Sweet humdrum days
by Connla Stokes
First published in Mekong Review in 2016, with minor edits for Pandan Weekly. Click the arrow (>) to learn more about this piece
Sometimes I revisit the halcyon days of early 21st-century Hanoi in my mind. How about you, buddy? No, I’m not talking about the dizzying highs like when I fell in love twelve times in the space of an afternoon without even getting off my motorbike, or when you won seventeen games of pool in a row in Apocalypse Now (even beating the guy who took it so seriously he had a special glove and came with his own cue), or when Vietnam hosted the 22nd SEA Games (heady, heady times). And I’m sure as hell not talking about the terrifying lows (mostly involving motorbike crashes, prolonged bouts of diarrhoea, and encounters with strange, whisky-addled and/or reptillian men after the hour of three a.m.).
I’m not even talking about the creamy middles — more the humdrum in-between stuff, the insignificant ways that you and I (and others of our ilk) passed the bulk of our time. Like: all the hours we spent sitting in a crappy internet café listening to the sound of an erratic dial-up connection, which may or may not eventually offer us access to the world-wide-web (but we didn’t care as we knew no better); sitting in Moka Café (I swear it was the best brunch café in all of Indochina for most of the year 2000) or the Kangaroo Café (no-frills egg brekkie, mate) debating with friends whether it was time to scrap Hotmail and sign up for Yahoo; or whether you or I, or someone we knew, should stop renting a (highly dependable) Honda Wave (with a monthly service thrown into the bargain) and purchase a two-stroke motorbike that would break down repeatedly (leaving you or I, or someone we knew, on the side of every road in town and most provincial highways across the breadth of northern Vietnam, wishing, hoping, praying someone will take pity on you or I, or someone we knew, and help). I’m thinking about the days when nobody would even raise an eyebrow when a restaurant advertising an English breakfast served you a canned frankfurter in lieu of a sausage. I’m harking back to a time when one of the most regular post-lunch activities for many of us was to sift through boxes and catalogues of bootlegged CDs in those pokey little shops on Bao Khanh Street and buy every single Tom Waits album ever recorded, or Café Del Mar volumes I to VII, or three Ali ‘Farka’ Touré albums that would never get played, not once. I’m recalling how we’d sit in a bar — pick a bar, any bar, doesn’t matter which bar — drinking Halida/ Tiger/ Carlsberg while listening to Californication/ Pretty Fly for a White Guy/ I’m the King of Bongo for the fifth time that night. Or how about those quiet nights when we decided to stay in (whenever one of us was sick or both of us were sick of being hung-over) and enhance our understanding of Vietnam by watching films (made by overseas Vietnamese directors) like Scent of Green Papaya, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, Cyclo, Three Seasons on a contraption known as a ‘VCD player’ while eating pizza Diavola from Luna D’Autunno? Or do you remember how we could drive home before midnight on a Sunday and not see a single ‘privately owned’ car and hardly any motorbikes (every time we crashed, we only had ourselves to blame)? Or how we told everyone we didn’t smoke, as we didn’t have to buy packs of cigarettes, as our favourite cafés (Cafe Quynh, Cafe Lam, Cafe Giang...) would sell us a single cigarette, so we’d sit there with nowhere else to be, sipping on our iced coffees, smoking our single Vinataba, or if we were feeling fancy, a ‘ba số’, flirting with, or just staring at the girl who served us the coffee... (or avoiding the stares of the seemingly lovestruck boy who served us). Whenever we got itchy feet, we’d jump on our motorbikes and crisscross the town, over and over, daydreaming as we rode, till hunger for food or a thirst for beer, whichever came first, signalled us to dismount and sit at a plastic table on a Lilliputian-sized chair. Maybe we’d trade very limited repartee with the locals around us (until they ran out of English, or we ran out of Vietnamese); maybe we’d trade barbs with the grumpy materfamilias and her cronies; or maybe we’d just sit there watching the traffic (even that seemed like a worthwhile recreation in those days). Every mouthful of cheap-street-eats and every glug of a two- or three-thousand-dong beer seemed like a tip of the hat to the entire city swirling around us.
Is it any wonder that you didn’t stop grinning for a whole bloody year? Not to me, buddy. We were in love. In love with the whole goddamned city and our humdrum lives. And maybe I’m wrong, but I’d like to think that all those years ago, there was a part of us that knew we would one day look back and say, those were the fucking salad days, my friend — and now we know they were; and even though we were most often doing nothing but killing time and loafing about, those days still deserve their little place in history. But let’s agree to never tell anyone that we never even opened any of the three Ali ‘Farka’ Touré albums we bought but listened to every single bloody volume of Café Del Mar — nobody needs to know about that, do they buddy? Even humdrum personal histories need a little airbrushing.
Connla Stokes is an Irish writer who has lived in Vietnam since the turn of the century. His Vietnam-focused fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Mekong Review, Eastlit, Litro Magazine, Guardian Weekly, and other places/ anthologies.
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