by Dana Sachs
Many foreigners who lived in Hanoi celebrated Tet by leaving the country. Why not avoid the chúc Tết duties, and the heavy eating, by spending the Vietnamese New Year lounging on a beach in Thailand? The weather was getting colder just as the Vietnamese holiday season erupted in full force, and I could certainly understand the attractions of the beach. But I’d been hearing about Tet for two years. I wasn’t going to miss it.
“You can never understand Vietnam,” Yen told me, “unless you’ve experienced Tet.” She began to point out things I never would have noticed, things that, for someone who’d grown up in Hanoi, were unmistakable signs of Tet’s approach. The stores selling children’s clothes, for example, were crowded with parents buying new outfits for their sons and daughters. And sunflower seeds had become, by the end of January, nearly as omnipresent as rice. Vietnamese munched seeds all year, but now they began to consume as if the crack-crack-crack of teeth on seeds marked some kind of drumroll for the season. Seeds did, I saw now, demand conviviality. No one sat alone in a room munching seeds. No one ate them for dinner. Seeds were sitting-around-with-friends snacks, chúc Tết snacks. In my earliest attempts at Vietnamese, I’d learned a verb for this sort of activity: ăn nhậu lai rai, which meant to eat and drink in a leisurely manner, keeping the mouth and fingers happy, while the mind is busy socializing. I thought I’d known what ăn nhậu lai rai meant, but it wasn’t until I watched Tung and three of his friends sit in our living room one afternoon and consume an entire kilo of sunflower seeds that I finally began to understand the true meaning of the term.
Other signs of the approaching New Year began to appear as well. According to tradition, in the days before Tet, people bring delicacies to others they want to impress. To keep up with the demand for these items, temporary specialty shops opened all over town, their bright red banners wishing everyone a happy Tet and proclaiming the delectability of their particular products. Yen and I went shopping at one of the biggest markets, where shopkeepers stood in front of dozens of glass jars full of sugar-coated dried fruits, the holiday treats known as mút. A saleswoman weighed out half a kilo of apricot mút for Yen to give to her aunt, a mixture of cherry and ginger mút for her mother, and tomato mút she’d give to her favorite professor from the university. All around us, shoppers were stocking up on jars of imported pickles, apricot wine, Russian vodka, dried sausages, and tins of golden Danish sugar cookies. In a country where most diets were limited to whatever local farms and factories produced, a jar of French mustard meant real luxury and could serve as the perfect holiday gift. Foods that foreigners bought in Hanoi all year were now being swept up by the locals.
Vendors began to appear on the city streets selling miniature orange trees and hoa đào, the small blossoming peach trees that were as much a requisite part of Tet as Christmas trees at Christmas. The vendors roamed the city with trees slung to the frames of their bikes, and prospective buyers checked the trees carefully, looking for just the right mix of branch, bud, and flower. One afternoon, I took Viet to the Tet flower market, in the center of the city’s Old Quarter. With Viet balanced on the back of my bike, I rode right into the center of the market, stopping in what seemed like a forest of trees. The tree-sellers were bundled up against the winter cold, and as the wind picked up, I buttoned all the buttons on Viet’s coat. The lacy pink veil of peach blossoms couldn’t keep out the chill, but it promised the coming of spring.
Viet, who normally had a hard time interrupting his play long enough to eat or go to the bathroom, was motionless now. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. Then he put his face into a mass of blossoms and let the soft petals touch his skin.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what Yen had told me about the days of Tet setting the stage for the entire year. If your Tet was happy, she’d told me, you’d have a happy year. If it was sad, you’d have a sad one. Even Tung and Huong took this concept very seriously, though they were not at all religious. They had a little ancestral altar, but they often seemed to forget that it was there. As Tet approached, though, they both sprang into action. Huong cut Viet’s hair and bought new outfits for both him and the baby. Tung had the Dream washed and buffed until it glistened as much as anything could glisten on those sunless winter days. Ly stood on a ladder and pulled year-old spiderwebs off the ceiling with the handle of a broom. One afternoon, a few days before New Year’s, Tung brought home a peach tree and moved the TV out of the way so that the plant would occupy the most prominent position in our house.
