Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

The jar sits on the counter of a workshop in Quarter 7, dark red going to charcoal along one shoulder, its surface too rough for a bowl and too fired to still be earth. No handle. No glaze. When I lift it, the walls are colder than the room around them, and lighter than the size suggests—as if the clay had learned, somewhere in its firing, exactly how much water it needed to hold and let the rest of the weight go. Run a thumb around the belly and you find them: shallow ridges, circling the jar at intervals that are close but never quite equal. There is no repeating motif here, no stamped or carved pattern that asserts itself as decoration. One ridge sits a hand’s width from the next, then a little more, then a little less, the way a person’s stride shortens on ground that isn’t flat. I ask the young man minding the shop what made them. He shrugs—some tool, maybe, or the way the clay dried on one side before the other. He doesn’t think it worth explaining to someone holding a water ...

The time I stood inside a vat house on National Route 1A, I was ready for the smell of a fish market at low tide—something sharp that announces itself before you cross the threshold. What reached me instead was warmer: a toasted, almost caramel note, the kind that comes off bread crust rather than the sea. It rose from a clear stream running out of a spigot near the floor, amber going toward the color of strong tea, catching the afternoon light through a gap in the corrugated roof. I had assumed decay. Eighteen months of fish and salt under a coastal sun should smell like rot—the reasonable assumption of anyone who has walked past a market stall at noon. I was wrong, and being wrong told me something being right never would have: whatever was happening in that tank was not decomposition being tolerated. It was decomposition being directed. A woman near the spigot adjusted a wooden tap with the practiced indifference of someone who has done it every morning for thirty years, caught ...

The provincial road out of Hanoi toward Phú Xuyên doesn’t look like it’s following anything. It curves the way roads curve when they’re avoiding fields, not tracing history—past a stretch of laundry hung to dry on a grass slope, past a stall selling rice paper and battery packs, past a man patching a soft spot in the embankment with a shovel and a bucket of clay. For most of an hour I drove believing the road ran beside the embankment. Then the shoulder narrowed, the ditch on the right disappeared, and I understood I’d been on top of the dike the whole time. The route south toward Phượng Vũ village runs along the crown of an earthwork that has been rebuilt so many times it no longer announces itself as one. This is, more or less, the same line of earth that Phạm Duy Tốn followed south out of Hanoi in 1915. He was a working reporter sent to see what remained after the dikes broke, not a writer seeking atmosphere by retracing personal ground. What he found on this road, and what he mad...

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...

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...