In the early 1990s, I made a decision that was either wise, or daft, or maybe a bit of both. I had a good job in a depressed economy, working as a reporter with the Irish Press, but I was bored. So I packed in the job, withdrew what I’d invested in my pension, even though that meant only getting back 75 per cent of what I had put in, and went on a skite.
I’d read in the Guardian that Vietnam – then as now controlled by the oppressive regime that drove out the Americans in the 1970s – had decided to open the country to foreign visitors, who up to then were only allowed in on restricted terms. My partner and I applied, via a tourist agency in London, for visas, paid the required fee, and off we went.
We started our four-month meander up through the southeast Asian country in Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City. I’m more than six feet tall and my partner has blue eyes, blonde hair, and freckles, but the reaction of the Vietnamese children – and sometimes the adults –when they encountered us was one of delighted shock at the size of our Caucasian noses.
My god, they would say, or something like that, pointing their fingers at what to them were obviously enormously ungainly hooters, and double over with laughter. It was strangely pleasant to find yourself surrounded by people who were so much poorer than you and be the object of pity.
A matter of perspective – Colm Keena on lessons from a trip to Vietnam
A tale of two harps – Tim Fanning on Paraguay and the harp
From Russia with question marks — Frank McNally on a famous revolutionary’s mysterious sojourn in Ireland
Duke of Hazard – Frank McNally on the literary pubs (and restaurants) of Dublin 2
There was a busy market close to our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City where you could sit at Montessori school-sized tables and have a bowl of noodle soup. I sometimes slipped down there for an early morning bowl while F continued snoozing back in the hotel.
The stools beside the small, low tables were so short-legged that when I sat, my knees ended up level with my chest. The women who ran the market found the sight of me sitting at one of these tables even funnier than the size of my nose.
Combine that with my incompetence when trying to fish the strands of noodle out of the soup using chopsticks – the noodles would slip back into the broth, which would splash up onto my lowered, big-nosed face – and I was the best show they’d seen for quite some time.
One morning one of the women stepped forward from the group that had gathered to laugh at me and adopted a serious air. She was a handsome woman, older than me, missing a few teeth. She could speak French and asked if I could too.
When I said I could, she began to ask questions about life in Europe and, as I responded to each of her questions, to translate the answers for her colleagues. No-one was laughing now. The woman told me she had a sister who lived in Germany where she worked in a factory.
In her letters home, the sister said that in Europe people get up in the morning early, travel to work on the train, stay in work all day, then go home on the train, tired, to apartments where they often live alone, have something to eat, go to bed, and then get up the next day and do it all over again.
Was that true?
Yes, I said. The woman translated for her colleagues. That they were shocked to have the sister’s description of life in Germany confirmed did not require translation.
Their faces were solemn, their eyes intent.
“And if you want, for instance, to go out to the shops in the middle of the day, you are not allowed? You have to stay in work?” Yes, I said.
A sort of sadness descended, as each of the women quietly contemplated the poverty of such an existence.
But, I said, you guys are here from six o’clock in the morning to late at night, running your stalls. Ah yes, the woman said, but that is different. We bring our children. Her face lit up then as she contemplated the certainty of her own good fortune. “And we have lots of time to play and sing.”