The Past Lingers in Changing Vietnam

By Amanda Hesser

Published: August 28, 2005

View original story on nytimes.com

BREAKFAST at the Morin Hotel in Hue was a game of Russian roulette. As my husband, Tad, and I sat sipping Vietnamese coffee in the courtyard, nuts from the bang trees above us dropped like bombs onto the stone patio. I asked our waiter, Dinh, a slender young man, if they ever hit people. "Yes," he said, pointing to his forearm and shoulder with a shrug. "One broke a table."

If you're not left unconscious, the Morin's terrace can be quite pleasant, a refuge from the choking summer heat and the buzz of motor scooters in central Hue. Small birds with bright yellow beaks - called chim sao - hop around, scavenging food from your table.

"They follow the farmers," Dinh told us. "We used to have 10. Now there are only four or five."

"Maybe they went to another hotel," Tad said.

"No," Dinh replied, taking him seriously, "no better place than here."

At the moment, that's true. But the Morin, a landmark since 1901, is a four-star hotel, and the tourism boom here has led to the construction of five-star hotels all around the city. A 12-story one was rising next door to the Morin. I asked Dinh if he was concerned about the impending competition.

"No," he said, puzzled. "Why would you want to stay up high like that?"

For nearly two decades, Vietnam's two big metropolises, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), have embraced capitalism and the modern world. But here in the center of the country, a belt of land only 40 or so miles wide that acts as a divider between the north and the south - and that consequently saw some of the Vietnam War's fiercest battles - the mood is often less aggressive. As we saw in Hue when we went there last summer, and later when we drove down Route 1 through Da Nang to the old fishing town of Hoi An, change is met with a mixture of desire and reluctance.

Small vendors continue to sell bunches of temple incense gathered like colored brooms. Grooming is still done right on the street, with sidewalk salons for ear cleaning and facials that are conducted by running a thread over a customer's face in tiny strokes. And although motor scooters have taken over even in the villages, water buffaloes are never far from view.

But for every contented Dinh, we discovered, there is an entrepreneur who won't rest until you buy his wares. The night we arrived, we dined at Lac Thanh, a restaurant that we had heard good things about. The moment our pedicabs - cyclos, as they are called - pulled up out front, we were surrounded by waiters from Lac Thanh, as well as two neighboring restaurants, all of them tugging at our arms and imploring us, "Here! Here!" We stuck to our original plan and were whisked upstairs to a balcony with three tables. The walls were painted a swimming pool green and cluttered with the scribblings of bygone diners.

A very short man approached our table holding out a handful of coins. "Hello, where are you from?" he said.

His voice was quick and boyish and he looked remarkably like Linda Hunt in "The Year of Living Dangerously." "I have nice coins from Vietnam," he continued, adding that his name was Mr. Coin.

"This is Miss Scarlet, and I am Colonel Mustard," Tad said.

Sensing that there would be no sale, he shuffled off. Next came our waiter, who took our order and then returned - not with the beers we had ordered but with a water buffalo painting he wanted us to buy.

Vietnam thrives on this sort of jack-in-the-box capitalism. The Morin's lobby doubled as a cluttered knick-knack shop where you could buy paintings, T-shirts and jewelry. And in downtown Hue, what appeared to be a women's hair salon turned out to provide full-service massages on the side.

(I discovered this when I stepped inside to ask directions and found myself interrupting a male client's special moment. But he very politely gave us a great restaurant recommendation: Chi Teo on Hai Ba Trung street.)

Once we finally got our beers at Lac Thanh, we began to enjoy the circus. When a large table of Australians arrived, Mr. Lac, the owner, swung into action.

He arranged five beers in a small semi-circle on their table, and attached one of his homemade bottle openers - a slat of wood with a screw protruding from one end - to each. He clapped to command the diners' attention, and then with a karate chop, he whacked the line of bottle openers. All the bottle caps popped off in unison. The Australians whooped and applauded, and Mr. Lac handed everyone a free bottle opener.

Our guide for several days was Do Ba Dat, a reticent man with dark still eyes and cheekbones like hamburger buns. On our first morning together, we headed toward the Perfume River - some say its name, Huong Giang, should translate as Fragrant River - to board a narrow old wooden motorboat. Bamboo fishing boats crowded the riverbank across from us. Children were jumping into the water from a nearby island.

Gia Long, the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, ordered the planting of fragrant trees along the river in the early 1800's, and much of the riverfront remains grassy and untouched. As we headed west, Dat said little, except to point out an imposing modern tower on the riverbank. "This is a water purification tower," he said, proudly. (Meanwhile, the first mate pulled out her buffalo woodcarvings and offered them for sale.)

Just as the temperature reached 103, we docked upriver and walked into the old Thien Mu pagoda and monastery.

