Liberation Day

Another week, another holiday.

Today marks 35 years since Southern Vietnam was liberated from well, itself in a way, and the Americans more importantly. On April the 30th in 1975, Northern Vietnamese Army tanks crashed through the gates of what is now known as the Reunification Palace in Saigon, and the American War was over. North and South could be reunited and Communism was here to stay.

To prepare for the celebrations, government authorities began closing off roads and constructing seating stands almost two weeks ago. On Tuesday morning this week, they shut down central Saigon at peak hour in order to rehearse the parade. Everyone was late for work and no one, foreigners and Vietnamese alike, seemed to have any prior knowledge that this would happen. Obviously this parade was going to be a big one. We were keen to go and watch, looking forward to being swept up in some nationalistic pride and atmosphere. 

However, this photo is as close as we came to seeing the parade this morning. It turned out that the event was invitation only. These are the buses that would take the participants and invited spectators home. Many streets, including ours, where this photo was taken, were shut down and the riff raff were kept out.

We had to settle for the television broadcast. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of military marching to begin with. I just kept thinking how hot these men must be in their dark green woollen uniforms. There was a large group of seated VIPs and officials, including quite a lot of older women in velvet ao dai, who I also felt for in the staggering pre-rainy season heat. As the soldiers passed the VIPs, the camera kept cutting to a shot of two old generals. Sometimes these two would salute or wave a small flag, however they always remained stone faced. After a while the military gave way to more colourful floats and groups of people representing various ethnicities and organisations. There was even a kind of interpretive re-enactment of the events of April 30, including older women rushing around, being reunited with their soldier sons and holding long embraces. Again they cut to the two old fellows, still no emotion.

Today, everything is red; flags, signs and banners with many stirring words and sentiments. As Uncle Ho once said, ‘Nothing is more valuable than independence and freedom.’ And these words span Le Duan boulevard (where the parade took place) today, on a rainbow like, yet red, inflatable banner.

Vietnam fought hard for independence over hundreds of years, first from the Chinese, then the French, the Japanese, the Americans. They are rightly proud of their independence. And freedom, well who would want to get into a philosophical debate about what that word means anyway? Certainly not me, as a foreigner living in a country, that although racing towards a free market is most definitely still Communist in so many other ways.

Little Birds and Mangosteens

Another Sunday and it’s too damn hot. When will it rain? I’m dreaming of that steaming concrete smell and streams of water pouring off corrugated iron roofs. The rainy season should begin in the next few weeks, let’s hope.

Luckily I have some good food to console me. It’s easy to know what fruit’s in season here, just look at what’s in the back of the baskets of vendors cruising the city. Now it’s my favourite, mangosteens. Prise them open to enjoy the segments of sweet, juicy, iridescent white flesh.

And tonight, little birds fried in butter, as my friend called them, or Chim Cut Chien Bo. They may be quails or something similar. They were also sweet, juicy and the perfect size for eating with your fingers. I ended up with quite a pile of little bones in front of me.

Hung King's Holiday

Yesterday was a holiday in Vietnam, to honour the death anniversary of King Hung Vuong. This holiday has its origins in the creation legend of Vietnam. 


Not long after the creation of the earth and the sky, a fairy, Au Co and a dragon, Lac Long Quan met and fell in love. Soon after, Au Co bore 100 eggs, from which 100 children were born.  Au Co and Lac Long Quan stayed together for some time with their children, but after a while, the dragon needed to get back to the sea and the fairy to the mountains, so they took 50 children each. Au Co taught her children the skills of agriculture and breeding animals, while Lac Long Quan taught his children to fish.

As the legend goes, these children are the ancestors of all Vietnamese people. One of these children became King Hung Vuong, the first King. The day of his death is not attached to a date in the solar/western calender, it has been passed down for thousands of years in the lunar calender (am lich). And thus the 10th day of the third month of the lunar calender is a very important day for Vietnamese people.

The flag that you can see in the poster and outside the temple is a funerary flag, always hung outside a house or at the end of an alley to signal that a funeral is taking place.

Chu Manh Trinh

After our trip to Hue, I spoke to my Vietnamese teacher about what I had experienced there, and as always Thay had some things to say about these matters. We talked for a while about the Mandarins, as Hue was the place where they had taken their examinations. To become a Mandarin, which was a kind of high level government officer adopted from Chinese culture, a person had to pass a series of examinations which took days to complete and was so tricky that many had to repeat the test several times before they were successful. Thay said that in the old days potential candidates would walk from southern Vietnam to Hue in order to sit the tests. This was a journey that took months and could be dangerous, because of deserted roads that were prowled by wild animals.

Obviously it was worth it for the chance to hold this prestigious title, and Vietnam still honours their most esteemed Mandarins by naming streets after them, though not the most famous streets, which are reserved for military heroes who defeated the Chinese, the great Kings and Emperors and some revered Communist reformers.

Was Chu Manh Trinh a Mandarin? I wondered as I visited the street named after him this morning. It’s not a main street, and is only a few hundered metres long, though still very centrally located in District One. Chu Manh Trinh’s position is part of its appeal, in that you step off the main drag of fashion boutiques, hotels and foreign restaurants into this little pocket of old Saigon charm. Skyscrapers may loom in all directions but this street still retains a feeling of authenticity.

