Legend and Wikipedia have it that Vietnamese cuisine is made up of five elements: Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter, Spicy.
I’d say these are the five ingredients to life, too. At any given moment, we might feel any one of these flavors, or a combination of them. Even the Bitter or Sour aspects of life create a distinct perspective that’s valuable, if unwelcome at times.
And so here’s five different flavors of Vietnam for you. Individually, they’re stories. Together, they’re a tapestry that reveal my experience in this beautiful, frustrating, mysterious country.
Sweet: Serendipity is Next to Godliness
Serendipity makes life light as angel feathers, even for a moment. I am always looking for it. I find it in a fast friend, named Cương.
He wants to build a travel blog online. He wants to partner with me to do it.
Why me? What makes me special? Honestly, I’d say it’s my open mindedness and curiosity. How I actively a ppreciate Vietnamese culture and defend it to other expats. So many people come here and only see the trash on the streets. So many people treat the language barrier like it’s a personal slight to them. Maybe they’re not looking for the same things as me.
Our first stop is an old gate. Medieval style. Still has cannon wounds in it from when the French began their colonization. The Vietnamese have reconquered their lands over and over. I hope it sticks.
Second stop: one of the older bridges where trains run through. We park the bike on the busy motorcycle highway. We rush across it, climb the guardrails and stand on the tracks. I feel like a teenager again, breaking in somewhere prohibited. We take footage and photos. Portrait mode makes us look gorgeous.
Our third stop is to hit up a famous Hanoi spot. The original cafe whose progenitors invented “egg coffee.” Simply delicious. We sit there, making commentary for the GoPro, watching people sipping their egg-yellow coffees. All kinds of people, too. Tired travelers. Koreans. Europeans. Vietnamese. All there for the same reason.
Next ia lunch. A delicious and strange (to me) dish, bún đậu mắm tôm. Fermented shrimp paste accompanied by things to dip in. Very American, in my mind. The flavors distinctly Vietnamese. Cold noodles become fragrant and salty in the paste. Sausage gains deeper umami. Cucumbers are actually worth eating with this dip.
Finally, trà đá, technically “tea, iced.” It washes down the fragrant fermentation. Conquers the humid midday heat.
Most important is the feeling of it all. Riding on the back of Cương’s scooter, feeling like a brother to him. Asking him loads of questions and getting thoughtful answers. It’s the jokes about America. It’s the observations of “maybe this is why this thing is.” It’s like we’ve known each other forever.
I love Cương. He inspires adventure. He inspires creativity and humor. I’d do anything for him. Even eat things like fermented shrimp paste. I wish I could do something for his son and the chronic ailments he faces. I wish I could make his travel blog successful with a snap of my fingers. I do the next best thing.
I go along for the ride.
Bitter: What a Waste
Content warning: animal harm
Chicken and waffles and charades. Friends new and old sitting around a small table, golden pastries with squares drenched in syrup, salty Korean-fried-chicken on top, roasted potatoes and Coke Zero on the side. The ingredients for a perfect night.
We play charades in teams of boys vs girls, like old childhood days. We are full in more ways than one. We go home and rest like toddlers, easy, peacefully. But not all of us. One of us is walking his dog on dark streets, the night like any other in Hanoi. The smells of the streets inspire many feelings. To the dog, it is pure, funky elation. He sniffs something particularly delicious and snaps it up.
The dog and his owner return home. Not long after, the dog is panicked. The dog is vomiting and leaking. The dog is dying. The owner is panicking, too. Calling the people who could help him over and over. Calling the vet. Calling for help. Calling the dog’s name. What’s wrong? The dog is dying. The dog is dying. The dog is…
Dead, my wife tells me. Our friend’s dog has died and there is no way to get the body to the vet. I suggest a “tuk-tuk” - a three-wheeled motorcycle truck that people use to deliver stuff all over town. Rarely has one carried a 150lb dog - alive or otherwise.
We arrange it. The body is carried to the truck by my hands and two others. The body is still a bit warm…makes you wonder. No. The dog is gone. I feel disembodied. Sigmund was once here. Sigmund gave this giant German Shepherd shape life and joy and sweetness. I feel wrong. This could be my dog. Could be my bitterness. I have it, just secondhand. There is sadness like an acrid coal in my chest.
The vet says, “Poisoned, purposefully.” Someone put poison on a bone or some meat for the dog. Left it on the street. Any animal could have touched it. A bare-footed child could have walked on it, tasted it, died instead.
Nothing makes you feel more alien than being in a country where people are allowed to leave poison out on purpose. Nothing makes you feel weaker than having no method of obtaining justice. Nothing more rageful and distressed and wrong than carrying a treasured animal, heavy and stinking, into the back of an aluminum truck.
What a waste, I think.
What a waste.
In memory of Sigmund, a beautiful, good boy.
Salty: Mucous, Mountains, Motorcycles
A moldy, damp spring has cast a pall on our spirits. Life is soggy. Life is grim. The skies over Hanoi are painted a communist gray. I prefer blaring, capitalist blue.
It’s time to get away.
A shitty bus takes us into the night, depositing us at our hotel and hardly coming to a stop to do so. The driver is tired, like us, after all.
