The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘This is how modern Vietnam exists, with life and death in parallel’
From ‘hungry ghosts’ of the past to contemporary art, this is a country of extraordinary complexity. Suzanne Moore can’t get enough of it
Iam in a modern art gallery by a lake. A chic gallery owner is showing me the work of a young contemporary artist: squares of earth, found objects and huge paintings made of thumbprints. The exhibition title is something that Google Translate renders as “Been-Continued”. It is all rather mystifying. Then the artist herself, Lâm Na, appears, pressing into my hand a coin she has dug out of the ground. This feels significant, as I understand the work to be about the past within the present, what is sown and what is reaped, but really I have very little idea of where I am. It could be Mayfair. It is in fact Hanoi.
This is my first day in Vietnam, in a ritzy part of the city where many expats choose to live, beside Hoan Kiem lake. There are taco places and cocktail bars. Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this. To confound me further the charming Nguyen Anh Tuan, an artist and curator, tells me I am in luck. We had bonded over a shared love of Leonard Cohen and now he takes me to the vast, disused Gia Lam train factory. It has been taken over by artists from the Hanoi Creative Design Festival. The theme is “flow” – and I am going with it.
In taking over this old industrial space, artists are connecting their heritage to contemporary life. There is so much work to see here: Cornelia Parker-type dismantled cars on strings, huge hanging ribbons of fabric, tunnels of small photographs that you need a candle to see. I am overloaded.
The truth is that, if your first day in Hanoi doesn’t overwhelm you, then you don’t have a pulse. It is one of the most exciting cities I have ever visited, a frenzy of traffic, markets, lights, street food, colonial-era architecture and huge monuments. I brave the shoals of scooters and the intense criss-crossing traffic to get around, determined not to be like a friend of mine who was trapped in her hotel for two days before she dared venture out.
When I meet my guide, he offers to teach me how to cross the road and is surprised I have already done it. The explanation is not bravery but jetlag. One must not hesitate and must not look at the traffic, he says. Just go for it and don’t stop. My guide is wearing a sweatshirt with “Barmy” written on it and he asks me what it means while we sample the street food. Barmy means “nuts but in a nice way,” I tell him.
You may have had Vietnamese food at home but there is nothing like sitting on little plastic stools next to young women wearing fake Gucci and eating what has become known as the “Obama Combo” (after the meal Barack Obama ate with the late, great Anthony Bourdain here, back in 2016). Grilled pork, noodles, bundles of herbs, dipping sauce. Bun cha and two beers. The ripped martial arts guys slurp it down nearby; the backpackers queue for their banh mi. Later, at a dazzling rooftop bar, young fashionable Vietnamese couples arrive with flowers for innumerable selfies as the DJ remixes the Pet Shop Boys and the moon rises high over the lake.
First thing in the morning, large groups exercise next to the Lenin statue, while the queues for the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum begin to form. Here you may see the embalmed body of “Uncle Ho”. (He didn’t want this; he had asked for a cremation but instead got the full Soviet treatment.) Communist flags and slogans are everywhere.
Vietnam is a one-party state, though the official reality is that it is “a market economy with a socialist orientation”. Ordinary people pay for health care and education and, driving out of Hanoi, one can feel the economic boom. Luxury developments are everywhere. I come to realise that the hard times referred to in conversation are not just the “American War”, but the famine that took place between the end of the war in 1975 and the lifting of the trade embargo in the mid-1990s. Sure, there are war tourists here rehearsing their Apocalypse Now speeches, but the most hostility I hear openly expressed is towards the French, not the Americans. One man tells me the former colonial masters gouged out his father’s eyes.
A few hours’ drive to the south-west of Hanoi, mountains rise up: black vertical jags of limestone jutting out of the earth, like nothing I have ever seen before. I am staying at the Pu Luong Retreat between two such mountains overlooking rice terraces. The view is spectacular, although the steep inclines to get to the room are not quite so alluring. This is no country for old knees. Thankfully there is a pool and a spa and a great restaurant.
It is the sort of place that lures trekkers, but my guide clearly understands that I am more of a trudger. We go down into the valley where houses are raised on stilts and impossibly pretty village girls take selfies with us.
I cannot help but think of Graham Greene’s A Quiet American where Fowler describes Phuong, his mistress, as looking “so small and breakable” but not in any way being an ornament. These villagers are ethnic White Thais, and have their own language and style of dress. They are still using scythes in the fields. We see papaya, starfruit, guava, cassava all growing and the Muscovy ducks that I have only ever seen hanging in markets. At a betel nut tree I hear about the Vietnamese fashion of women making their teeth completely black – mind-blowing – which was once considered beautiful.
I fly south to take a cruise along the Mekong. It is hot and rainy, with a different vibe altogether. There are fish in the river that eat dogs, the boatman says, as we sip from coconuts. But I only see mudskippers. At night in my resort you can sit by the river and watch the junks pass. I don’t stay long, because I am heading to Can Tho, to catch a small propeller plane to Con Son island.
In the airport, I wave at a baby and I sense this makes everyone uncomfortable. Babies, I am told later, are to be ignored, for one does not want to make the spirits jealous and the baby ill. Each day in Vietnam, I become more aware that the spirits are ever-present: ancestor-worship prevails; death sits alongside life and is everywhere celebrated. The dead must be kept happy with votive money, gifts and food on the family shrines. I even see expensive pairs of trainers left as offerings.
Con Son is a tiny island in the Con Dau archipelago. It is heavenly, stuffed with pristine beaches and jungle. Brad, Angelina and their troop stayed here back in 2011 at the extremely luxurious Six Senses, but I really don’t think anywhere could be nicer than the Poulo Condor resort, where I stay.
My room is actually a sage green villa with two balconies. There is an outside shower and lotus ponds everywhere. You can trip down to the empty beach or have a massage. There are kayaks to paddle around in. It is totally lush, with a pool above which rises Chau mountain. The staff are lovely, WhatsApping to ask if you want breakfast brought to you. These islands are surrounded by the best diving waters in Vietnam and yet remain undeveloped.
However, this seemingly untouched paradise has its heart of darkness. This was a prison island. In town there is the museum, and the old prisons and cemeteries are dotted about. More than 20,000 political prisoners died here. The French built the prisons in 1863 to house those they considered dangerous. The Americans used them until the 1970s. It is here that you find the infamous “tiger cages”, where prisoners had quicklime poured onto them.
A few hours of visiting these places was certainly enough for me. It was clear that many of the Vietnamese people visiting had relatives who had died there, so this is a place of pilgrimage. When I went back to my hotel, I found out that the museum had been set up by the son of a political prisoner and this was a way of giving thanks to the island.
This is how modern Vietnam exists, with life and death parallel. There are always hungry ghosts to appease but right here, right now, there is beauty and wealth to create. And always another selfie to be taken. It is dizzying. I learnt during a cooking lesson how to tie summer rolls using steamed spring onions as tiny ribbons. I saw women on Vespas applying make-up as they manoeuvred in dense traffic. I glimpsed the ultra-modern city of Ho Chi Minh City and chatted to octogenarians working in the paddy fields.
All of it draws you in, one way or another. You can feel the future surging, yet what truly seeps into your heart is the remarkable and unbreakable soul of the place.
Large groups exercise next to the Lenin statue, while queues for the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum form