Xe máy tiếu ngạo - Joking rider

It's such a long time to come back to you here.

This month I have a new book which names "Xe máy tiếu ngạo" - in English means "Anecdotes about riding motorcycles" or just simply, "Joking rider". In fact, its name is a kind of parody of a very famous Hong Kong wuxi novel of Jin Yong (Kim Dung). Jin Yong novel's name in Vietnamese is "Tiếu ngạo giang hồ". The Chinese title of the novel, Xiao Ao Jiang Hu, literally means to live a carefree life in a mundane world of strife. Alternate English translations of the title include State of Divinity and Laughing in the Wind.

Of course, my book includes almost funny proses to express the state of "smiling". Half of the book contains proses about motorcycles, about the lifetime of some motorcycles I used to ride. I still choose the way or writing which is lightly humorous so bring the readers a fresh angle on some very familiar topic like motorcycles, city lifestyle, street food, and ridiculous matrix of Hanoi streets and alleys.

Underneath those funny lines is my quest for explaining the transform the behavior of urban people under the impact of traffic and living environment. I also bring to the readers a survey to depict during near 100 years since motorcycles appeared in Vietnam, how they has made effect to Vietnamese society, and whether their destiny will end soon or not. We are just the weird culprit of a reluctantly speedy life!

Number of pages: 176.
Size: 13cm x 20cm.
Publisher: Tre Publishing House.
Price: 45,000VND.

Beneath the shadow of Orpheus

These days, if one were to ask Hanoians, “Which of the city’s architectural works do you most admire?”, nine out of ten would probably respond, “The Opera House.”  Since its inauguration nearly 100 years ago, this building has stood by to witness  every one of the city’s historical events, afforded “front row seats” thanks to its prime central location. One out of ten respondents, however, would be hesitant to recognize the Opera House because of the following issue: the Opera House was built during the colonial period, following the French Classical style of 19th century, a structure forced upon a city under the imperial bootheel.

But until it is joined in the near future by the Thang Long Theater, designed by one of the most renowned contemporary architects, the older, smaller Opera House will retain its striking prominence in the Hanoian’s inner urban map. If you’re getting married, you’ll take glamour shots in front of the Opera House. You can sit beneath the stars in the courtyard of the Opera House, drinking a cup of Highlands Coffee. If you want to drop a lot of bills, go for a bite at Nineteen11 restaurant in the Opera House’s lower level, named for its opening year. Musical rallies and public celebrations are staged in front of the Opera House. At the edge of nearby Hoan Kiem Lake, one can find the intersection of a wide boulevard leading to the Opera House. This stretch of cityscape may be one of Hanoi’s most thoroughly transformed in terms of architectural heritage, as it was once almost entirely devoted to traditional temples of worship. Originally, the land was recognized as a commons between a number of small villages, whose residents would gather there to stage cultural festivities: a role quite appropriately adopted by the Opera House within the cultural life of modern Hanoi. To take in a performance at the Opera House, one usually observes the formalities of such an occasion in the Western style, donning a tuxedo and stuffing oneself into a velvet seat, just as the “woman who went to hear the singers of Đặng village,” from Nguyễn Bính’s poem [1], was similarly dressed to the nines back in that earlier day, well aware that such an event was a rare and special episode in her life.

The Hanoi Opera House on postcard in early 20th century.

It is the architecture of the Opera House itself, however, that exerts its greatest cultural influence. Like the other major building works of the French period, the Opera House exudes majesty and grandeur. In a city devastated by civil war and deprived of its former capital status, whose golden age had since passed, like the “old castle fallen into the shadow of dusk,” [2] the ‘Big Theater’ was a beacon of splendor in those colonial times, legitimating the prestige of the French overlord, but its beauty has remained even after the fall of the regime that built it. The Vietnamese people who first beheld it were exposed to the power of its stately new aesthetics, a counterpoint to the palaces and temples of an indigenous monarchy that had long since waned to the point of only nominal relevance. Of course, the aesthetic principles followed by the Opera House derive from Greco-Roman times, refined and elaborated over the centuries according to the golden ratio, but carrying with them also the ancients’ confidence in their right to conquer any other people they came across. The adornments and embellishments of the Opera House’s roof rise into the sky, its pediments supported by towering Ionic columns that extend from imposing stone feet, and its marble steps open out onto a wide plaza which seems to the suggest that one is approaching a cathedral. The endless reproductions of the Opera House’s image suggest that the structure has indeed conquered the aesthetic sensibility of the population, even if the vast majority of them have never stepped inside of it to hear a performance.