A clean hotel, a clean sleep, my throat draining from early sickness. Maybe not the right time to get away.
We’re picked up by Vietnamese dudes, then wait around with a breakfast of noodles. When will the adventure begin? When will the waiting end?
We meet two couples on the journey with us. Soon enough, all six of us are on the road (plus our experienced guides). Stephanie and I are driving our own motorcycles. We play cat and mouse on the twisty roads. Leaving Ha Giang on two wheels…the shackles come off.
There’s hints of blue between mountain peaks. There’s mountains everywhere, real ones, impossibly terraced by careful hands. We rise over passes and zip through valleys. The whole world reduced to the road ahead and snatches of sungleams showering the landscape in glorious hues of green, slate, and chocolate.
They say money can’t buy happiness. I argue that as long as you can buy a trip on the Ha Giang loop, they’re dead wrong.
The adventure is a complete one. With highs and lows.
I get sick, really sick. But riding is my DayQuil (on top of the the DayQuil). Herbal baths in pine tubs make me feel like a bag of tea; warm, succulent, and in tune with the natural world.
Stephanie is the first and only rider to have a crash. But it’s a silly, low-speed one. No damage done. Plenty of laughs, though. We’re stopped by the police, once. One of our members gets fined a whole $60, but really , it’s a bribe.
The other couples are additional lenses to see the world. The young couple is there to party, escaping their demanding work life. The couple from Greece is there to taste and see and share. There are no lows with these new friends.
There are beds harder than rock bottom. There is plentiful, sometimes dubious, food. There are hot cakes made from cassava and red beans. There is “happy water” - rice wine - that doesn’t improve my health, but certainly alleviates my mortal symptoms.
We race all the way to the Vietnam-China border. We scale a monument that stands like a middle finger to Vietnam’s larger, and incredibly unreliable, ally. We ride through every kind of climate. Humid jungle. Cold mist. Hot, dry, desert. Temperate, cooling evening. Same for the terrain. Paved and unpaved. Farmland and highway. Switchbacks and long straightaways, perfect for takeoff.
And the final night, in a homestay at the bottom of a rustic valley, we share the simplest meal of all. Another group of travelers is with us then, so the conversations are wider. The dynamics different. All smiles, though, and a few games. One requiring masterful butt clenching skills to drop a quarter in a cup. Another designed for heavy drinking.
I skip out on the drinking and opt for singing karaoke. Country, of course. An Australian joins me. The land from down under gets Garth Brooks.
The morning before our final jaunt home, we hike to a waterfall and swimming hole. We baptize ourselves in water that must originate in heaven. It’s chilling. It’s soothing to muscles stiffened by days in the saddle. It’s the cherry on top.
By then, we’re ready to go home to the damp and the overcast. We’ve bottled up the sun and fresh air and joie de vivre, holding it in our lungs like free divers.
I will never let that breath go.
Sour: American War, American Violence
Content Warning: Graphic descriptions of violence, harsh hyperbole
Saigon, or, Ho Chi Minh City, is a strange place.
More capital city than the capital, Hanoi. Less gray skies and insane roads. There’s more order, here, than where the seat of the government lies.
It’s the city the U.S. pinned her hopes on, those decades ago. It’s where we Americans pumped so much money and resources and ideology. It’s also where it all failed. It’s where we became the very thing we wished to prevent.
Touring the War Remnants museum is not for the faint of heart. You might see it as the real history of the Vietnam War, or, as it’s named here, the American War. Yet, others claim the museum is propaganda from the prevailing and victorious government.
It’s both. Viciously so.
What really does it is the pictures.
When you think of American soldiers, you imagine muscled men with guns, saving their comrades, killing true villains. Heroes who sacrifice all for the ideas of “security” and “freedom.”
The pictures tell a different story.
Grenaded villager corpses, more torso than body, carried by the remaining arm.
Vietnamese children, babies, naked and sprawled and full of holes like Swiss cheese, their blood staining their mothers’ clothes. They lie atop them. They lie in heaps.
The soldiers smiling as they look down on their dark work. Smiling at the tortured screams of an unarmed man.
A Vietnamese man’s body tethered to a tank, dragged, the soldier atop it proud of it, for some reason.
And all this before we get to the victims of Agent Orange. A calamitous and ruinous and unspeakably vile weapon. We knew what it would do.
Mutated men and women. Cancerous, covered in tumors and lumps. Missing limbs or having distorted versions. Stunted. Missing fingers. Children born unable to speak. Children with their skulls loose and stretching. Children unable to learn. Some with double-heads like two watermelons sprouting together. Some forced to crawl like beasts their whole lives.
But why should these pictures matter? These things are long past. The future where there are no children with disfigurement, where land is not plagued with mines, where the ecosystems we scoured are alive again - that future is in reach. Similarly, the Vietnamese - on balance - hold no animosity for the U.S. and her citizens.
There’s a lot to say about the American/Vietnam war. There’s more to be said of war in general and of violence and how we abet it.
If you dig into it, you find that Ho Chi Minh, the father of modern Vietnam, wanted the United States’ help to become an independent country. He was willing to align with us, and what’d we do?
