Revelation

I became transfixed by a woman making strange white steamed things on a hotplate outside a café in Hanoi and stumbled in to eat dinner. My only doubt was the large bowl of chopped gristle sitting on the counter-top amongst other ingredients. Pro-culinary risk as I am, I remain somewhat averse to gristle. There was no menu in English but pinned to the wall was a review of another café which makes what I now know are called banh cuon, rice flour pancakes. Using my best sign language, I ordered a plateful, hopefully sans gristle.

Calling these pancakes is a bit of a misnomer, I think, as there are no eggs or butter involves and hence nothing cakey to write home about. Banh cuon are more like flat noodles made from fresh rice-flour batter, enriched, I discovered, with ground alabaster. They are filled with minced pork cooked with cinnamon and star anise and onion, topped with holy basil, Vietnamese mint (surprise!) deep-fried, and served with a sharp sour dipping sauce and chilli. Delightful. Clouds filled with ambrosia.

These strike me as a superior version of one of the staples of yum cha, the big steamed rice noodle rolls filled with prawns or minced veggies. Along with prawn gowgees and mango pancakes, these are the default foundation of the yum cha Pike, beloved for their reliably stodgy slipperiness. A fine point of reference, but one convincingly trumped by banh cuon.

Potential hissy fit

One of my most trusted cadres has strongly advised me to eat a cobra in Hanoi. Apparently the consumption of the cobra is feted with much ritual splendour. The bile is extracted and drunk with a shot of whiskey, if I recall correctly. I can manage almost anything on my own, but I do not think I can manage to participate in the ceremonial eating of a snake all by myself. So adamantly and carefully worded have the injunctions to eat a snake in Hanoi been that I wonder whether admission into some secret society might be at stake. In other words, I need a witness as well as an accomplice. I’m out of Hanoi for a few days and then will pass through for just a few more on my way south. Somehow, I need to mix with my peers on the tourist circuit and find a reasonable dinner partner. As to whether it will be possible to find such a one (or two or three) from a random sample of the general public, my expectations are quite low. Managing to board a plane to the same destination does not, in my opinion, automatically represent common ground sufficient to justify sharing a meal. The challenge is to find someone who passes the reasonable person test AND is amenable to the idea of eating reptiles. Alternatively, if anybody knows of a reasonable person who will be in Hanoi on Monday or Tuesday and might want to eat some snake with me, let me know. Brief character reference required.

How far out of the loop am I really?

Has Britney died? Or has the ghost of her innocence finally passed to the other side?

Thrillseeking

Being a pedestrian in Hanoi is an extreme sport. There’s a whole lot of traffic and not a whole lot of stopping. This sign, which I photographed in a little town in Scotland, would be laughed off the street in Hanoi.
Pedestrians beware, more like it. I’m proud of being an expert jaywalker. As a non-driver, I consider jaywalking to be a kind of political statement. Crossing when the lights are red, darting out into four lanes of traffic, throwing a spanner into the works at peak hour, that’s what sticking it to the man is all about. And besides, it’s an adrenaline rush. Living on the edge, it’s where you feel most alive. Right on. Yeah right. Etc.

The stakes are raised in Hanoi. There’s no cause for pedestrians to disseminate anarchy in traffic as the roads are entirely and fabulously chaotic. There are motorbikes. There are bicycles. There are people balancing baskets of fruit and chickens and snake beans. There are four wheel drives. It’s a maelstrom out there but happily it’s a fury-free maelstrom. Where’s the road rage? I’ve been honked and tooted a couple of times but neither fists nor curses have been hurled in my direction.

Nevertheless, there are many new challenges for the jaywalker schooled on the streets of Sydney. The William St Dash, one of the moves I perfected during my apprenticeship, has no place in hardcore Hanoi, nor does the Late Night Bolt Oblivious. The Macleay St Eyeball – the establishment of stern eye contact with a lily-livered driver who will not, experience tells me, dare to run down prey glaring them in the face – does have some application but only on streets where there are relatively few vehicles. What is generally needed is a slow, meditative and detached approach. Make like a feather in the breeze and float across the road. Make like a lost sheep and bleat your way through.

Pedestrian life is challenging but there are some support structures in place. There are nominal pedestrian crossings all over the place and they are marked by a fantastic variety of signs. These seem to have a negligible impact on the movement of traffic but they do serve to raise the spirits of the pedestrian community significantly.

a) Man of the city
Bowler-hatted and upbeat.

b) Disjointed chappie on the way homeRough night, what-ho.

c) Feral childrenEvacuees from Enid Blyton-land on the lam, armed with lashings of cocoa and a tuckbox full of ginger biscuits. Jolly old Nursie.

d) Loopity loop
Here, the mind and body split is clearly illustrated. My own feeling is that the mind of the Hanoi pedestrian must reside resolutely in her body in order to keep both intact.

e) When in doubt…
…Run.

f) Dapper hatter
Cruise it.

Solutions to higher education crisis

One of the things that Ezra Pound admired about Confucian societies was their respect for scholars and their long-term maintenance of civic order and stability via a set of clearly delineated ethical relationships. And the elder worship. He would have loved Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. Mandarins-in-training started fronting up to study the Confucian canon, government administration, and poetry in 1076 and kept doing so until the late eighteenth century.

The name of every person who passed the Royal Exams, the Confucian doctorate, between 1442 and 1779 was inscribed on a stele which in its turn was mounted on the back of a blue stone tortoise.
Having your dissertation lodged in the Australian Digital Thesis Repository is one thing. Being held aloft by a tortoise would be something else.
The 82 steles are on display in a courtyard around the Well of Heavenly Clarity.
The clarity of the Well is obviously figurative rather than actual. To walk to the next courtyard, the Sanctuary of the Sage, you need to pass through the Gate of the Great Synthesis. I am certain I dreamed of a Well of Heavenly Clarity during the course of my thesis and had I known that one existed I probably would have jumped on a plane to Hanoi so that I could take a dip. As for the Gate of the Great Synthesis… it would have also been comforting to know that this existed somewhere in concrete form.