Hanoi’s wealthy weren’t the only ones preparing. The street children who lived on Cam Chi Street, where I ate noodle soup, were getting ready as well. All year, they slept in a half-hidden corner of the alley; at first glance, their bodies, curled around one another, looked like piles of discarded rags. Over the past few months, I had gotten to know a few of them. One afternoon, I invited an adolescent girl and a boy of about ten to eat with me. They were shy, and, at first, they couldn’t even look at me. Only after the food arrived, and we all had something to focus on, did they begin to relax. I asked them about their lives. Both had left home in the countryside because their families were too poor to take care of them. They lived in Hanoi and returned home once a year, at Tet, bringing with them whatever money they’d been able to save over the past twelve months. It seemed ironic that homeless children sleeping on the streets of the city would end up being breadwinners for their families back home, but that’s how the economy was shaping up in Vietnam. They could earn more than farmers out in the countryside. The girl had managed to save ten thousand dong, about ten dollars. The boy, who was younger, cuter, and therefore more successful at begging, had earned fifteen. They would have had more, they told me, but they’d both been robbed. They explained all this to me as if they were telling me what grades they got in school, and not describing the circumstances of urban homelessness. We were just three people having lunch together who happened to be discussing poverty. After lunch, I gave them some money, but, later, after I’d gone home, I decided to give them more. By the time I went back to the food stall alley, however, all of the street children were gone. They’d already returned to the countryside.
By then, the firecrackers were beginning to explode. Children treated them as toys and shot them like missiles into the rush-hour traffic. Foreigners were easy targets, a fact that added a whole new challenge to my rides through the city. The Vietnamese authorities had begun to criticize firecrackers as a social problem, and thus, in the fluid way that official opinion came to dominate the pages of the press, newspapers ran prominent stories about fireworks-related deaths. In one incident I heard about, a bus exploded because a reveler had set off a firecracker inside it. By the next year, in fact, the government, citing danger and expense, would ban firecrackers entirely, which meant that my first Tet was the last explosive one in Vietnam. For now, though, Hanoians were still setting them off with abandon.
Hanoi became strange and dreamlike then. Even time changed. As if following some subtle shift designated by the heavens, just as the holiday began, Vietnamese returned to their ancient tradition of marking days. Throughout the rest of the year, they follow the solar-based calendar that’s used in the West. At Tet, they switch to the lunar one. If, for example, Tet began at midnight on February 9, then February 10 was the first day of the Lunar New Year. Suddenly, Vietnamese began to follow the moon. No matter what the Western calendar might call the date on which the Lunar New Year’s Eve fell, Vietnamese called it “the thirtieth of Tet,” and, according to the logic of the season, New Year’s Day itself was known as “the first of Tet,” followed by the second, the third, fourth, etc. The rest of the world continued racing through the same old year, while Vietnam stepped off for a week and then, reluctantly, stepped back on.
Because the holiday set the tone for the coming year, Vietnamese gave a great deal of thought to whom they would invite to be the first person to walk through their front door in the first minutes after the new year began. It must be a person wh
ose previous year has been prosperous, or a person with a reputation for bringing luck. As a foreigner, I was considered both prosperous and lucky. Thus, almost everyone I knew wanted me to come visit them on Tet. The competition for my presence was so great that I had to settle my schedule weeks in advance, filling every day like a dance card to accommodate all the people anxious to have me visit.
My first appointment was at Yen’s house, where I’d committed myself to helping cook, then eat, the feast for New Year’s Eve. The family had made their bánh chưng well in advance (also like fruitcake, bánh chưng has a long shelf life), but there was much more to do before the new year arrived. I sat on the kitchen floor, wrapping spring rolls, while Yen, her mother, and her younger sister hurried to complete the dozen or so dishes they would prepare as an offering to their ancestors. Only after the ancestors have had their share of the food could the living family members eat. As we completed each dish, Yen or her sister would climb the three flights of stairs to the family altar, then set the dish there. For hours, the two sisters ran back and forth between the kitchen and the altar, while their mother and I kept working in the kitchen.
