Two happy Vietnamese vacationers, plus a little yada, yada, yada...

Hanoi is much shorter than Bangkok, whose downtown skyline is built like a lost Tetris game, well-dominated by a multitude of skyscrapers and high-rise buildings. Hanoi’s old quarter, however, is primarily two stories high, and the city’s highest ordinary buildings stretch only six or seven stories above the ground. The few existing skyscrapers in Hanoi appear grossly monolithic across a fairly empty horizon. They add yet another ambiguity to the architectural mélange of Soviet communism, French colonialism, and early Vietnamese monarchy and peasantry that have finally been appended together in the same purview.

Bangkok did not seem to have the same throng of desperate street sellers that Hanoi had, whose primary weapons are to complain loudly to foreigners about their bad luck selling postcards, trinkets, or photocopied books, and then to begin to talk about their dire poverty and perhaps hold up an unhappy infant. Almost without exception, the slow-moving western visitor to Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi is inundated with a numbing throng of individuals. I have spoken with many of them about their situations, and in most cases they have left their native countryside homes in search of buried treasure in Hanoi but find that, as most have not finished primary school, the buried treasure is very hard to find.

Beggars in Vietnam tend to be outspoken and visibly separate from the surrounding crowd. They are often disproportionately elderly, crippled, or very young, and they congregate in districts heavily frequented by foreigners. The most successful beggars are those who can incorporate of the relevant aspects into a coherent, pitiable presentation that can woo an unknowing individual into making a deposit upon the briefest of glances. After all, those who are employed by others to be beggars in tourist districts quickly realize that their ultimate success depends upon the degree to which they can render their presentations effective and make their efforts useful. In Vietnam, beggars have learned this skill, and have turned begging into a veritable occupation, complete with a learned corpus of skills and techniques. For example, the most profitable beggars are often crippled elderly individuals carrying infants or walking with young children, and as a result these two classes of individuals are significantly over-represented among the beggars seen in the tourist districts of Hanoi. Some see this as a form of exploitation of the young and elderly, even though the young and old often act as free agents in this profession.

For many street children in particular, the choices tend to be grim. Primary education is a luxury in the minds of those who are hungry, or perceive themselves to be in dire poverty; consequently, in order to establish entitlement over a sufficient quantity of food, shelter, or some other commodity, street children and their families are required to work long hours, very often sacrificing their final years of schooling. The free agency of street children in choosing to become beggars, prostitutes, or post-card vendors, however, is precisely that which keeps them from hunger, as they are able to choose to work in order to eat. Consequently, in present-day Vietnam, there is little consistent hunger, but, according to a survey published in Hanoi, only half of the school-age and post-school age population has completed primary school, and there are exceeding numbers of child prostitutes. It is ambiguous whether or not the difficulties incurred to an individual exploited as a child laborer or a prostitute are greater than the difficulties incurred to a non-child laborer or non-child prostitute, who has been liberated of his right to work, but is thereby unable to establish entitlement over a sufficient quantity of food. In this regard, hunger is perhaps much more exploitative than child labor or prostitution.

There is a very funny story that must be told here. It was in Bangkok that I first realized how the Vietnamese are different from the Thai in the way that they sat in public places. The Vietnamese – including the individuals from large cities – make good use of the human body’s squatting position, and will often squat quite comfortably on the ground in order to talk or wait. This is accentuated by the fact that Vietnamese people are, in general quite slender, which makes squatting less burdensome. It was just today that I was in the bus when I caught glimpse of a group of skinny men, quite casually squatting on the ground and smoking cigarettes in a circle. In market places as well, squatting is very common, and I can’t recall how many times I nearly walked right through a group of squatting of women, who were in the marketplaces of Hanoi passing the time chatting.

Now here’s what makes it all so funny. Squatting does not seem to be exceedingly popular amongst the Bangkok Thais, who are perhaps too well-fed to squat comfortably. Our tour was taking many people from Mr. Hung’s work along. It was early one morning at breakfast that two Vietnamese men from our group decided to go outside beneath the trellised arbor in the courtyard in front of the entrance to the hotel. In the courtyard to the left was the infamous Kinaree “Traditional Thai Massage Parlor” (which actually turned out to be a brothel).

So right, here are two skinny men from Hanoi enjoying the shade during their vacation in Thailand, with one happily sipping coffee and the other calmly smoking a cigarette. They’re sitting as they would on the streets of Hanoi – you know, in the traditional Vietnamese squatting position. After a while, a fat Thai man passes, looks at the two starving Vietnamese men squatting on the ground, and stands right in front of them and begins searching in his pocket. He finally pulls out a couple of coins and looks embarrassed. “Sorry,” he mutters, and tosses the coins in the one man’s empty coffee cup, and walks away.

The two men have absolutely no idea what just happened. They’re not beggars, they’re vacationers. It just happens that they’re from another country where it doesn’t look miserable if you’re underweight squatting on the curb, holding a cup. But they finally understand what happened, and it has been the best story I’ve heard in a long time.

So I’ll post this one and see if it gets any responses…