In 1963, an elderly monk from Thien Mu, Thich Quang Duc, set himself on fire to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem's policies of discrimination against Buddhists. The baby blue Austin in which the monk made his fatal trip to Saigon is kept in an open building, where it rusts slowly in the room next to where the monks eat their meals. Atop the car is a grim photo of Quang Duc sitting in the lotus position, his body consumed by flames. A fire extinguisher sits nearby.

"The Green Berets were stationed 45 miles from here," Dat said, in one of his many sudden, oblique references to the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese refer to as "the American War"). Dat had the manner of a schoolteacher with a love of facts and figures, and he spoke English well, with a command of odd words like "magnolia" and "ornamentation." But he was guarded, almost defiantly so, and deaf to humor.

He grew up in Hue. When he was 15, he saw Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, pass through the city in a motorcade. Recalling the moment, he said: "People always wondered whether or not he can shoot. Because he's dressed very civilian. He comes from Ford, so we don't know if he can be any good. The Vietnamese think someone from West Point is maybe better."

The war was never far from view (at the Citadel, which once contained the royal palace - a small-scale version of Beijing's Forbidden City - the walls are still peppered with bullet holes from the Tet offensive, and some of Hue's nightclubs have names like "Apocalypse New"). But while no one expressed resentment about our involvement in their country's affairs, no one wanted to talk about it much, either.

Surrounding Hue are a number of emperors' tombs, many built as summer retreats and eventual burial sights. We arrived at the tomb of Tu Duc, the 19th-century emperor who had the longest reign - 35 years- of the Nguyen dynasty, at noon, when the temperature had soared to a level that I never wish to repeat. Tu Duc spent summers in Hue and the pondside pavilion where he would write poetry and relax with his concubines - "a boring job," Dat said - still stands among frangipani trees.

Tu Duc is one of the few emperors who left a postmortem of his job performance. On a large stone table near his tomb, Tu Duc criticizes himself for losing to the French and for lacking a direction. He did build a lovely tomb, though.

Afterward, we stopped at one of the outdoor cafes along the Dong Ba canal; they are packed together so tightly it's hard to know which one you're in. We drank Huda beer served over giant ice cubes and ordered a bowl of chao, a rice porridge with shrimp, and watched as the cooks washed their dishes in buckets, dumping the water into the canal.

After three days in Hue, we left early for a daylong drive through Da Nang to Hoi An, following Route 1 - sometimes referred to as the "route of the mandarins" - which runs like a vein through Vietnam from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The route took us on a high-speed trip through the tiny theaters of Vietnamese daily life.

As our car weaved around motor scooters and bicycles, we passed a woman on her haunches wearing a non (the conical peasant hat) and splitting wood; women carrying babies; computer stores and coffin shops; rice fields; haystacks for cooking fuel; bungalows and new McMansions trapped behind iron fences. The villages are small and pass by in a breath.

After about two hours on the road, we began climbing Cloudy Pass, a harrowing 13-mile stretch that marks the country's climate divide, separating the wet north from the dry, hot south. At the top, Dat pointed out Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where the first regular American ground troops landed in March 1965. To the east was Monkey Mountain, a spit of land, and to the south, Da Nang, nestled by mountains, hung under a band of haze. During the war, Da Nang was called "shelled city," because the Communist forces attacked it from all angles.

We stopped in Da Nang for the only reason anyone stops in Da Nang: to see the Cham Museum, at the south end of town (2 Tieu La; phone 84-511 821-951). The open-air galleries are jammed with Cham sculpture, mostly from the 9th to the 11th centuries, which was a great moment for free expression.

Stone apsaras bend seductively. Breasts wrap around pedestals. Lions strike burlesque poses, and giants shake their fists. Many of the works were gathered in the early 20th century by a Frenchman, Henri Parmentier, and they are kept, trustingly, behind a fence that could be scaled by a child.

As we returned to our car, a man crossing the street was nearly hit by a man on a motor scooter. Dat shook his head. "People who cross the street without thinking or looking, we call them 'poets,' " he said.

ONE of the treats of Vietnam is fresh-pressed sugar cane juice. In the late afternoon in Hoi An, about 17 miles south of Da Nang, the cafes along the Thu Bon River fill with people drinking beer, eating rice cakes and drinking gallons of the cane juice, called nuoc mia. It comes out of the press pale green and cloudy with a fluff of foam on top. It's sweet, zesty - due to being pressed with tiny limes - and pleasantly faint.

As we drank with all the others, we watched boats at the dock loading up with commuters. More than 60 people and 40 bicycles crammed into a rickety 30-foot-long boat before it lurched into the open water. A man with an ice cart pulled up nearby. He began chiseling ice from a large block, then pounded the ice with a stick until it was crushed. Then he hauled the crushed ice from vendor to vendor, filling their coolers.

Hoi An, which means "peaceful life union," is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. Down an alley off of Phan Boi Chau, we saw a man who stood in the center of the road, tossing bricks up to the second floor where another man caught them. A house was being built, one brick at a time. When we strolled through the central market one afternoon, nearly all the vendors were napping, some lying on bags of rice, others with feet propped up on piles of dried beans, heaps of cucumber.

