. The building we were staying at was expanding, raising up a second tower, an identical mirror to ours. Looking at its concrete skeleton, I could see the same skinny, twisting hallways, the same awkward room shapes, the same elevator shaft placement; two wings off the core, six rooms per wing and a suite on each end. I wondered what it would look like in five years, what the district, the whole city would look like. What it would look like twenty years from now, or forty, or sixty, if I ever made it back here.

One night, we jumped in the building’s infinity pool. The chairs were put up for the night, but the door was still unlocked. The only light came from one sickly green bulb in the pool itself, casting an eerie, watery glow on each of our faces. It was the 40th floor, the summit of the tallest building for at least a mile in every direction. It felt like floating on top of the world. I could see Hạ Long’s shipping yards lit up under fluorescents, buzzing with activity, the dark masses of cargo freighters and fishing trawlers, cruise liners and warships, sulking in their docks or some already set off, floating on a black bay, smooth as glass, just sparks of light on the horizon. Then the pool light shut off, plunging the top of the world into darkness. My stomach dropped, and for a moment it felt like the floor had fallen out from under me. We called out, whispering, afraid to yell. We fumbled around in the cold water, reaching out for each other, so as not to be alone in the darkness. Suddenly the water was desperately cold, urging us out. Something did not want us to be there. Whether it was the building staff glancing at security cameras, or just a timer ticking down unknowingly, we knew we did not belong on that rooftop any longer. Deciding not to push our luck, we scrambled out of the pool, shivered in the wind, threw towels around ourselves, and ran for the relative safety of the elevator.

The morning after the pool adventure, we took a boat trip out into Hạ Long Bay proper. The bay sits nestled between the city of Haiphong and Cát Bà Island, in an inlet of the South China Sea between North Vietnam and the Chinese island of Hainan. The bay is home to hundreds of small islands and cliffs made of soft limestone and covered with trees and moss. Thousands of people spend their days and nights on Hạ Long Bay, fishermen and merchants on tiny aluminum motorboats and cloth-covered wooden pontoons. Due to the bay’s proximity to international nautical boundaries, each of the watercraft, no matter how small, was required to wave the Vietnamese flag high—gold star on red. I didn’t quite realize where we were on the map at first; I thought they were just a really patriotic bunch. I thought about the group on our boat—a converted crab boat, modified to maximize passenger comfort—what it would be like if we were stranded and had to band together to survive. I think we could do it. The captain, the guide, the cook, the three of us, two German grad students, a Danish woman traveling alone, two robotics engineers chatting back and forth in Japanese (though one we found out was Peruvian), a Chinese guy who kept his sunglasses on the whole time, and an old Japanese guy ashing cigarettes into an empty Sapporo can. He wore a floppy waterproof hat and a matching windbreaker, beat-up sneakers, and a satisfied expression that told me he was ready for anything. I decided I could trust this last man with my life the second I saw him. Ironically enough, despite all of the nationalities among us, everyone was able to communicate with someone. The crew spoke some English, but mostly Vietnamese; my roommate also speaks Vietnamese, and thus she could translate back and forth. The Danish woman spoke some German as well as English, and so could translate for the grad students. The Japanese engineer spoke Chinese, and could talk to Sunglasses, and both engineers spoke Japanese, so they could talk back and forth with the old man, though I suspected he spoke English too and just wasn't letting on. He looked at us as if he were listening to every word we said.

There was always evidence of rain the night before, always threatening to rain again. It rained while we sat in airport terminals and restaurants, while we rode in taxis and waited for buses, but it never opened up on us while we were outside. It was as if we had a barrier protecting us. We were told January was the dry season; as long as we maintained faith, we would stay dry. The minute we stepped out of cars, paid the bill at restaurants, or were led out onto airport tarmacs, the rain would pause, as if the world was waiting to see what we’d do next.

We shared a van with a pair of old Australian couples. At least, I thought they were old when we got in the car because they reminded me of my grandma and her friends. Then, as we were signing our names on the reservation, I noticed that the youngest among them was born in 1962, the same year my dad was born. The rest weren’t much older. I’d never thought of my dad as an old man; I still don’t. But I realized in that moment that, for better or worse, I probably never will.

