The Poetic Chaos of Hanoi

Andy Hill

I arrived in Hanoi on an overcast morning after being up all night on the bus ride from Hue. Knowing nothing about the city’s geography other than that Hoan Kiem was the area I wanted to find, I ended up walking for miles all over the city that first day and falling in love with it.

I was attracted to Hanoi as if it were a living being, more so than any other place I had ever visited. It was very seductive, in the facades of houses, the old men wearing painter’s hats and bicycling down the street, and the grey cobblestones underneath. It felt very respectable and refined, yet enigmatic and enshrouded.

There was a curious dichotomy to it. On the one hand, there was the serenity of the lakes and parks and, on the other, the blitzkrieg of people and motorbikes in the streets. There was a palpable sense of historical reverence to the place. Under the shadow of glass and concrete high rises, on streets lit by neon signs, an ancient stillness refused to be edged away by the impulses of modernity.

I swooned under its vibrancy. Out of a turbulent past, there seemed to be an immediate, poetical urgency to create a future capable of stability. Walking around, I found the images to be intensely captivating and beautiful. Trees wildly draped themselves over rainy streets and fog hung in the air into midday. At Hoan Kiem Lake, old people performed tai chi, young lovers embraced surreptitiously and others sat alone in the stillness that emanates from that mythic water.

I knew only the simple, everyday necessities of the language, but these, coupled with a modicum of politeness, rendered more toothy grins and warm handshakes than anywhere I had ever been. People are nice in their own way everywhere, but in Hanoi I found some of the most straightforward and hospitable people that I have encountered anywhere.

Walking down the street in Hanoi was like a military exercise. With every step one has to guard against getting creamed by a motorbike, stepping on a family of chickens or an old woman’s foot, knocking over a cigarette vendor’s stock, falling into a hole in the ground, obstructing the path of a woman carrying baskets bulging with fruit, falling over a steaming cauldron of pho broth or, dazed by these perpetual precautions, just slipping and falling the way one does in the course of a normal walk.

There was an unexpected fluidity to the chaos in the streets, and after a while I realized it wasn’t chaos but a seamless order. When crossing the street, I found that the best thing to do was to just walk right across as if it were empty. The barrage of motorists would zip effortlessly around me like water in a river flowing around a stone. It’s a kind of order, a symbiotic disharmony that was remarkable to witness.

As long as I am away from the lilting branches swaying gently over its lakes and the whiplashing, cyclonic activity of its sidewalks and streets, I will long to return to that Paris of the East, Hanoi.