When we lived in another part of the city, we got to know Chu Manh Trinh because we would often walk home along it in the evenings for a chance to see “the ice men”, as we called them. With darkness surrounding, one man would stand in the back of a steaming cold truck pushing out metre long slabs of ice to another, who would hoist this hefty weight on his shoulder with just a small piece of newspaper to protect his skin. Then this wiry man would run with it, about 20 metres or so to a mysterious building in the depths of an alley. Backwards and forwards he would go, and this event occurred around the same time every night.

Today when we turn into Chu Manh Trinh we see an outdoor barber, his business just a chair and a mirror against a wall. The barber snips away on the shiny bowl hair of a small boy, who is watching his reflection and the barber’s work with some suspicion. Next we come to a street market that operates every day on this street. The stalls are protected from the sun by a hotch potch of plastic awnings. They are well stocked in the morning, and the dozen or so vendors cover all food needs. Perhaps a market strip like this was more common in the old days, but now you don’t see them like this very often. I think how much more leisurely it would be to do a daily shop here, and avoid the agitation of the big markets.

We stop for some breakfast at a Banh Cuon stall. These are freshly steamed sheets of rice noodle served with pork sausage. I am coming back for another taste of this smiley woman’s banh cuon, because they have a particular delicacy, so light and silky that they slip down very quickly, though not so fast that you can’t enjoy the crunch and sweetness of the accompanying fried shallots, and the tang of the nuoc cham. We eat at knee high metal tables and watch the passing traffic, though it’s not too busy, just enough old men on bicycles, families on motorbikes and occasional meandering toddler or animal to keep us entertained. Looking across the street there are a couple of old colonial buildings behind high stone walls, one is bulging with fig tree roots and sprouts. On our side, to the left of us is a similar wall, though the footpath is surprisingly clear, all you can see on the ground is the dappled shadows of the foliage above.

I did try to find some information on the internet about Chu Manh Trinh later in the day. It was limited in English, but from what I could gather, he was not a Mandarin, instead a poet who died in 1905. His vocation is fitting, I trust he would be happy and inspired strolling his street, even in this age.

Hue

Last week we visited Hue, the former capital city of Vietnam, a place of wide rivers with grassy green banks, tree lined boulevards, royal tombs and pagodas a plenty. Compared to Ho Chi Minh, the traffic is a breeze, perpetually Sunday afternoon. So it’s perfect to explore on pushbike, stopping as you come across intriguing old buildings, or you see a woman with baskets of Banh beo or any of the other tasty rice noodle Hue specialties.

The main tourist attractions are monuments from the Nguyen Dynasty, a succession of Emperors in Vietnam from 1802 until 1945. Although they built a citadel and some very impressive tombs for themselves, their role was mostly nominal during French occupation.

Emperor Minh Mang’s tomb, about 20 minutes drive from central Hue, is a very beautiful and tranquil place. It’s a series of symmetrical courtyards and temple like buildings, which finishes with a bridge to an ornate gate and wall, enclosing a grassy mound where the great man rests. Water and trees surround the complex, and a variety of bird song accompanied our walk through it.

So who was this fellow Minh Mang? Who could he have been to inspire such a splendid monument? I happened to pick up a book at Hue airport, which included a chapter on the Nguyen Dynasty’s second Emperor, who ruled from 1820 to 1840. The first point that was clearly made was that Minh Mang was “un-fatigable” in the bedroom, proved by his 142 children and five to six hundred wives. Reading between the lines, it seems that he may have been trying to keep up with the Chinese Emperor at the time, who was reported to have 3,000 wives and concubines. Minh Mang liked to have 5 concubines with him while relaxing daily, one for preparing tobacco, betel and areca, one for fanning (very wise as Hue does get extremely hot in the summer), one for massaging, one for singing lullaby and the last one for doing the chores. However, Minh Mang did have a prick of conscience during his sixth year of reigning, realising that the hundreds of women attending him in the Forbidden Palace may be causing the negative and feminine air not to circulate, and thus the drought that was wreaking havoc on the land. He resolved to reduce the number of his women by one hundred, very wise indeed.

In 1822, Minh Mang visited Ha Noi, and became extremely displeased at the sight of women in skirts, and thus ordered a ban on them, to be enforced by soldiers “watching diligently” at markets and street corners.

To quote my book directly….

‘The natives in Ha Noi were so annoyed with the ironical situation that they composed a folk poem to describe such a tragedy:

In Lunar June, there was a decree issued by the Emperor himself,

He banned wearing skirts, which frightened everybody,

Markets were closed because no women came there,

Otherwise, they had to take their husbands trousers off reluctantly,

Wearing trousers, you could do the selling.

Without trousers, you had to stand at the end of your village to keep watch on the mandarins.’

Visiting his tomb and then reading about this woman loving, skirt hating myth of a man is definitely one of those sublime to ridiculous experiences which you often encounter in this country.