Vietnam Part 2
The Chicken Man cancels!
He forgot he had something on.
The chicken lives to berkaaark another day, Death goes back to playing Sudoku and grumbles to himself “I’ll see you soon enough”.
I seek out a local specialty Bún chả cá, rice noodles in a fish broth with fish balls.
I wrote part 1 from about 12 days into my trip, so let’s go back to the beginning…
I had to change my flights a few times for reasons too uninteresting to mention so I ended up with a one-night stay in Singapore. Too lazy and too much of a tight arse to leave the airport I slept on an armchair somewhere in the airport.
When I arrived in Vietnam the next day, I got off the plane and passed through customs and there were 100’s of people waiting, anticipating, screaming! Had Hiển (my Vietnamese friend) invited her entire extended family to welcome me?
It turns out I was on the plane with miss Vietnam who was busy being beautiful in faraway lands and had decided to come home.
Joyous were the people.
Anyway, I manoeuvred through the masses a little hurt and disappointed that I wasn’t yet famous enough in Vietnam to warrant such a welcoming. I found a ledge to park my anonymous behind and awaited Hiển’s arrival.
I had not seen her in about 2 and half years, our romance cut short by the Kung Flu, the Spicy Cough, the Plandemic, the Covid. After a deep long embrace, we double-checked that each other was indeed real and within 5 minutes it was as if no time had passed, like we had just seen each other yesterday.
We drove through the different districts of Saigon towards her house, had a rest then began to plan our trip. Our first little journey was to drive into the mountains to Đà Lạt with one stop at Bảo Lộc.
Along the way Hiển introduces me to different foods and specialties of the different areas we pass through. I try frogs cooked in garlic, chives, ginger and lemongrass, pigs intestine stuffed with spring onion, various snails both river and sea varieties, barbecued dried squid, different noodle soups, super funky fermented shrimp paste, new herbs I’ve never heard of and that have no English translation.
Everywhere has different sauces that are common to that area. Years and years of trial and error and general consensus on the best way to combine the local ingredients for ‘maximum tasty’ have produced a style of sauce that somehow everyone knows how to make. The same goes for different dishes.
I see the excitement in Hiển’s eyes when we get to a new place where they make something she loves.
It strikes me that we do not really have this identity with food in Australia. There’s nothing that you would really say is Australian food. There’s Modern Australian, whatever the hell that is. There are of course Indigenous staples but sadly these are not known to the majority of the public.
What about the lamington?
Everyone knows a lamington. But are you really that chuffed when you show your international friends a Lamington? A cheap sponge cake covered in chocolate icing rolled in desiccated coconut.
We have dishes that are relics from the British migration and we have dishes that became pub staples from other European migrations, but no styles of food that when you get to a new region you go “ahhh this where they do such and such” and the digestive pre-consumptive salivatory mechanism involuntarily lubricates the inside of your mouth.
Theres no regional amalgamation of local produce, local pallets, creativity and years of trial and error that distils out of this complexity a particular dish or sauce that is common everywhere in that locality. Where everyone has agreed that this process of refinement has reached its apex. The only thing left to do is to make better and better versions of that thing. Balance the sauce better. Get the broth deeper and richer. Tweak the marinade.
In Australia you might go to a different state, and find a Ned Kelly pie, or discover they call a Parma a Parmi. But these things do not represent the locality, the ingredients native to the earth, the creativity and pallets of the locals.
But I realise I’m comparing too much and am not appreciating things for what they are.
One of the most interesting culinary experiences I had was in Đà Lạt where they make the famous semi-fertilized duck egg, trứng vịt lộn. You can find this in a lot of places but it’s really good the way they do it here.
Sitting on the side of the street in a cheap plastic chair an old lady in one bowl is cutting trứng vịt lộn and mixing in herbs and sauce, while monitoring several bowls on an open flame, their ingredients bubbling away as the aroma wafts away through the crowd luring in more customers.
We take pull up a plastic chair and wait our turn.
It’s interesting to imagine the thought process that would have created such a dish. Essentially it is where you take a duck egg that has been fertilized, allow it go through some of the process of gestation, but cut it short at some arbitrary point. Different customers also have different affinities for different points on the egg/duck spectrum.
The one we had was boiled in the shell first then taken out roughly chopped up with scissors and put in a small bowls with herbs and garlic and put on hot coals.
This pre-duck (as I like to call it) has started to metamorphose from its slippery yolky origins into a living soon-to-be-breathing duck fetus.
The bones are beginning to form, the muscles are starting to take shape. The texture in parts is half-way between boiled egg and chicken breast, the bones are weak enough that they can be crushed through and eaten.
It’s a lot to take in.
Many confusing emotions bubble to the surface of consciousness.
The logical mind tries to rationalise. It compares the process to that of a chicken factory or a slaughterhouse and logically the suffering there is far worse. Terrified animals lining up to be shot or electrocuted.
At least this pre-duck never suffered. Wasn’t developed enough even to have experience. How would we know?
But maybe that’s not what’s most puzzling.
What’s most puzzling is: why do it at all!
What benefit is there of starting the process of life, then deciding to eat it at this very specific stage?
But the Vietnamese love novelty in their food, it’s part of what makes their food so diverse and interesting.
Our next stop was Sa Pa a small city in the Northwest mountains. Many different minority groups moved here especially the different H’Mông groups and Dzao’s who were escaping persecution in China during Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
When they arrived in Vietnam apparently the government was such a mess, and had its own problems to deal with, that they were largely left alone. They settled into the mountains and set up agriculture on every possible inch of land that would allow it.
In Sa Pa, the dominant grain is rice, and rice fields are literally everywhere. Carved into the landscape following the contours of the mountain it makes for an incredibly beautiful sight.
What once would have been unkempt miscellaneous flora was now beautifully manicured rice fields, lush green undulating stairs tip toeing down the face of mountains all the way to the valley below.
The minority communities are all scattered throughout these rice fields.
What was interesting to note was that one village, consisting of only a couple hundred or so people, would have H’Mông people and Red Dzao people but they didn’t integrate with each other at all, they kept their own languages and to their own sides of the hill. There was the H’Mông side of the village and Red Dzao area, how interesting.
There are also different types of H’Mông, distinguished by the dominant colour they wear, e.g. The Red H’Mông, Black H’Mông, Green H’Mông, the LGBTQI H’Mông?
Apparently, the thing to do when you get to Sa Pa, is step off the bus and yield to heckling of the Mama’s.
The Mama’s are a conglomerate of older women, hilariously all referring to themselves as “Mama”. They offer affordable accommodation, trekking tours, food tours, and more.
Usually, this type of scene is a screaming indicator for a scam. But the Mama’s have earnt the trust of many a traveller over the years and the word of mouth bade us good fortune.
Mama San, our surrogate mother for the next 24 hours, was very sweet. She had a very high-pitched child-like tone, almost like the tone people make when speaking to a baby. She would always elongate the last word with a dip and rise, like asking a question.
“You coming to my house and eating the fooOOd? We maybe do some trekking and take photooOO, and see some minority village as you liiIIke.”
The feeling of being around her was a mixture of feeling mothered and wanting to cuddle a cute stuffed toy.
Was she our mum or a doll?
We drove around the rice fields with her, and she showed us different minority villages. The landscapes were breath taking, photos and videos do not even come to close to capturing the feeling the panorama of that geography gives you.
We had lunch at her house and her sister and some of their children joined us. They could speak only a little Vietnamese, so we mostly spoke in broken English to Mama San and her sister. That shocked me as well, that she lived in Vietnam and had all her life but barely spoke Vietnamese! I was beginning to understand that Vietnam was far more diverse than I thought.
Respect is a big thing In Vietnam and there is a whole taxonomy of relational terms one must learn when speaking to people. These are terms that acknowledge how you relate to the person you are speaking to, this could be in terms of age, family, status at work, and so on.
If a person is a little older than you and female you call them Chị, if male, Anh. If much older, Cô, if a child, Con, and so on.
There are other interesting social rules too. Like younger children cannot ask older people their name, they can only call them by their relational name which is a sign of respect. So, at the table the children would not speak to us unless spoken to. Very different from Australia where social boundaries between children and adults are far looser.
Food was cooked and it was as delicious as it was healthy. Everything was taken from straight out of their backyard. Loads of vegetables, some pork and chicken, and of course rice.
We had some tea made from Hemp leaves and drank some rice wine infused with opium, what a service!
When the H’Mông fled China, they took the opium poppy with them and continued to grow it for some time. During the American War (what we would call the Vietnam War) it was processed into heroin, giving the American soldiers a ride on the white horse until the Vietnamese government outlawed its cultivation.
It is still however made in secret.
After lunch they tried to sell us some weed.
Then some other ladies came over and showed off some of their hemp productions for us to buy. We bought a few things we didn’t want or need, and then they threw in a free baggy of weed.
Ohhhh Mama San. So sweet. You didn’t have to.
The next day we left the rice people and headed north-east to Ha Giang to visit the corn people.
