When Good Fences Made Bad Neighbors in Hanoi
When It Seemed So Easy
It has been a long time since I originally decided to take up residence in Hanoi, but I still remember what sold me on it like it was yesterday: the sensory overload of its street life. It is hard to imagine falling for Hanoi without a love for its very public pulse. I just had to live amongst it all.
Later, when apartment blocks and gated communities started to make their appearance, I scoffed. Why even choose to live in the city if you were going to hide yourself away? I was determined to wake up every day in a narrow, all-but-windowless townhouse crammed together with dozens just like it on a street awash in sounds and smells like nowhere else on earth: the real Hanoi.
It was only after some years, while taking up such a residence with my then partner (a Hanoian) that I was shown just how awful I was at this whole neighborhood life. In a manner far more patient than I likely deserved, she walked me through what I was getting wrong with regards to those around me. I was incompetent as a neighbor in ways I didn’t even know I could fail at.
Reality Check
I failed by exhibiting what would probably be judged fair and neighborly behavior where I grew up. I was often away from the house. When I was home, I was quiet and rarely had many people over. I was congenial during brief encounters with other local residents. I asked virtually nothing of anyone who lived around me.
That was the problem. I was judged to be almost impossibly cold and inscrutable. It was tolerated in a friendly manner, because Hanoians can be incredibly accommodating to a foreigner who might not know any better. All the same, my weirdness was never invisible. Though few would probably have said as much, most would have been more at ease had I not made my home there.
Once I was joined by someone more conversant in the ways of the networks around me, the difference was clear. Everyone quickly gravitated to her. They wanted to know what was wrong with me. How could I live in that big house all alone for so long? Was I not afraid of the ghosts? What was I hiding? Apparently, the prevailing theory on the street was that I was some sort of foreign agent engaged in clandestine affairs.
I thought I had been friendly.
After it was established that I wasn’t a spy or a criminal (just a bit quiet), the house was a hive activity. People from all over the street were always coming and going. We hosted dinners. We attended dinners. People loaned us things we didn’t need. It felt like every man I made eye contact with was handing me a beer or a cigarette.
I moved a year later. For everyone’s sake, I’ve lived in apartments ever since.
The Hidden Costs
Friends visiting from overseas cannot help themselves. They just can’t. After a few days in the current that is Hanoi’s social life — the overflowing streets, the neighborhood cafes, the cascading dinner conversations — they just have to try and draw some big conclusion about how wonderfully together everybody is compared to their own society. They can’t not do it.
Sometimes it involves amateur sociology. Others have poetic inclinations. It is almost always a tacit condemnation of somewhere else.
And it is beautiful, this relentless, irrepressible sociability in Vietnam. It is impossible to imagine the place without it, but I am also tempted, every time, to stop them mid-reverie and remind them: it comes at a cost. It is hard to convey just how much every person you see here has invested in the tangle of relationships they build a life from. They are always at it. It is a full time job.
To really be a part of all the family, neighborhood, and professional networks that foreigners marvel at, you must actively manage your node. That means people constantly coming and going, advice being asked, suggestions being made, introductions offered. You can’t afford to just let other people take care of their own affairs because they are inextricably your affairs as well.
You must also be continually present. Dropping in and out of the game as needed isn’t really an option. Anyone who is going to be a serious participant needs to be building up their intel, status, and social capital long before it is needed. Conditions need to be monitored. Past efforts can be quickly lost if an individual or family aren’t around to keep things in order. It is almost never the easy, à la carte favor granting from a “connection” that foreigners like to imagine.
Throughout the city, this burden falls disproportionately to the women of a household. Watching my partner manage this on my behalf was exhausting, and never something I grew comfortable with. I made the decision that I’d rather miss out on some of the intimacy of the Vietnamese experience in exchange for a level of responsibility I felt I could comfortably manage on my own.
You Can’t Have It Both Ways
A good friend of mine tried to make the opposite decision. He’d been in Hanoi nearly as long as myself. Married to a Vietnamese woman. Kids. Business.
He and his wife both loved the city and had managed to buy a small house in an area of exactly the sort I had lived in before. They were very much a part of the neighborhood, their kids running through it and mixing with the various families without effort or affectation. They were at home there.
Then an opportunity came to expand the business he and his wife had spent so much time building. With Hanoi’s traffic and air pollution worsening and concerns about whether their modest home would be enough as their kids grew, they jumped at the chance: they moved to Đà Nẵng. They’d still be back every month or so to spend a week in Hanoi. They decided to keep the house.
At first it seemed easy enough. They trusted the neighbors to keep an eye on things, and they’d be back regularly. Within six months, however, it was clear something was wrong. Attitudes toward them were changing. With every spell spent away, they were met with a greater emotional distance when they returned.
The final tipping point came when they returned after a long summer absence to find that one of their power outlets had failed in the previous weeks: the outlet for the refrigerator. There wasn’t all that much food in the main part of the appliance, but the freezer had been nearly full. All that food was stuck in that enclosed space for weeks without refrigeration during a Hanoi summer; you can imagine the result.
They went door to door to the neighbors close enough to be affected and warned them about what would happen when they were going to open it up and clean it. There was no way around it. Their neighbors were angry. Not just annoyed or irritated at the inconvenience, but indignant. Doors closed on them.
Now you might say, “Of course they weren’t keen on a maggot farm a few doors down. What did they expect?” It’s true that nobody would be pleased with that, but these were people they’d been close to and had gone through many similar or worse things with in this same neighborhood. There is always some drama or mishap to deal with in those ultra dense living quarters.