It was after dusk already, and the firecrackers were exploding constantly on the streets outside. I looked out the window, excited but nervous about the increasing onslaught of noise. I’d grown up watching firecrackers from a cozy distance on the Fourth of July. These explosives were closer, constant, and more dangerous.
Yen’s mother, a successful businesswoman who ran a number of beer halls in Hanoi, could see that I was edgy. “Don’t you have firecrackers in the States?” she asked.
“Yes, but mostly for public displays,” I said. “In many states, people are forbidden to buy or sell them.”
“Forbidden!” She found the idea incredible. “Why?”
“Because they’re so dangerous,” I said.
Yen’s mother was silent for a while, slicing beef and considering what I’d told her. When she looked up at me again, she had a smirk on her face. “So you Americans aren’t allowed to shoot off firecrackers,” she said, “but it’s quite all right for you to carry guns around and shoot each other?”
A huge bang went off in what must have been a neighbor’s yard. It was followed by a string of tiny pops that sounded like machine-gun fire. Yen’s mother looked back down at her cutting board, chuckling, neither expecting a response nor wanting one. I stopped what I was doing and gazed outside, but the night was dark and I couldn’t see a thing. Even though Yen’s mother seemed satisfied with her knowledge of my country, part of me felt that she should know that her information wasn’t accurate, that it wasn’t “quite all right” for Americans to shoot one another. In the end, though, I kept silent, reaching my fingers into the bowl full of spring roll filling and continuing to wrap. There was no point, really, in correcting her. And, in some ways, she wasn’t all wrong.
By the time we finally sat down for the first feast of Tet, we were too exhausted even to talk, and we ate almost silently. The women in Yen’s family had spent the last weeks cleaning and cooking without respite. For them, the holiday was no vacation. Still, their tired faces showed content, even joy. Afterward, we went out to the front porch, and Yen’s father and sister lit firecrackers.
Midnight on New Year’s Eve, known as giao thứa, is the most significant moment of the Vietnamese year, and I wanted to experience it at the very center of the city. At around ten that night, Yen drove me over to my friend Van’s, who lived near Hoan Kiem Lake. After all the exploding firecrackers of the past few weeks, now, only hours before the new year arrived, the streets were eerily quiet. Almost everyone was inside their homes, setting offerings before their altars and praying. On every doorway hung a long strand holding hundreds of bright red firecrackers, ready to be lit at precisely the instant when the new year arrived. At Van’s house, five or six of us sat drinking rice wine. We didn’t look so different from a group of friends hanging out on New Year’s Eve in the States, but it didn’t feel like an American New Year’s Eve at all. The evening seemed hushed and somber, as if something enormous were about to happen. We kept glancing at the clock.
And then, as the clock struck twelve, the firecrackers began to pop, slowly at first, but with increasing frequency. We walked out of Van’s house and made our way up Ba Trieu Street toward Hoan Kiem Lake. For so many weeks, I had braced myself for this moment when the world would explode, and now it was happening.
I couldn’t see anything except the black of the sky, the white flash of exploding firecrackers, and the rusty fog of smoke. But the noise was a demon in the air. For the first time in my life I could imagine the sound of war. And that, perhaps, was one of the main reasons foreigners had such a problem with Tet. Given Vietnam’s history of war, giao thứa could have given outsiders an uncomfortable suspicion that there were inherently violent tendencies within Vietnamese culture. On the surface, it seemed true. Any culture that would willingly put itself through something as aurally painful and potentially destructive as the simultaneous explosion of millions of firecrackers seemed, at the very least, masochistic. But standing in the middle of Hanoi at the moment of giao thứa, I realized that something entirely different was going on. All around me people were joyous, not reveling in the danger, but reveling in their happiness. At that moment, I began to understand the truth about Tet. Vietnamese didn’t love firecrackers because of their violence. They loved them because of their noise. Firecrackers were Vietnam’s call to the heavens: “Here we are! Don’t forget us! Let the new year be better!” Clutching my hands to my ears to protect them from the sound, I knew that what Yen had said was true. Tet revealed the essential nature of Vietnam. This place was complicated, yes, and full of pain as well, but beneath the hardship lay a sense of joy, a recognition of change, and, perhaps most significantly, a pervasive hope for the future.