Look back the past time, Vietnamese used to make a cover which has same style as communal houses or pagodas while the interior was very flexible and quite not orderly. And so, for the Vietnamese people today, who have not yet been won over by the modern forms of architecture emerging in Hanoi, the Opera House remains the exemplar of “civilized” style.

Trang Tien Street with the Opera House at the end in 1950s before the fall of French in Dien Bien Phu battle.

But architectural preeminence is just one part of the issue. Buildings such as the Presidential Palace or the halls of diplomatic reception rely upon a flashy sort of splendor, representing a form of power that is still too far from the psychology of the masses and thus from their aspirations as well. And yet, as a cultural landmark, the Opera House still exerts an aesthetic appeal as a proper place for “civilized” activities. Despite its terms having been imposed from outside, the course of cultural progress has seen the Opera House grow on us all the same, peacefully easing itself into the distinctive scenery of Hanoi and the imagination of its public. In those early years after achieving national independence, the first sessions of the National Assembly took place within the Opera House, which went on to weather all the travails of a city at war. After renovations in 1997 to host the Francophone Summit, the Opera House became the city’s most expensive place to hold artistic performances, an unwritten standard against which more modern venues were compared.

Nevertheless, the Opera House is steeped in an outmoded neo-classicism, ignoring the creative innovations of the present, a product of French urban planning, a structure that presses upon the psychological scars of the people of Hanoi. That’s the flipside of the pretty postcards, the ones with sepia photographs of colonial Hanoi complete with old-fashioned buildings and the 36 streets of the Old Quarter.  It can be said that beyond the Opera House, Hanoi is still searching for an iconic structure to call its own, one that is both ennobling and familiar. It’s important to note, however, that people are always lauding the structural perfection of the Opera House, its balance of form and function. The operatic musical genre emerged in the 16th century, when its patronage signified membership in Europe’s aristocratic class. Internally, opera houses were designed to project natural acoustic resonance, but their architectural style always reflected a classical polish befitting the lifestyle, clothing, and social rhythms of the feudal gentry, affectations later acquired and cultivated by the bourgeois class. The performance venues, and culture in general, of Hanoi have not been privy to such luck, since the “dynamic” impulses of modern architectural and social trends seem always to contradict all that has come before. The Opera House will alway be mired in its bygone values, like the beautiful close of a strange, fading season in a country where few material structures can endure for long.

A concert was hold in Hanoi Opera House. As you can see, the auditorium is quite small. It was modeled on the Palais Garnier, the opera house of Paris.

Amid the fever of urbanization, every street in the city is crowded with people, all pressing for a bit of open space. The Opera House has become just such a space for many of the city’s residents, an increasingly popular destination. It’s not just operatic divas who perform at the Opera House; there are also comedy shows and “golden oldies” concerts, such as a recent seven-night engagement by Tuấn Vũ. The Opera House can deliver other sounds as well. There was once a time, during the war, when a loudspeaker installed on the roof of the Opera House would broadcast instructions during air raids. Inside of the Opera House hangs a great lyre of Orpheus, plated in gold during the restorations of 1997. Meanwhile, on the steps outside, one can find droves of young people who gather there every night to chat and hang out beneath the shadow of the winged statues on the roof (also the symbol of the Opera House), gazing out at the lovely scene of the plaza below. This is something that, one hundred years ago, none of us could have possibly imagined.

Nguyễn Trương Quý

(Source in Vietnamese: Phu Nu (Women) of HCMC newspapers, 2010).
Translated by Jacob O. Gold

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1. Nguyễn Bính (1918-1966), a famous poet born in northern Việt Nam’s Nam Định province, a committed participant in the revolutionary movement but also well-known for his romantic works. In the poem mentioned by the author, a girl travels to Đặng village to hear the folk-opera singer she has fallen in love with. She wears her prettiest clothing, but is dismayed to find that the man is absent from the performance. 

2. A quote from the poem “Thăng Long thành hoài cổ” (“Thăng Long has become nostalgic” using the old imperial name for Hà Nội-), composed in 1802 by celebrated female poet Bà Huyện Thanh Quan when the restored Nguyễn dynasty shifted the imperial capital to centrally-located Huế.