But the inevitable reorientation to tourists has begun, and it is hard to escape the town's many energetic tailors. More than one woman grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me to her store.

I was more charmed by Xuan, a tailor on Hoang Dieu, who simply posted a sign in English, which read: "Stop looking, you've found the most honest, friendly, non-pressuring + accurate craftswoman in Hoi An. Surpassed all expectations with her creative flair. Gucci move aside!!!"

Hoi An's charm is its historic buildings, whose architecture was heavily influenced by immigrants from Japan and China . At Fujian Assembly Hall, a Chinese-style community center, a wooden model of a junk stood near sculptures of the man of the sun and the woman of the moon, two magical Chinese gods. At the back of the hall were altars to deities for beauty, wealth and social position.

A group of young men wearing T-shirts that said "Netnam" - the Microsoft of Vietnam - crowded in behind us. They were there to pray to Tan Tai Cong, the tycoon deity who determines people's financial future. If an entrepreneur's prayers are granted, he is supposed to return to thank the deity. If he fails to, it is certain death - or, at the very least, social ostracism.

The Netnam group reminded me of Phan Thuan An, an elderly scholar and relic of a vanishing Vietnam, whom we had met earlier in Hue. He would have been pleased to know that these techies were keeping up old traditions, although he would have been scandalized to see T-shirts in the temple. Thuan An is a member of the former royal family, and his painstaking documentation of the palace helped the Imperial City in Hue win status as a World Heritage Site.

When we visited him at his traditional house in Hue, he was wearing an ao trong, the white two-piece tunic and pants, with a pair of wooden clogs. He took us for a tour of the grounds of his home, designed in a feng shui style with a koi pond in the center and a screen of bamboo at the back. Inside, he showed us the altar in his home dedicated to his ancestors. It was piled with mangoes and cake and his grandmother's ivory chopsticks - a time capsule in a time capsule.

Like many people in a country undergoing so much change, Thuan An is worried about Hue's future.

"If more people come here, the atmosphere in the city is not good," he said. "The number of foreign visitors, they destroy the cultural atmosphere in our city. When they go to the pagoda, and to the Imperial City, they wear shorts. I don't know what to say."

In Hoi An, Dat finally told us his own story, over beers and fried wontons at a small, forgettable restaurant, Wan Lu. He had been a high school teacher until 1975 when the North Vietnamese government took over. "People who taught literature and history were replaced," he said.

For seven years, he farmed peanuts - "like Jimmy Carter," he said, brightening - then began teaching English to people emigrating to America. He wants to visit America himself one day.

I pointed out how handsome the restaurant's lanterns - made of loosely draped rings - were. "They were designed after grenade rings," Dat said, "the kind that soldiers used to hang on their helmets."

That night a steady rain fell on the town. I was sure it would soften the mood, but the energy only shifted. The Internet cafes filled up, the motor scooters sped up and two weaving factories I passed were in high gear, the looms clacking relentlessly, echoing through the streets of Hoi An - feeding the tourists, driving the economy, shuttling into the modern world.

Getting There

From New York City, United Airlines, (800) 538-2929, www.united.com , and Cathay Pacific, (800) 233-2742, www.cathaypacific.com , offer daily flights with connections in the high season (May to October) to Ho Chi Minh City. Once in Vietnam, Hue and Da Nang can be reached by air on Vietnam Airlines, (415) 677-0888, www.vietnamairlines.com .

If driving from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, it's best to hire a driver and guide because road signs can be confusing. Poe Travel in Little Rock, Ark., (800) 727-1960, www.poetravel.com , planned much of my trip, and can offer information on hiring guides.

Where to Stay

The Life Resort Hoi An, 1 Phom Hong Thai Street, (84-510) 914-555, www.life-resorts.com , is a new luxury hotel nestled on the languid but sometimes noisy Thu Bon River. The 94 rooms and suites start at $102 through the Web site, for a garden view and $198 for a river view. Breakfast, which is included, is mostly Western food, but excellent.

In Hue, the 130-room Hotel Saigon Morin, 30 Le Loi Boulevard, (84-54) 823-526, www.morinhotel.com.vn , is in the city center and has a friendly staff, as long as you can tolerate the lobby's flea market atmosphere and bad Internet service. Web rates start at $80 for a double room.

Where to Eat and Drink

On the outskirts of Hoi An at 9 Thanh Tay is the tiny restaurant Quan Nhan, (84-511) 862-261, which specializes in seafood. Ask for the crabs (I drew a picture) in ginger-lemongrass sauce. The woman who owns the restaurant cracks the crabs at the table. At the rate of 16,000 dong to the dollar, dinner for two is about $25.

In Hue, check out Chi Teo, a restaurant at 59 Hai Ba Trung, a few blocks south of the Morin and the Huong River. It serves an excellent beef salad and pork chops with tomato and garlic. Dinner for two is about $12

AMANDA HESSER if the food editor of The New York Times Magazine.