All revved up, but nowhere to go (xưa và nay)
A quick letter of sorts. To you and others (including myself).
SINCE THE START of October, 2021, the residents of Saïgon/ Tp.HCM have been free to wander outside their houses and ride, drive, walk, jog or cycle across town. Alas, there’s still nothing much to do, and nowhere to really go – no cinemas, no restaurants, no cafes. No karaoke, or live shows. No clubs or pubs.
You wouldn’t need to be a market analysis whizz kid to quickly see that the likes of Circle K, 7-11, FamilyMart, etc. are cleaning up in this cultural and recreational interlude. They’re practically the ‘Third Place’ for young Vietnamese and not-so-young foreigners these days. Every evening, near my apartment, clusters of folk sit outside a trio of convenience stores, smoking vapes and pot, sipping on soft drinks, or cans of beer, munching on not-so-nutritious snacks, and shooting the breeze, or chém gió, as locals say.
It’s not the only social/recreational activity. All around the city — beneath graffiti-covered underpasses, beside opulent villas, pretending to walk past luxury brand outlets downtown, standing outside a cafe and cake chain called C H E E S E — you will also see small groups of young Vietnamese, all taking turns to take pictures of one another as they pose like professional models in their latest outfits. If you add up the hours spent on shopping for clothes, scouting for locations, riding around and snapping the images, editing and filtering and then posting the best of the images on FB/ Insta/ Etc., reading the comments, counting the likes, blocking weirdos, and reporting lewd comments, I guess it must be a full-time vocation.
Now, going for an amateur photo shoot was a massive lifestyle hobby in Saigon before the pandemic came along — and sitting outside Circle K and getting drunk and/ or high was also a thing — but with everything else currently stripped away, in my mind, there’s something more peculiar about it now — and that peculiar thing is me being less cynical about it.
I mean, what else is there for these kids to do?
Well, there is one other social pursuit, judging by the sound of motorcycle engines getting revved up to the max, as young men with souped-up scooters and motorcycles take advantage of the *relatively* empty streets all around the city. I can’t say for sure, but I imagine they’re mostly just showing off to each other. From my apartment, I hear them hooning over the Thu Thiem Bridge through the night, breaking the silence, but also taking me back…
Waaaayyyy back [insert spiralling, time-travel visuals here]…
When I first lived in Hanoi, now over 20 years ago, late night and wholly illegal motorbike/ scooter races were common on weekends.
It took me and friends a little while to figure it out — I mean, why they really raced. But Hanoi in those days was basically a city in constant curfew. Nothing was supposed to be open after 11. So, what are you going to do, when you have nothing to do in the dead of the night? With the capital’s streets completely free of traffic, and everyone in possession of a motorbike, the idea of racing each other didn’t require much of a leap.
A French friend, the kind of guy who bragged about his record ride times from Hanoi to the valley of Mai Châu and back (he liked to wear motorbike gloves but no helmet) became mildly obsessed by the races for a while. At 1am or 2am, he would sometimes leave whatever pokey bar we were drinking in, and ride around searching for the races, desperate to see them at full tilt. He would then return wide-eyed to the bar to report on what he’d seen.
One night he persuaded me to join him. I remember driving alongside the semi-elevated train track on Phùng Hưng street – a good solid, crepuscular ‘Hanoi noir’ backdrop for this scene, you’d have to agree. They — dozens and dozens of 125cc scooters, slowly gathering together in one motorised peloton — must have been rumbling down Phan Đình Phùng. We accelerated to catch up by the Water Tower and tucked in at the back. Some of the racers around us were with their girlfriends. They waved us away. I realised we were a nuisance. We’d get in the way, or only hurt ourselves. I’m sure my French friend didn’t agree. He had notions. Fantasies. He wanted to purr away like ‘a real horrowshow’, as Alex and the Droogs would have done, you know, till you got that ‘nice, warm, vibrate-y feeling all through your guttiwuts...’. But I just wanted to see and hear the sound of the engines as they collectively tore off, just once, and when they did, I slipped into a side street and double-backed to my Old Quarter digs.
I only have one other clear memory of seeing some racers (you would often hear them). It happened after me and my French pal had stayed up all night, probably at Le Maquis bar. Dawn was breaking as we walked down to Hoàn Kiếm lake. He seemed to know the racers would show up there – it must have been New Year’s or some other auspicious date, and where else would they want to finish up after a night’s racing. His intel seemed to be vindicated by a gathering of locals (including some cops) at the top end of the lake. In those days, there were no Cảnh sát in riot gear and the middle-aged cops in standard cotton uniforms seemed as transfixed as everyone when the first of a few racers came tearing around the bend. I don’t think they were racing. It looked like it was just a dare for whoever was still going and had the guts. I recall one guy with peroxide hair slowing down a touch, as if sensing the crowd wanted more, as if he wanted to tempt the cops to step forward and play cat to the mice, and when one did, the racer jerked his handlebars up and did a wheelie, and tilting his front wheel to the side, petulantly rode well beyond the cop’s grasp before bringing his front wheel down and zooming out of sight. Some of the crowd that had gathered screamed with the thrill of it, my French friend included. It was pretty rock and roll to be fair. But all these years later, well, I feel it’s clear what I am trying to tell you — we were young and there was nothing much to do, and nowhere to go. I mean, I can only speak for myself, but if there had been cinemas, music venues and a few decent nightclubs around town, I’m pretty sure I’d have been in bed sleeping the sleep of the righteous and the just.