HCMC: Highlighting the Shadows – Shadowing the Highlights

Saigon, the centre and supposed old quarter of HCMC reveals itself as big and loud and new, and striving only to get even bigger and louder and newer. This is a city with large roads: one lane for motorcycles, one lane for cars, one lane for buses. Built for the wealthy on and within their motorised vehicles, the bicycles and the pedestrians fend their own way through the urban jungle, remaining unaccounted and unplanned for. With street vendors, roadside restaurants, and the conical bamboo straw hats out of out of sight, Saigon seems to have separated from the rest of Vietnam. Bursting with construction, the name Saigon remains one of the few reminders of an older past, and the name Ho Chj Minh a bitter irony amidst the Gucci’s and Ralph Lauren’s and Apple Stores. This is the place where we see our first Mc Donald’s, our first Starbucks, our first Porsche of Vietnam, and they don’t remain in the singular throughout our two day stay either. Yet as the brand names have gone up the Vietnamese flair seems to have fled, although this place is as Vietnamese as the rest of Vietnam if you can understand what I am trying to say. Perhaps it is the atmosphere that has changed, and the nostalgia that has departed? For example, instead of people enjoying a freshly brewed coffee, sitting on a small plastic stool on the side of the road and watching either the life on the street, engaging in a heated conversation with the customer thirty centimetres to the left, or perhaps typing something on a phone, here the people enter buildings with shiny glass fronts and stylish tables to sit on ‘proper’ chairs to drink their coffee that is prepared in a ‘proper’ kitchen and not in front of their eyes by a middle aged Vietnamese mother. And nearly all of the customers are busy on their phones or on their laptops that are plugged into one of the many sockets found behind them on the four walls. With two eyes glued to the screen, the idea of watching the life go by on the street, where only cars and motorcycles stream by, or engaging in a conversation when the next customer is busy engaging with his own technical device remains out of the question for most, absurd even. This ‘modernism’, this ‘westernisation’, that seems to be the ideal that is being aimed for as HCMC commercialises and develops leaves me feeling a little sad. Sure, I enjoy HCMC, it’s big and loud and new, but there remains the overpowering feeling that HCMC is more a space than a place.

Highlighting the Shadows

Shadowing the Highlights

Food Heaven in Hoi An

In Hoi An we do a cooking course, and are blown away by the deliciousness of the dishes that we somehow manage to create under the watchful eye of our teacher.

Shrimp mousse cabbage leaf parcels in a mushroom broth

Bánh Xèo: crispy fried Vietnamese ‘pancake’

Spicy green mango salad with charcoal grilled chicken skewers

The soup is delicate and light, complementing the cabbage leaf parcels filled with shrimp mousse. The addition of soft mushrooms and coriander to the broth means I could have eaten at least another two bowls! Our second course is just as good, with the perfect combination of crunchy ‘pancake’, soft fresh garden herbs and the tang of a slice of mango. Again, I could have eaten another two or three, even four. But there is a third dish to cook. A mango salad that has just the right amount of sweet, sour, and spicy flavouring in its dressing, adorned with sesame seeds and Vietnamese mint (which has a minty, lemony, basil flavour). This is paired with a grilled chicken skewer that has been marinated in a concoction abound with market flavours including lemongrass, lime, and the Vietnamsee staple: fish sauce. To top it all off there is lemongrass ice cream for desert, with dried coconut shards on the side. We leave, half floating and half rolling, in a food coma heaven. Vietnam, I love you!

Hanoi: Photos of Photos

We visit the ethnology museum in Hanoi, a stuffy, old fashioned place with an overload of information that goes in one ear and out the next. There is one aspect, however, that I truly enjoy: Jean-Marie Duchange’s photography exhibit of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. “I took pictures just for fun, just my taste” he writes in the preface of his book, which entails the complete collection of his photographs taken throughout Vienam’s central highlands in the 1950’s. In Hanoi only a selection of work is on display, but I am nonetheless taken aback by the simple beauty of his images. The black and white photogaphs are so raw, yet so elegantly refined. And also how they are displayed; hanging from thin metal wires inside a darkened room with the only lights poised at the photographs themselves just adds to the asthetic. Setting and image complement, elevating Duchange’s work to much more than just a historical documentation of a disappearing way of life. And so I busy myself trying to capture this stunning composition with my own camera:

Jean-Marie Duchange #1

Jean-Marke Duchange #2

Jean-Marie Duchange #3

Jean-Marie Duchange #4