Writing about the Flavour of Hanoi

Das "wahre Hanoi" kennen nur noch Wenige

The title above is the German version of my answering for interview on Thể thao & Văn hóa ("Gu Hà Nội" đang là thiểu số). The English title is "The Flavour of Hanoi is Fading". It's from the book "Hà Nội: Một thành phố trong Nghệ thuật / Im Spiegel der Kunst / A City in Art", an edition for the exhibition that curated by Natalia Kraevskaia (owner of Salon Natasha) and Lisa Drummond. The Goethe-Institut Vietnam in Hanoi organizes this exhibition. It has many phases, with various artists like Bùi Xuân Phái, Nguyễn Bảo Toàn, Nguyễn Trọng Hợp, Đỗ Phấn, Nguyễn Văn Cường, Nguyễn Trinh Thi... The book includes photos of their artwork as well as 6 interviews and essays by Nora Taylor, Veronika Radulovic, Phạm Toàn, Vũ Dân Tân, Bùi Thạc Chuyên and me.



About me, the book says: Nguyen Truong Quy is a young architect who chose to become a write. He's currently an editor with the Tre Publishing House, and author of 3 books about Hanoi, namely "Make your self at home, like the Hanoians do" ("Tự nhiên như người Hà Nội"), "It's very hard to find Phở delicious" ("Ăn phở rất khó thấy ngon") and "Hanoi is Hanoi" ("Hà Nội là Hà Nội"). The first two are in their fourth edition.

Thank T.A for introducing me to Ms. Natasha and thank Ms. Natasha for collecting my word as well as someone who translated it into German and English.

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When I started writing about Hanoi, I set off with the reality that, however untidy it is, Hanoi is the place that defines so many values in me. The place where three million people inhabit just inner city must obviously carry with it a lot of stories, and it seems that you just need to listen to a part of those stories and you will get enough material to start your writing. Certainly when I chose to write prose, notes and small essays, I was fully aware that these were the types of writing that could reflect life directly and straightforwardly through my subjective personal views. And Hanoi is something so ever-changing that you can always write about it.

When I was small, I was so much in love with Hanoi's historically iconic architecture. At that time, urban areas (including Hanoi) were, to me, a world of shapes and spaces diversely installed. It was like in an adventure game, where you broke into a city in disguise and looked at it from very strange angles. It was maybe because I had all the time in the world as a small boy to play that game by myself.

I like Hanoi as a place generations of young people, each of them having a unique way of being "posh". During the last twenty years of 20th century, young Hanoians, as featured in Luu Quang Vu's plays or Nguyen Viet Ha's stories, were enthusiastic yet indifferent, innocent yet experienced, self-proving and welcoming but not too readily exuberant. They always kept themselves at a reasonable distance. They were not a type of people who would not think before they said or did something, and they were not too open or bombastic either. I think young Hanoians now still prefer a simplistic, if not sparing, lifestyle, probably shaped by their surroundings which leave little room for vanity.

Writing about them is also writing about myself, about all the nonsense and weird things of a generation, naive to life. Sometimes, I find myself and my friends drifting in a chaotic yet sequenced life, like any one among those three million motorbikes hustling on the roads of Hanoi, not knowing where they are heading.

There are many things available in Hanoi now which used to exist only in my dreams. Yet, they are no longer a fantasy that I am curious about, maybe because I am grown up now! The other day when I looked again at Bui Xuan Phai's painting in a book, an impression of mystery arose all of a sudden. The innumerable houses with match-boxed roofs looked like temples in a holy land. It was because nearly all of them seemed to be speaking the same language, having the same style, and secretly shaking their hands like "This is just between you and me, ok?" They were different from the houses in Hanoi's present, where even the most magnificent thing looks like it was to be sold on the pavement of the street right away.

I don't want to believe that "genuine" Hanoians are losers, lost in this life and unable to control the changes of their living spaces. But Hanoi's culture is being challenged by the more fundamental subsistence matters: the price of houses and land, the service mindset and the management of urban areas. Time has proved an old saying "You need to settle down first before you can develop your business": only streets and wards that have stable structure and prosperous trades can generate cultural institutions that serve themselves. As long as we are still busy trying to buy an affordable house given our scanty income and still caught in traffic jams, the various urban "experiments" and these polluted living condition, it sounds a bit too impractical to tell ourselves and others to live a cultural, i.e. a polite, decent and humane, life.

I still believe that there exists an "aesthetic school called Hanoi". Of my generation, and as followers of the older ones, there are still believers of such a school. It's all about the same aesthetic "gout" and the living taste - once upon a time cherished and championed by groups and associations of believers. However, we are now loners, and the school, although not yet failed, is in the minority./.