8 Lust

 It’s Christmastime in Hanoi again and the Metropole Hotel is lit up like an amusement park. In the courtyard, a monstrous white tree with bright red ornamental balls towers over the swimming pool. The decorative palms shine blindingly bright with a million tiny bulbs. I’m on my second gin and tonic and planning on having a third, settled back in a heavy rattan chair and feeling the kind of sorry for myself that most people would be very content with. There’s incense in the air, buffeted about by the slowly moving overhead fans: a sickly-sweet odor that mirrors perfectly my mixed feelings of dull heartache and exquisite pleasure.

I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.

Today, this feeling will disappear the second I’m out the door. Once I’m away from the sight of the other lone Western travelers, each, I imagine, with their own weltschmerz-loaded back story, their own unfulfilled longings, sitting there with their Gerald Seymours and their Ken Follets next to unringing cell phones. After strolling ever so slightly tipsy yet confident through the lobby, the service staff in ao dais and traditional Annanite headgear address me (as they do all the guests) in French: “Bon soir, Monsieur…Ça va?” I’m through the doors, and suddenly the air fills with the roar of a thousand motorbikes and those feelings are gone, replaced by a giddiness, a familiar rush of overwhelming glee at being back in the country I’m crazy in love with.

The only way to see Hanoi is from the back of a scooter. To ride in a car would be madness—limiting your mobility to a crawl, preventing you from even venturing down half the narrow streets and alleys where the good stuff is to be found. To be separated from what’s around you by a pane of glass would be to miss—everything. Here, the joy of riding on the back of a scooter or motorbike is to be part of the throng, just one more tiny element in an organic thing, a constantly moving, ever-changing process rushing, mixing, swirling, and diverting through the city’s veins, arteries, and capillaries. Admittedly, it’s also slightly dangerous. Traffic lights, one-way signs, intersections, and the like—the rough outlines of organized society—are more suggestions than regulations observed by anyone in actual practice. One has, though, the advantage of the right of way. Here? The scooter and the motorbike are kings. The automobile may rule the thoroughfares of America, but in Hanoi it’s cumbersome and unwieldy, the last one to the party, a woolly mammoth of the road—to be waited on, begrudgingly accommodated—even pitied—like the fat man at a sack race.

Linh is driving—and I’ve finally, after many hours and many times as his passenger, given up on the strictly Western practice of hanging on. Nobody else does. Not the three-year-old child whipping past me, standing in front of his father and mother. Not grandma, riding side-saddle behind her son-in-law and daughter over there, or the hundreds of thousands of young men and women, chatting on cell phones or exchanging comments from the backs of other bikes. Somehow we all manage to stay aboard without gripping our drivers around the waist or shoulders—or even bracing ourselves from the back. Somehow it all works; we manage to move quickly—sometimes very quickly—through space, together and apart, without flying from our seats or colliding with each other. Thousands, millions of us, a moving conversation of words, glances, gestures, and the shrill honks of our horns with an ever-changing cast of characters snaking through Hanoi’s Old Quarter, around its lakes, weaving through crosscurrents, breaking over and around the bigger, sadder four-wheel vehicles like stones in a river, barely noticing the souls trapped glumly and impatiently inside.

Is anyone in this city over thirty?

It seems not. Statistically, it is said that nearly 70 percent of the population are under that age, and, if the streets of Hanoi (or any city in Vietnam, for that matter) are any indicator, that number seems even higher. Nobody among them remembers the war. They weren’t even alive for it. Much like our post–World War II baby boom, they must have gone straight home from the battlefield and done an awful lot of fuckin’ around here. Everyone—everyone, it seems—is young and either on the way to eat, returning from eating, or eating at this very minute, absolutely choking the sidewalks on low plastic stools, filling the open-to-the-street shop houses, slurping noodles or nibbling on delicious-looking bits, drinking bia hoi, the fresh beer of Hanoi, with varying degrees of joy and seriousness of intent.

My old favorite, bun cha—juicy hunks of pork served in room-temperature, sweet-and-sour green papaya juice—are grilling over charcoal by the curb; bowls of bun oc, the bright, reddish, steaming mix of snails, noodles, and crab roe–infused broth are recognizable from the hunks of fresh tomato on top as I sweep by. Sizzling crepes; banh mi sandwiches—crunchy baguettes overloaded with headcheese, delightfully mysterious pâté, pickles, and, often, a fried egg; bun bo Hue—a sort of heartier, more highly testosteroned version of pho (noodles heaped with slices of beef and pork); slabs of blood cake—and nearly every delicious goddamn thing you can think of. Tiny electric-red slices of chili peppers, crunchy sprouts, Thai basil, roughly yanked cilantro, mint, green banana slices, wedges of lime everywhere. Everywhere.

Parties of ten, twenty Vietnamese cluster around and hover over hot pots of beef parts and whole fish.

Or they just ride.

If you’re in a car, you’re fucked for any of this. Most neighborhoods have no room for your spaceship to touch down. At best, you can glide slowly by, face pressed to the glass, or—if you care to torture yourself—open the window for a moment, let your nostrils fill with the complex admixture of a thousand and one delights, most of them unavailable to you. Sure, you can park a few blocks away, maybe—but then you may as well have walked. For the scooters and motorbikes, however, there’s the convenience of valet parking. Oh, yes. Since nearly every available square foot of sidewalk is packed with tables, there is precious little space for bikes. But not to worry, because every little com, coffee shop, street stall, and eatery has a kid outside who will helpfully take your scooter and helmet, scrawl an identifying mark with chalk on the seat, and find some way to jam it in between the scores of others out front. It’s the only way the system works. When you’re done? He will helpfully extract it and have it ready for departure.

Some things never get old. Some things are just…classic. You never lose appreciation for them. Your enthusiasm may wax and wane ever so slightly, but you always come back. Whether it’s the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” or doing it doggie-style, good is simply…good. There may be other things in life, but you can pretty much spend eternity considering the matter of the former—or latter—and you’d be hard-pressed to improve on either of them.

I feel exactly like this with Hanoi-style pho. I may love the Southern versions of this spicy noodle soup fiercely, and appreciate—even need—from time to time the difference, the rougher, spicier, less subtle charms of Saigon’s often cloudier, more assertive sisters. But I wouldn’t marry any of them.

Using sexual metaphors to describe food is a practice blithely, even automatically employed by most food writers—yours truly being a frequent perpetrator. But it seems particularly appropriate when describing pho in Hanoi—even though it’s usually a morning routine, as opposed to a late-night, post-bar, fall-into-sloppy-embrace kind of a thing. Visiting a popular pho shop, particularly later in the morning, after the first waves of hungry people on their way to work have been through, resembles nothing so much as the set of a porn shoot.