Anyway, Pound thought that an orderly state should be sternly governed and led by wise, obdurate, educated men. There isn’t a whole lot of overlap between my vision of the perfect state and Pound’s but I think we would both endorse the following statement, inscribed on the first stele of doctorates at Van Mieu:
Virtuous and talented men are state sustaining elements: the strength and prosperity of a state depends on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn’t fail in seeing to the training of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality.
Why am I, a would-be member of the literati, brimful of vitality, virtuous to a fault, resigned to a life of unemployment and vagrancy? Because there’s not enough Confucianism in higher education policy. First step, funding to resurrect the tertiary sector: jobs for post-docs and ECRs of the rank of literati and dilettanti. Second step, a Well of Heavenly Clarity in every Australian university by 2010!

Hanoi Fly Girls Rock the Vote

By the lake in Hanoi the Fury. If propaganda must be posted, let it be brightly coloured, I say.

Bonanza!

I’ve killed a fair amount of time addressing my reading needs in the secondhand bookshops of South East Asia. Whilst the heinous state of the modern publishing industry and the crisis in contemporary fiction are certainly both in evidence on the shelves of South East Asia, I have always been able to find something or other that I actually want to read. Onerous exchange terms no longer make me wince. I am still baffled and nerdily entertained by shelving protocols. Samuel Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women was shelved in the self-help section of a bookshop in Pai, in between The Surrendered Single and Healing Back Pain Naturally, just a few down from Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus and a book assessing Nabokov’s contribution to lepidoptery. Genius! Memories like this bring me real pleasure. They also make me wonder whether spending too much time on my own is warping my idea of fun beyond any hope of repair.

Anyway, browsing away in Luang Prabang I came across this book.

Everything about this, I love. I love its refusal to entertain any of the nuances which might accumulate to the title. I love the expression on Ralph E. Baney’s face. I love that the photographs are authentic. I love the old-school yellow scuba gear. I really love the many stand-in phalluses. It’s a goldmine.

Leaving Las Laos

This is the Hmong street market which bustles up a storm every night in Luang Prabang.

This is what a chi-chi bar looks like in LP, a stone's throw from the mercado above. This one is operated by Frenchies civilised and business savvy enough to know the merits of discounting cocktail hour.

Et voilà.

Café au lait #2

And this is the more orthodox presentation of the Lao café au lait. Note the charmingly tilted angle of the coffee. That's right, squirrels, we're still in quaintsville.

The limits of culinary authenticity

One of the less palatable contributions to Lao food taste is made by padak, a thick and foully odiferous fish sauce which is drawn out of a vat of fermented rotten fish and rice husks. It is not a visually attractive condiment; it is unkind to the olfactory organ; it trounces every other flavour in its wake. Back in the day, every household had a claypot full of decaying fish sitting by the backdoor, all ready to round out the casserole. Padak strikes me as a ten year old prankster’s dream. Imagine: fill a bucket with dead fish and salt and scraps, pour in some muddy water, let it rot for a while, and then make people taste it on the grounds that it’s a delicacy.

Foreigners are said to have assimilated to Lao culinary culture when they can dip a raw bean into a pot of padak and eat it with gusto. My brief sojourn in Laos has not equipped me with the wherewithal to appreciate padak in any form. The official story is that the fishy, salty taste of the padak is distributed through a dish and mellowed. I do not believe this to be true. When Lao food is prepared for Western palates, the cooks go easy on the padak or, better, substitute for it the shrimp paste that goes into Thai food. If, however, you quit the tourist boulevards and go forth with great intrepidity to the local markets in pursuit of an Authentic Culinary Experience, no such allowances will be made. As I have discovered. Lao green papaya salad is pretty similar to somtum, the Thai green papaya salad. What distinguishes the one from the other, at least on the street, is the padak and the addition of this one ingredient is fatal. Similarly, I had to abandon an eggplant casserole which should have been delicious after just a few bites on account of the padak pestilence.

I like Lao food enormously. Although they all juggle the same basic set of sweet, sour, bitter and salty flavours, Lao cuisine is much feistier than Thai and Cambodian food. Great swathes of lime and tamarind battle it out with slugs of ginger and garlic and chilli. The broths are full of lemongrass; the sour vegies are really, really sour; there are eggplants and tomatoes everywhere. Herbs don’t get used as a garnish, they get thrown into everything by the handful. All these things are good. So yes, I like Lao food enormously but it seems that it is an adapted Lao food that I must love. And thus, on the vast and complex arena that is the dinner table, the great questions of cultural relativism are raised. To embrace Lao food, must I discard my own culinary values? Do I commit an act of gastronomic imperialism when I laud, indeed call for Lao cuisine sans padak? Am I striking a blow for the globalisation of the palate when I refuse to accept the most distinctive ingredients on the menu?

I’ve been pretty harsh on travellers who refuse to cope with local ingredients. Nothing gives me an easier occasion for a good old scoff than hearing some nitwit in a leisure suit order a curry with no chilli. Some feeble sense of culinary superiority is strengthened when, just as I bite into an eye-opening clove of raw garlic, someone else has an audible attack of the squeams over the onion or the garlic or the rice or the fish or the spice or some such rubbish. They, gormless philistines, crave trans fats; I crave strange greens. I feel like a maverick and I like it. Padak has made me question my suitability for this category.