Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

I have often heard people in the "phố cổ" (the Old Quarter) say that Hàng Mã has all four seasons.  In the three hundred and thirty-nine meters from the "Phùng Hưng" (the railway arches running parallel to the old Hanoi rail line) to the "Hàng Đường" intersection, the street's inventory rotates according to both lunar calendar and Gregorian calendar. At the back of every shop, behind whatever the calendar currently requires of the front, the permanent inventory holds its position: paper houses, ceremonial clothing in adult sizes for ancestral burning, paper vehicles at full scale, hell bank notes in denominations that appear to track real-world inflation as though someone has kept the books. These goods predate the festival tourism, predate most of what the street now sells. What to call that — whether it too counts as one of the four. Spring — Tết Nguyên Đán, Nguyên Tiêu The red of "Tết Nguyên Đán" (the Lunar New Year) arrives as structure,...

The cassette was a "băng Sơn Ca 7" — one of the commercial tape series that moved du ca recordings through southern households in the late 1960s and early 1970s — and it lived in a wooden cabinet alongside yellowing school notebooks that smelled of pencil shavings and mildew. I was eleven. The voice on the tape was already cracked before it reached me: warped by heat, by repeated playback, by whatever had happened to the magnetic ribbon inside. I heard it as weather. Not music exactly, not language exactly — a pressure system moving through the room that had no name I could give it yet. It made the air feel different without explaining why. Years later, I found the photographs. Printed on paper that had bronzed unevenly at the edges, stills from evenings at "Quán Văn" (the outdoor student gathering space at the Faculty of Letters courtyard on Đinh Tiên Hoàng Street, where Khánh Ly and Trịnh Công Sơn performed regularly through the late 1960s) — the frames so ...

Seven bottles arrived at a table meant for six. My aunt had ordered Saigon Special. Her husband had ordered Tiger. Their eldest son had 333. Someone had Coca-Cola. I had ordered Saigon Special too — the 330ml bottle that southern drinkers call "Sài Gòn lùn" (short Saigon, for the squat profile that makes it look abbreviated beside its taller siblings). The bottles were different heights, different shades of green, sweating at different rates onto the metal surface. The sound of each one being set down was slightly different — a short thud, a thin clink, a hollow knock. Nobody remarked on any of it. This was 2011, beside the "kênh Nhiêu Lộc" (the Nhiêu Lộc canal, then mid-rehabilitation, its embankment still smelling of disturbed silt and low-grade motor exhaust). I had come from Hanoi where a table like this would have had one kind of glass on it — the thick blue-tinted tumbler — and one source filling it: a "bom bia hơi" (a pressurized steel keg of fr...

"Phố Hoàng Hoa Thám" (a long street in Hanoi's Ba Đình district organized around plants, feng shui minerals, and objects of uncertain provenance) does not announce what it sells. The shops accumulate rather than display — rose quartz clusters beside African malachite slabs, polished spheres without price tags, objects whose origin is implied by proximity rather than stated. The sphere that stopped me was tiger's eye, polished to a depth that looked structural rather than decorative — as though the gold-brown bands were load-bearing, not ornamental. I turned it over. The weight was wrong for its size. Heavier, more insistent than I expected. I was buying it as a housewarming gift. The convention for such gifts in Hanoi runs toward objects that carry weight — literally and symbolically. The seller, unprompted, mentioned "làng đá mỹ nghệ Non Nước" (Non Nước stone craft village). Not the mountains nearby — the village. He had been there recently to restock. ...

At 4:00 AM on "phố Trần Nhật Duật" (the wide embankment road running between the Old Quarter and the Red River), a single rider pulls away from the kerb with a load that changes his silhouette entirely. Behind him, three towers of compressed vegetable sacks are tied at the waist and shoulders in a configuration that adds nearly a metre to each side, so that the motorbike no longer looks like a vehicle — it looks like a moving market stall, briefly animated. Styrofoam boxes are wedged beneath the sacks, and as he accelerates, meltwater traces a broken line across the asphalt, marking his path like a sentence being typed and erased simultaneously. I had been standing on the river-facing pavement for twenty minutes, noting the volume of traffic for an hour when the rest of the city is asleep, when the rider reached the far end of the boulevard and turned. Not onto another wide road. Into a dark mouth in the wall of shophouses — a "ngõ" (a narrow inner-district all...

The ice bucket arrives before anything else. A dented metal pail, sweating immediately in the humidity, four bottles already submerged to the neck — one "Sài Gòn lùn" (a stubby 330ml Saigon Special, the affectionate name for the short bottle), one Tiger, two 333s — each person's order distinct, already declared before they sat down. Along the "bờ kè" (the concrete embankment), the plastic stool arrives next: low enough that your knees approach your shoulders, oriented toward the dark surface of the "kênh Nhiêu Lộc" (Nhiêu Lộc canal) rather than toward any wall. The canal does not smell the way it once did. That fact, unremarkable now to anyone sitting here, is the structural reason this entire scene exists. By 7 PM, the sidewalks along Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa have reorganized themselves into something that was not planned by anyone: rows of tables angled toward the water, each with its own cluster of plastic stools, each stool occupied by someone...

There is a moment, somewhere between the kitchen and the table, when the bowl stops being something you are given and becomes something you are making. My father never explained this. He just handed me the chopsticks and pointed at the ceramic bowl on the counter. Inside: "mắm tôm" (fermented shrimp paste) — a dense lavender-gray paste, muted as old slate, smelling of salt flats and wet rope and something faintly oxidized, like metal left in rain. The oil was already crackling in the pan. He poured it directly into the paste — not slowly, not carefully — and the sound it made was the sound of a decision. I had been watching him do this my entire childhood without understanding what he was actually doing. I thought the ritual was about softening the smell. It took me years to realize the smell was not the problem to be solved. It was the starting condition. What he was constructing, with the lime and the whisper of sugar and the few drops of white rice liquor and the rapid...

At five o'clock every afternoon, a sound came through the same gap in the wall — the narrow space between the neighbor's shutter and the tin roof overhang of the alley, where heat pooled and radio signals bent. The old man two units over played the same ballad on repeat: a northern melody, a woman's voice, one line arriving whole and unanswered through the gap: "Và nhớ tiếng leng keng tàu sớm khuya, hướng ra Đống Đa Cầu Giấy..." — and remember the leng keng sound of the early and late tram, heading toward Đống Đa, Cầu Giấy. I was ten years old. The syllables "leng keng" were pure sound to me — a phoneme without an object, no heavier than wind crossing a wire. The "tàu điện" (electric tram) network had been dismantled nine years earlier. The tracks had been pulled up before I turned one. I had no referent for what the song was describing. The knowledge arrived later, in pieces — through my grandmother's accounts, my father's secondha...