My head ached from all the explosions, but my whole body felt alive and strangely grateful to have a head that could ache, lungs that could fill with smoky air, ears that could ring, and, most importantly, a mind that could sense the power of what was happening all around me. Holding my fingers in my ears, I rotated in slow circles, bracing myself for each new flash of light. Vietnam changed then. For a few brief moments at least, it floated between reality and dream, between heaven and earth. As an outsider, I might never fully understand the meaning of Tet, but I knew that I was witnessing something spectacular and precious. A whole nation, through the force of firecrackers and collective will, was transforming itself into something utterly different, to herald the future, and welcome it.
For days after giao thứa, every street and sidewalk was covered with the paper fragments of exploded firecrackers, which Hanoians considered a blanket of lucky red covering the city and all of Vietnam. I spent the days of Tet in a whirl of feast after feast, visit after visit. Most of my visits were also good-byes, because I planned to leave for the States on the fifth day. I wasn’t the only one going away. My friend Linh was also leaving Vietnam. Son had managed to secure a coveted position at the Vietnamese embassy in France, and the family was about to move to Paris. On the evening I went by their house, they were packing up the last of their belongings. It was an ironic time for them to leave. After living for years in a bare, one-room house, they’d finally saved enough money to complete an extensive renovation, enlarging their space into a three-room home with a tile floor, a comfortable loft, and, most thrilling of all, a sparkling new Western-style bathroom. The place wasn’t big, but, for a family that had quite recently used a tin pail for a toilet, it was like a palace. Their fortunes had improved so much that Linh was able to quit her job at the Metropole Hotel in order to go be a housewife in Paris. Despite all that, she wasn’t completely happy about the idea of leaving Vietnam. She’d never been overseas before, had never even ridden in an airplane. The flight to Europe would take an entire day, she told me. She was worried that they wouldn’t have enough food to eat on board. That they wouldn’t be able to sleep. And, up in the ai
r, a plane can’t stop. What if one of her little sons had to pee? As she walked me to the door that night to say good-bye, she held my hand tightly. “Write letter to me,” she whispered fiercely. “Over there in Paris, I will be very lonely.”
I gripped her hand, telling her not to worry. I’d been lonely when I first arrived in Vietnam, I said, but, slowly, I’d managed to build a life for myself and make friends here. “You’ll have a good life in Paris,” I said. “You’ll be happy there.”
Linh didn’t look convinced. “I don’t love Paris,” she told me. “You love Vietnam.”
No one ever seemed puzzled by the fact that an American woman would abandon the United States, with all its glitzy cities, modern conveniences, and wealth, in order to come live in a country as poor and troubled as Vietnam. I’d often had to explain my actions to people in America, but the Vietnamese didn’t even ask. They could understand why I loved their country, because, despite their grudges and gripes about things as fundamental and disparate as the weather, the government, and the economy, they loved it, too.
I left Vietnam on the fifth of Tet. After five days, which all of Hanoi spent eating, drinking, and racing all over town, the holiday spirit was finally beginning to diminish. Huong didn’t make as much of an effort anymore to keep her Tet dish full of sunflower seeds and candied ginger. Tung, who had visited aunts and uncles, old school friends, and former teachers, now began to draw the line, telling himself that it just wasn’t that important to go visit one more distant cousin and one more former neighbor. He settled down on the couch and began to chúc Tết by phone instead. Out on Dream Street, some of the shops were open again, conducting business as usual. For the past few days, it had been impossible to find any food in the city, other than what people were serving in their homes. Now, a couple of the stalls on Cam Chi Street were, once again, ladling out steaming bowls of noodle soup. With the waning of the holiday, the wedding season was officially beginning again, and the fifth of Tet must have been deemed, by those who read the calendars, an auspicious day for nuptials, because busloads of wedding revelers kept zooming past our house. Sometimes, I could spot the bride and groom, riding by in a rented car covered in garlands of silk flowers. Some couples wore the traditional Vietnamese áo dài. Others wore garb so Western that they could have posed for the figures on the top of an American wedding cake. Many couples did both, spending the first half of the day in traditional Vietnamese costume and the second half in black tux and silky white dress.