Vietnam felt like a place fallen out of time—Kurt Vonnegut would say ‘unstuck’ in time. This never felt more true than in Hanoi. Men wore old U.S. military surplus helmets on scooters and motorcycles, and drove troop transport Jeeps around bearing produce or oftentimes livestock and domestic animals of all kinds: cows and hogs lashed together with hempen rope, hens and roosters in rusty iron cages, canaries and parrots and doves in gilded ones, snakes and frogs and salamanders in glass boxes, spotted dogs panting in the heat. Swords and old scrolls with Chinese characters painted on them hung on walls in restaurants like trophies of a bygone warrior culture. Buildings that clearly had once been palaces or temples with walls of stone crusted with green moss and brown mold now held within them book shops, toy stores, fine dining establishments, a Chase bank, or municipal works. We visited one of the city’s remaining temples in the middle of Hoàn Kiếm Lake, or Lake of the Returned Sword. Inside, we saw a pair of giant softshell turtles, taxidermied and preserved in temperature-controlled glass. The legend goes that a turtle from the lake gave a sword to a rebel named Lê Lợi, and with this sword he drove the Ming dynasty from Vietnam, winning the country’s independence from China. He returned to the lake after the war and returned the sword to the water, then became Emperor of Vietnam. Most say the lake’s turtle population has faded into extinction, but some insist that there are still a few of the species remaining, hiding beneath the lily pads. We looked for them, but saw only minnows and koi fish, water birds and yellow butterflies.

The city was a constant blur of sights and sounds and smells; hazy smears of neon and halogen lights, motorcycle horns and car alarms, tobacco smoke and meat being grilled on the sidewalk. We passed by shops selling red-and-gold lanterns and kites and sculptures of animals—dragons, tigers, pandas—all made from cloth and paper and wood; shops selling iron kettles, pots, and pans; shops selling fruit of all kinds: fresh bananas and dragon fruits, cured and salted jackfruits and mangoes, dried and candied apples and melons and cantaloupes. We walked down streets lined by drooping mangrove trees, hanging wisterias, and white magnolias, canopying the chaos of the streets beneath a garden of wildflowers.

Despite its unruly nature and occasional glimpses of temporal asynchronicity, Hanoi, and Vietnam as a whole, felt inexorably modern. We visited shopping malls that could have been ripped right out of any town in America, filled with stores of every high-end designer brand, every department store, tech stores selling the latest models of cell-phone or laptop, a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel stand (yes, the lemonade tasted exactly the same). The escalators didn’t start up until they detected you approaching, an energy-saving feature I’ve never seen in America or Europe. Bookstores had the latest releases from Europe and America labeled as Western Literature. Embassies and other government buildings had the highest-end security cameras, and in front of banks and corporate headquarters sat lines of the latest luxury electric-cars, waiting to be valeted. Hanoi was not a city—and Vietnam was not a country—that existed purely in the past, but the past still held tight. I don’t think anything sums it up better than this: in Sa Pa, we met a girl our age—around 20 years old—who’d been married since she was 16, a customary marrying age for the last few centuries, and she met her husband on the Internet.

We linked up with some Viet friends of ours who’d come home to Hanoi on break from college, including my old freshman-year roommate. We spent an afternoon at the neighborhood basketball courts playing pick-up ball with kids who’d just come off school. They joked around with us, made up rules on the spot to call fouls on the white boys, and smoked cheap Japanese cigarettes to keep the mosquitos away. We spent evenings at billiards bars and video game cafes, slowly bleeding away the rest of our Vietnamese cash getting hustled by our local friends. In a way, our time in Hanoi felt like a nightcap: just enough to wind us down, make us feel sleepy and comfortable after a long journey; a moment to slow down from the intensity of the trip thus far, and a return to a more casual routine. We got a hotel instead of staying in rental homes and apartments, we ate regular meals, slept in comfortable beds, took hot showers, slept in till noon, and enjoyed the hotel’s hot tub.

I relished the pain of travel but I was secretly glad to be leaving it behind: the ache in the feet from walking miles down muddy roads and sandy beaches, the cramp in the hand from a spider bite, the gently thumping headache of a hangover that never goes away. We had grown real comfortable in each other’s presences, even more so than living together in New York. We listened to each other sleep and shower and pee, watched each other get dressed and shave and brush our teeth every day. We got under each other’s skin, argued just to argue. We were always hungry, thirsty, and sore, coming home to cold showers and hard beds in dark, unfamiliar rooms, putting our bodies through hell every day and loving every second of it, not realizing how exhausted we were until we stopped for just a moment to catch our breath.

We spent our last night in Hanoi in a bar, surrounded by friends, thumping music, and posters advertising Filipino tequila and Tiger beer. We drank our share of beer, took shot after shot of sweet lemon liquor, ate plates of steak and potatoes, and watched, fascinated, as our friends passed around large black balloons to inhale nitrous oxide out of, all under the soft neon glow of the barlights. Near the end of the night, as the first glimpses of sunlight peeked over the horizon, I asked one of our friends if he was planning to move back to Vietnam after college, or if he wanted to stay in the States for a while. Dazed from the late hour and the alcohol and the laughing gas, he replied that he had no idea when he was coming back, but that he would eventually. Someday. ‘I’ll die here, I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll come back when I’m ready for that. Before then, there’s nothing for me here. The United States for short-term. Vietnam for long-term.’ We drank one last Tiger together—my head swimming, the world spinning around me—then called a cab back to the hotel to pack and sleep for a couple hours until it was time to leave for the airport. We were connecting back out through Taipei, and I was looking forward to another coffee made by that robot.