We became invaders and conquerors and torturers in the wake of the French. e became war criminals. And for what? Our fear of not controlling the outcome? Of letting people decide what they want to do with their country? The means we went to. The sheer insanity. The stupidity. Bombs and bombs and bombs. All amounting to incalculable loss.
And when it came to call those responsible for such violence, the fingers pointed in circles. Who wanted to convict a president or his staff for war crimes? And why would we, ever? War has been our major export for decades.
Vietnam will happen again and again. War in every shape and form, engineered and inspired and let loose. Not like the US is the only one with their hands in the pot. But we’ve certainly got a lion’s share in our fingers.
So let’s get wild with it. Give our military budget a true carte blanche. How do we best eviscerate children and their mothers holding them? How do we blow more farmers to bits than ever before? How can we sew the seeds of something like Agent Orange so that it lasts into the next century, hiding in the genes of the afflicted?
That familiar old lie, “necessary evil,” is probably on your tongue. By all means, let’s hide behind it. Let’s really believe the world will always be this way. Inhale, accept that there are still lands sewn with mines and unexploded ordinance ready to maim a young man walking by. Exhale, appreciate how guns have more protections than any other human right.
Is that enough hyperbole for you? Back to the sober truth, then.
This war happened a long time ago. But the things that caused this war, the reasons and powers that be that engineer war, they’re still here. We allow them to exist.
Back during the Vietnam War, monks and young people set themselves on fire in protest.
What will we do, all of us? Do you silently believe and whisper necessary evil? Do you not have an answer at all? A time will come when you will need one.
Oh, wait, that time is now.
To see the pictures I’ve referenced, see these sources:
War Crime Photos, Times
Agent Orange Victim Photos, The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation
Spicy: Love in the Time of Uncertainty
Before we moved to Vietnam, Stephanie and I were in the pits. Not like marriage-ending pits. But just a hard time. Now that we’re here, we’re still in a tough time. But we feel more united than ever before.
And that makes all the difference.
In the winter of 2021, our landlords became a statistic. They joined the droves of Californians exiting the sunshine state. That put us out…and into the dog-eat-dog world of house hunting.
Yes, this was our logical next step. Yes, we finally had the money for it. It was time, baby!
Oh, the houses we saw. One that was 1400 square feet with 300 of it being un-permitted, uncertified construction. A dozen of them that were thirty years old and practically untouched. Original eighties construction that didn’t scream vintage as much as “we didn’t give two shits about this place.”
And even the houses we put bids on, always at the top of our budget, were all but fixer uppers. The one that stole our hearts: an adobe house. Beautiful adobe brick. A vaulted ceiling. An architectural diamond in the rough. We put in a bid with our dreams on the dotted line.
Like most houses in that early 2022 time, it was taken by the highest bidder - 100k over the asking price. That time it felt like the door did hit us on the way out. Rejected by the universe.
“What do we do? What do we do?” we asked while living with my gracious parents. How do we build a life?
“We start over in Vietnam,” was the strange answer.
But once we got here, our excitement was stalled. Our dreams further disentangled. Our careers cast into a deeper shroud of uncertainty.
But…we started having the times of our lives.
From strange taxi rides to hot days sipping juices by the river. From searching high and low for an electric fan to buying custom linen bedding. While shivering in a freezing bus beneath stinking blankets. While suffering in our own, private ways (depression, bitterness, lost in life, hungry, sick, low on funds), we turned it all into interest fuel. After nearly five years of marriage, we found ever more to experience and discover.
Let’s get vulnerable for a moment .
I’ve been crippled, emotionally, for over a year. My confidence was shattered by a bad job and an even worse pair of bosses like Hotep and Huy from the Prince of Egypt. Stephanie has been a constant support and friend through this time. Even when I am too cowardly to make simple decisions. Even when she asks for help and I cannot find the energy to assist her.
Now, I’m re-learning how to be her ally in everything. I’m also in therapy.
Sidenote: the bedroom part of our marriage has not always been easy for us. Not until we moved to Vietnam did we figure things out. Now, things are quite nice and spicy. (Yes, Stephanie did allow me to write this, though I removed a few adjectives at her behest.)
If you’ve read the stories above, you might find this entry broad and vague. You might find it lacking specificity. Here’s some for you: holding each other crying in the kitchen about our foolishness in moving to Vietnam, again in the War Remnants museum (see above). Lots of laughing, joking about a little fall Stephanie took on a motorcycle. Sharing, opening up about my discussions from therapy. Playing games like Cribbage and Stop Go and Railroad Ink.
A thousand small moments that push us up and down the mountains and valleys of life. Grieving and smiling and searching and breaking down together. Together.
The spice of marriage requires many ingredients. Togetherness, partnership, or a deep camaraderie like knotted veins is certainly one of them. I’m not calling it love, because the depth of that word varies so much. It’s the inscrutably-inseperable-bond-of-two-prevailing-selfish-people-discovering-how-to-live-as-one-ness.
Is that a word?
It should be.
That’s the Five Flavors of Vietnam. Thank you for reading and listening!
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Thank you for reading and listening!
The Five Elements of a Life in Vietnam