Some years earlier, a neighbor had unwittingly rented his house to an unlicensed drug rehab clinic. There was the neighbor who insisted on slaughtering a live hog at 3am two or three times a year for family gatherings. They endured all the noise and mess that came with the inevitable houses getting knocked down and rebuilt. Weekly fights outside the local gambling house were ignored. Everyone stayed on good terms, because life happens close and often on a street like this in Hanoi.
But their refrigerator accidentally losing power? That was unforgivable. He and I must have talked about it every time we met for the next year or two, not because he was upset or even disappointed, but because it was possibly the most Hanoian thing he’d ever experienced.
Being There
An unattended home in one of the more established neighborhoods in Hanoi is a relatively rare thing. Demand for housing and property values as they are, few have the means or inclination to leave a home wholly unused. An unoccupied home can cause various practical problems for neighbors. Bill collectors frustrated by never finding the family at home start hassling neighbors for information on the absent family. An unfamiliar face found lingering in the vicinity of the unattended house can lead those living around it to worry that its lack of activity has attracted the attention of thieves. Animal pests can also quickly turn an unfrequented structure into thriving habitat of their own — a habitat that has a tendency to overflow into surrounding homes.
Overlaying those real and practical concerns are also spiritual ones. Many Vietnamese strongly believe in spirits, ghosts, and other manner of ethereal beings that need to be regularly placated with rites ranging from simple acknowledgement to more substantial votive offerings. A house is rooted to a patch of earth that comes with all sorts of responsibilities, and a family who is never home to see to them is guilty of more than a late water bill payment.
In my friend’s case, these practical and metaphysical sensitivities wove themselves into a single, overarching impression of neglect in the eyes of his neighbors. Of course the refrigerator’s power failed; you didn’t think spiteful ghosts were just going to take your ignoring them, did you? That this would obviously have never been an issue had they been actively living in the house to quickly notice the power failure didn’t mitigate the effect; it made the connection all the stronger.
Being absent also made the problem solely their own to bear which is a rarer thing than you might expect. Take the aforementioned pig slaughter as a counterpoint. If you’ve never heard a large hog bound and killed in the echoing confines of a Hanoi street, then it is hard to do justice to just how loud it is. Anyone within a hundred meters would have not only been able to hear it, but would have been awakened instantly. Even if you knew nothing about the animal or the neighborhood in question, you’d know something was dying.
For those who went back to sleep, they awakened to a pretty gruesome scene. The killing, draining, dressing, and butchering all took place in the limited confines of a small courtyard and the pavement in front of their house. There’s a lot of blood. In the summer months, it didn’t take long for a smell to rise, no matter how much washing went on.
Almost nobody complained. It was even rather beloved. Why? Everybody ended up with a hand in it. Many of the neighborhood men turned the actual killing of the hog into a reason to stay up drinking. It takes a lot of help to get and keep a hog subdued. Women with a bit of time offered help cooking. It was often different women each time, as availability varied. A full size hog makes a lot of food, and they froze virtually none of it. Almost everyone who mattered was invited. Those who couldn’t make it had dishes brought to their houses. Since some member of the house has probably chipped in on the cooking at least once before, they knew what each household favored. The many different shopkeepers on the street also saw small windfalls from the party preparations. Even though it was one family’s party, it was highly inclusive of the neighborhood.
Or take the gambling den being run on the street and the fights that routinely broke out. They all knew that the owner was more likely to have cash on hand than most of them and was good for a short term loan when needed. He was also more likely to stump up some money for something like cement when the neighbors decided to take matters in their own hands to fix some potholes or broken sidewalks. Even the unlicensed rehab clinic played a role, as they hired private security to make sure none of their patients (or anyone else) did anything more than come and go quietly while in the neighborhood. The police who tolerated the clinic (in a tacit acknowledgement of the inadequacies of public facilities) asked that the neighbors not kick up too much of a fuss in return for their favor in future matters.
But if you’re not there to actively reciprocate and reinforce these networks of association? You don’t just get to hit pause and decide to pick things up back where you left off. The neighborhood moves along without you. In the end, my friend decided he and his family were better off selling their house. He did so without bitterness, even delighting in that little street having one last lesson for him.
Inevitable Change
Hanoi has, in my time there, always been a very industrious place. There was always a lot of work going on, but schedules were very fluid. Things got done on an as-needed basis as plans changed and evolved. Much of this was small scale entrepreneurial activity and temporary work that both allowed for time spent in the neighborhood managing networks just as it also relied on those same contacts to do its business. Times are changing. As more and more men and (especially) women enter the formal workplace in Hanoi, it doesn’t surprise me that the desirability of apartment and gated community living has increased. Who has time for all the rest?
This is certainly changing the character of the city, but it would be a mistake to think that choices in living arrangement are the sole (or even a primarily) causal factor in the broader shifts. Deep changes to family and professional life often precede decisions to alter residential modes. Unless one is suggesting a comprehensively reactionary attitude toward Vietnamese society — including changing gender roles, social and geographic mobility, international economic integration, and much more — I find it hard to be surprised that housing looks different these days. It was always more than just a house.
Clearly, a lot goes into the decision to live elsewhere and differently. I do not think the majority of Hanoians are making this decision lightly or without thought for its broader consequences. I look forward to seeing how Hanoian culture adapts to these new social spaces. There will be surprises.
And as much as I personally enjoy wading through the thick of it, I’m much too much of an introvert to really manage my affairs in old school Hanoian fashion. I’ll never really be good at it, and I do not want to hand off that responsibility to a friend or lover who bears the burden for me. In the end, I need the sort of clear, unambiguous boundaries that made me something less than a good neighbor in the Hanoi street life of old. It appears I’m not the only one.
