Let’s sketch Hanoi, beginning with a rough map. Take an imaginary piece of paper, lay it over a diagram of the human body, and trace the right half of the ribcage. That’s Hoan Kiem Lake. It’s maybe half a mile from top to bottom.
North of the lake is the Old Quarter, a maze of narrow streets. South of the lake is the French Quarter, a grid of boulevards.
That’s the main difference between the two neighborhoods: the size and layout of the streets. In other respects, they’re fairly similar.
Now that we’ve got our streets roughed in, let’s get down in them and put up some buildings.
In the Old Quarter, most of the buildings are one room wide, several rooms deep, and a few stories tall. They adjoin one another. In the French Quarter, there are buildings like that and buildings that are much grander.
The ground floor is usually a shop of some kind. The rest of the building is living space.
Let’s go back out onto the street and look at the facades. The storefronts are mostly merchandise and signage, on which more later. But above their striped awnings is a stratum of fossilized French architecture. Louvered shutters. Wrought-iron balconies. Balustrades. That sort of thing.
Often, the walls are a pale orange-yellow, the color of the mangoes here, and the shutters are dark green. Sometimes the fins are turquoise. It’s a pleasing color scheme. And of course there are all the colors in the Crayola box (the big box with the sharpener).
The original facades are showing their age. Perhaps a century of wear and tear. The plaster is tattered, and whole patches of it are missing, revealing red brick underneath. On some buildings, the brick matches the color of tile rooftops.
Not everything is weather-beaten. Give some of your buildings a fresh coat of paint and some a more extensive renovation. Replace others with new buildings in the same ornate style and still others with plainer, boxier buildings. (Outside the old part of town, these boxes predominate.)
Hopefully you’ve got a pretty clear picture of the streets and buildings. Now merge that picture with another image, that of a swamp. I’m going with the Okefenokee Swamp as depicted in the comic strip Pogo, but you’ll have your own associations.
Don’t worry too much about the marshy ground. It’s been drained, filled, paved over.
What we’re interested in are trees—great twisting forms that lean out over asphalt rivers or find their way level with the buildings.
Their foliage is lush, droopy, and somewhat weedy. These are leaves that stay put in winter and withstand heavy summer rains. Except when those storms are brewing, the leaves don’t much rustle and the trees don’t much sway. The air in Hanoi is pretty still. These quibbles aside, Hanoi’s leafiness is one of its most appealing features.
Back at ground level, the trees clutch their squares of earth or flow into them like lava that was bubbling and popping when it crusted over.
And we haven’t even mentioned the trees’ most distinctive feature: Many of them are utter tangles of aerial roots.
Young roots hang from boughs like bead curtains. Pithy roots run down trunks like melted candle wax. There are trunks that look like the legs of prehistoric creatures—some shaggy, others scaly and caught in criss-crossing snares. And there are roots buttressing organic cathedrals that make the city’s stone cathedral look rough-hewn by comparison.
Echoing the roots are vine-like cables—loose strands of twenty, fifty, even a hundred of them slung messily from pole to pole. Cables radiating like bicycle spokes to houses across the street. Cables coiled, cables snarled.
The cable-vines are only the beginning of the clutter.
There’s the signage on the storefronts, reminiscent of the cover of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, but with Vietnamese writing—short strings of Latin letters buzzing with diacritics.
The sidewalk-riverbanks would be ample if not for two more kinds of clutter, one good and one bad.
The good kind is street food joints. They usually consist of makeshift kitchen stations surrounded by plastic tables and blocky plastic stools. The kind of stool you might keep on hand for changing lightbulbs, only you’d hesitate to step on it for fear it was too flimsy.
It’s not the most comfortable setup. Sitting on one of the stools is not so different from sitting on your haunches, and hunching over a steaming bowl on the table puts your head almost between your knees.
The other thing cluttering up the sidewalks is parked motorbikes, like hitched horses outside of Old West saloons.
It’s amazing that we’ve gotten this far without mentioning the motorbikes. Those asphalt rivers are teeming with metal minnows, their flow generally unimpeded by traffic lights.
The motorbikes account for ninety percent of Hanoi’s soundscape: forty-five percent engines, forty-five percent horns. Ten percent miscellaneous.
Which brings us to the motorbike taxi guys. (It’s about time we start populating our city.)
They’re parked at every busy corner, sometimes sitting upright, ready to rev off, sometimes lounging like centerfolds or Sistine Chapel Adams.
Their cry of “Mo-to-bike?” must be the second most commonly spoken English word in Hanoi, after “hello,” which they also use. And these are by no means their only calls. Sometimes they clap, as if calling a dog. Sometimes they hoot, as if it’s owls they’re hoping to attract. Sometimes they woo with a “Woo!” Sometimes they literally yoo-hoo and flutter their fingers as if waving a handkerchief. They are ever-hopeful suitors. And professional nuisances.
Then there are the cyclo drivers. A cyclo is the back half of a bicycle propelling a commodious, canopied wheelchair. The cyclo drivers ding a bell to indicate that they’d like to pedal you around at the speed you’re already walking.
Women in conical rice hats have the most physically demanding job. They walk the streets, each carrying what looks like a giant set of scales—a pair of broad baskets suspended from either end of a bouncy wooden beam balanced over one shoulder. The baskets are usually full of fruit.
These women aren’t as relentless as the motorbike taxi guys. But they sometimes try to get you to pose for a photo carrying their baskets, usually without first finding out if you’ve got a camera. I guess the idea is that you’ll feel like you owe them something afterwards. Particularly when you imagine the beam digging into your shoulder all day. But when they try to get the beam onto your shoulder, it usually ends up coming at your neck, which can be disconcerting.
There are shoeshine guys who carry their brushes and polishes in plastic beach baskets and wear plasticky sandals, I assume so they don’t have to shine their own shoes as well. The more dramatic shoeshine guys will come to a dead halt at the sight of shoes crying out for a shine. Even if, like me, you’re wearing hiking boots that aren’t really supposed to gleam.
These are just a few of the people in the neighborhood—the ones who solicit you. And it’s by no means an exhaustive list of them either. There are guys lugging stacks of photocopied books and guys towing bunches of bobbing balloons. There are girls who claim to be collecting for the Red Cross, a rumpled laminated card their only proof. And so on.
As for the rest of the city’s inhabitants and the way they live, that’ll have to wait for a future entry. But I hope this gives you a sense of Hanoi as an environment.
