Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

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The Line Used to Be

You could ask for kem at Hiệu kem Bốn Mùa — Four Seasons, the shop was called, though under the ration system there had only ever been the one — and that was the whole menu: one kind, one price set by the state, poured from the same batch for the child in front of you and the one behind. You queued for it outside the round pavilion on Lê Thái Tổ street, the one everyone still calls Nhà Tròn , the round house. The line did not move quickly, and nobody expected it to. Waiting was most of what the system offered besides the cup itself — a reason to stand outside on a summer evening, next to people you hadn't chosen and couldn't skip past. I did not think of any of that as anything but an inconvenience until I was sitting inside the same round building decades later, on granite that didn't exist when I was a child, waiting for a bill instead of a cup. Understanding what actually happened to Hiệu kem Bốn Mùa on Hồ Gươm — how a state ice cream counter became a Hapro café wi...

Where the steps met water

In a folder marked hs: 78.693 , inside the Résidence Supérieure au Tonkin records at the National Archives Center I in Hanoi, there is a photograph a French explorer named Firmin-André Salles took in 1896. It shows a gate the French sometimes mislabeled Grand Bouddha — the temple's own name is Quán Thánh, and the deity behind its doors is Trấn Vũ, not Buddha at all — and it shows, at the base of the gate's stone steps, water. Not approaching. Not visible somewhere past a wall. Touching. The lake's edge sits directly against the lowest stone, the way a threshold sits against a floor. I was standing at the intersection of Thanh Niên and Thụy Khuê a hundred and thirty years later, four lanes of traffic between me and a lake I could hear but not see, when I understood that the water in that photograph had not receded on its own. It had been asked, for decades, one project at a time, to leave. That asking is most of what this essay means by Quan Thanh Temple's history wit...

Eleven Phins in a Basin

The woman who runs the coffee stall on Nguyễn Thiếp Street keeps eleven phin filters in a plastic basin under the counter, and no two of them close the same way. She reaches for one without looking. This morning it's a squat aluminum body whose base plate no longer sits flush — warped just enough, after decades of boiling water, to rock a half-degree against the glass tumbler underneath it. She doesn't notice. Her hand has already moved to the coffee tin. I take an identical filter from the basin while she's occupied with a customer. It weighs almost nothing, lighter than the spoon resting inside it, cold at the rim and faintly warm at the base where the last brew touched it. Four pieces separate in my palm: a lid, a cylindrical chamber, a perforated disc the vendors call tấm nén — the press — and a base plate, rế phin , sold on its own because it wears out first. The holes across the disc aren't evenly spaced. A few sit slightly wider than the rest, one punched at a...

Al Noor Mosque, Hanoi

By the time I stepped into the courtyard at 12 Hàng Lược, the Friday sermon was already three sentences past its opening line, and no one turned to notice a stranger arriving late. The Adhan came through the open doors in a register that didn't ask the street to quiet down for it. It simply laid itself over the noise already there — a moped idling in low gear, someone counting change over a stack of red paper, a kettle going off two doors down. I had expected the sound to sit apart from the market the way a foreign object sits apart from a body: tolerated, maybe, but never absorbed. It didn't. The call and the change-counting moved at the same volume, in the same air, the way two things move when they've been doing this for longer than either can remember. Men knelt in rows that spilled past the doorway, because the hall inside had already filled. Al Noor Mosque Hanoi is not a recent arrival. It is the last standing anchor of a community that began arriving in the 1880s...

Hanoi Sticky Rice, Before the Street Wakes

Six-thirty in the morning, and the intersection in the Old Quarter is still half dark, half lit. In front of a shuttered storefront, a line of people stands in a straight column along the sidewalk. No one talks above a murmur. No one checks a phone. At the head of the line sits a basket wrapped in thick cloth, a thin column of steam rising straight out of it before dissolving somewhere below the eaves. I had arrived with a wrong assumption. In a city where motorbikes thread through half-second gaps in traffic, I expected a sidewalk rice stall to run on the same tempo — scoop fast, wrap fast, pay fast. But the woman selling it, seated low on a plastic stool, didn't shorten a single motion. She held a thin blade and shaved slice after slice off a block of pressed mung bean, each sliver curling as it fell, thin enough to look like a petal, onto the turmeric-yellow rice underneath. No one in the line urged her to move faster. The mung bean block hadn't been sliced in advance. I...

The Informal Recycling Network

The bottle lands on the scale still warm from someone's hand. A two-liter PET bottle, crushed flat along its ribs, a grease smear across the label where a kitchen rag wiped it just clean enough to sell but not clean enough to look new. The scale is a rusted mechanical arm bolted into a doorway too narrow for a car, set into an alley behind a wet market in Chợ Lớn — Ho Chi Minh City's old ethnic-Chinese quarter, where the house numbers still follow a sequence that stopped making sense to anyone but the people who live there. A man in flip-flops watches the needle settle, calls out a price half in Vietnamese and half in Cantonese-inflected slang, and writes the number by hand into a ledger gone soft at the corners. Behind him the room goes back further than the doorway suggests, built for something else, repurposed, the ceiling low enough that a tall man ducks nea...

Lục Ngạn, the Best Lychee Never Reached the Road

A man at a roadside stall sent me up this hillside — I'd asked where to see the harvest up close, and he tilted his chin toward a dirt track and said to find whoever was up in the trees. The farmer up there never agreed to be written about, so he stays nameless here. He climbed into his own lychee trees the way other men climb a familiar staircase, without looking down, one hand finding a branch he'd clearly used a hundred times before, a cloth sack already slung crosswise over his shoulder. From the ground, his wife called up the count as clusters came down: four, three, six, a number scratched each time onto a scrap of paper held against her palm with a thumb. It wasn't six in the morning yet and the heat hadn't started; what had started was the smell — leaves crushed and bruised off the branches, and underneath that, the sweet rot of fruit that had dropped early and split open in the grass. Behind that unhurried pace sat headlines I'd been reading all week: a w...