The H’Mông who fled to Ha Giang found unfavourable conditions for rice production. To adapt and survive they flirted with various grains and eventually settled on the hearty corn, the ear of enterprise.
The landscape here is famous for its dramatic almost violent-looking mountains. They shoot up vertically to incredible heights. Very thin roads are carved into the side of the mountains as they snake their way to the top.
We ummed and ahhhd about getting a manual bike with more horsepower to climb these steep roads but decided to stick it out with Hiển’s scooter which at times of steep vertical incline we regretted as it almost buckled under the weight of two people, three bags and two yoga mats.
But the Honda Vision soldiered on.
It earnt its reputation as not merely economical scooter designed for urban transportation, but also as a passive workhorse capable of traversing steep mountain ranges, rocky terrains and dirt roads.
The most noteworthy part of the Ha Giang loop is undoubtably the drive itself.
Words do not do it justice. The feeling of spiralling up or down a mountain face, driving through corn fields, driving over bridges, the milky emerald river hundreds of meters below can’t really be captured in words.
I’ll just say that is was like… HEAPS GOOD!!!
One night we stayed in a H’Mông village, and our host was somewhat of an entrepreneur.
Of the 100 people who lived in this village, he was proud to say he was the only one who had left and had gone to university, earning a Bachelor of Information Technology of all things.
He then returned home and applied all his knowledge of information technology to the nurturing of the corn cob.
He was a real character.
He had a restless spirit and sharp mind and had taught himself many different skills.
Among other things, he made musical instruments. He had crafted about six different H’Mông instruments, each of which he could play remarkably well. He also distilled corn wine to make a corn spirit which would have been around forty percent which we proceeded to get drunk on with him all that night.
He also made these drumstick-shaped wooden toys which they play games with. How it works is you have a long piece of string which you wrap around your hand then wrap up the drumstick from the skinny part to the apex of the fat part. You then flick the drumstick and yank the string back, so the drumstick is released spinning, the fat part on top with the skinny part spinning on the ground.
They play different games with them like battling each other.
The original BEY BLADES!
Here opponents try and knock each other’s drumstick over by spinning them next to each other or they simply see who can keep theirs spinning the longest.
For the later, when it starts to slow down, you’re allowed to whip it with your string to keep it going. Which looks absolutely ridiculous. Like someone is beating these drumsticks to death.
At some point, its starts to feel like domestic abuse and your paternal instinct kick in as you feel like stepping in and defending those poor little innocent drumsticks.
We stayed up drinking with him till quite late. He had the aura of a village elder about him despite only being in his early 30’s.
He told us the history of his people, of which he was incredibly proud and knowledgeable of.
This was really cool to see, especially from someone who had actually left the village and spent five years living in a big city with all the comforts of modernity, like air conditioning and Uber eats.
“What age do people start work here?” we asked.
“Three years old,” he replied without any hint of a joke.
Haha what?
“At three years old my son can carry a little bag of corn.”
I looked over at that muscly little three-year-old. Veins bulging in his arms. Broad chest. I’m sure he could…
He had another son, two-years-old, not quite of working age.
We played with him and I wondered if next year, when he clocks on for his first shift, how he would feel about that.
Better chat to HR.
Maybe he would actually be excited to go out in the fields with the rest of his family instead of staying at home with the grandparents.
Maybe he’ll be a corn prodigy, the Mozart of the cob.
It’s hard to say.
If everyone around you is out all day picking corn, then you’re probably going to want to, on some level, do that with them too. Even if you don’t enjoy the task, you would at least want to be with your friends and family.
And so, if they’re picking corn, then you’re picking corn.
You’re together.
Laughing. Fighting. Complaining. Singing. Sweating.
But together.
Humans can endure many things, but what we find almost impossible to endure is solitude.
In many cultures banishment is one of the harshest punishments imaginable, sometimes considered worse than death. Even in Australia, one of the most psychologically punishing experiences is solitary confinement.
Life can be terribly shit sometimes, but it’s the terribliest and shittiest when we’re alone.
Companionship, comradarie, togetherness, being there for someone–are greater cures for life’s woes than anything you’ll find in the pharmacy.
And that’s that.
Well, not really, I can’t remember what happened after that.
I’m writing this last little paragraph a year and half after the events mentioned above and I had forgotten to finish the story. Luckily, I found it tucked away in some innocuous folder labelled “Thoughts”.
But today, I’ve just arrived back in Vietnam for the third time for the Lunar New Year, Tết.
I’ll be meeting Hiển’s family this time and will search for yet more hitherto un-munched delicacies.
Until next time.
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