Oil and Lacquer

On a Friday night, some of my friends and I took the soft-seater 29 train ride from Saigon to Hanoi. On the train, we talked about things over bags of beef jerky and cuddle fish, kilos of grapefruit, cans of pasticcios, jars of pate, and dozens of boiled eggs. Vietnam is a beautiful country. It has bodies of water, valleys, and mountains all elegantly spread over a thin S-shaped piece of land. Rain or shine, everything looks like it’s just lingering—moving back and forth in humidity. We arrived in Hanoi at 4 am on Sunday morning, tired, smelly, motion-sick, and stomach-sick. We caught a taxi and told the driver to take us to some place central.

We sat by Ho Tay (The West Lake) and watched people wake up, eat, and exercise. Soon, we figured out a place to shower, people to meet, and places to see.

Hanoi prides itself in Vietnamese sophistication. It is scattered with lakes and each lake is surrounded by very large and old trees. In the fall and winter, Hanoi is wet, cold, and gorgeous. In the spring and summer, Hanoi is wet, hot, and (rumor has it) not as gorgeous. In its elegance, people drink their coffee black and hot. Grey and brown coats with pointy black shoes is a popular dress code among men. Dark colors adorned in rhinestones and spiked heel boots is a popular dress code among women.

We wandered to the zoo where many parents were taking pictures of their children with Nikon and Canon digital SLRS. Old people sat on benches reading the newspaper. A popular hangout for teens was a roller-skating rink. We sat down at a sugar cane juice stand. The woman smiled and made us four fresh glasses. She talked about how the beautiful the zoo was on Sunday mornings. Then, she took a sugar cane stick out of her bucket, ran 10 meters, and started fighting with a rival juice-lady. Supposedly the fight was over money.

We met up with a friend of a friend who is a graduate of the Hanoi Fine Arts University and is now a working painter. He sports a black Vespa and earns $20,000 a month making impasto paintings of Hanoi’s charming streets. His house was full of these paintings; he had them all displayed because his gallerist was going to come to pick them up in a day or two. He shook his head at them and said, “These paintings took a lot of energy out of me, you wake up and you just paint and paint. None of them took me more than an hour. But, these are commercial paintings, not my real creations, I can’t make real paintings yet. You need money to make real paintings.” In Vietnamese, the creation of commercial paintings is ‘sang tac hang’ which literally translates to ‘create goods’; the creation of personal paintings is ‘sang tac choi’ which literally translates to ‘create play’.

Our painter friend took us around Hanoi. He said, “Give me any other city to live in, and I would never live in it. I love Hanoi. Don’t get me wrong, other cities are nice too, interesting and exciting at first, but there is nothing like Hanoi.”

He had to pick up some checks from his gallerist, so we stopped by Dragon Gallery. The gallery was crowded with paintings, they were all hung salon style. The gallerist was a very nice lady. She told our friend to keep painting and that many people were responding to the paintings. However, he should think about using more yellow.

After the visit to the gallery we went to a lacquer painting studio of our painter’s friend friend. You couldn’t miss the studio; there was a large sign outside it that said, “Lacquer Studio.” The lacquer painter’s work does not sell as well as our painter friend, mainly because he sells out of his studio and isn’t associated with a gallery. When we walked in, the lacquer painter offered us chrysanthemum wine and showed us around his studio. His subject matter is the minority women who live in the high mountains in Vietnam. He had an assistant who was polishing some of his works. We sat, looked at his paintings, sipping on chrysanthemum wine.

Later, we went to another painter’s studio, another friend of our painter friend. His paintings also don’t sell as well as our painter friend but mainly because they are pastel colored paintings of ordinary landscapes. We didn’t stay there for long because we followed this new painter friend to a hidden coffee shop on top of a clothing store. There, he took a guitar and sung songs about Hanoi. This was the Hanoi that I heard about in Saigon.

Listen:

Chieu Mua Hanoi (Afternoon Rain in Hanoi)

Huong Ve Hanoi (Turn Back to Hanoi)

Em Oi Hanoi Pho (Baby, the Streets of Hanoi)

Co Phai Em Mua Thu Hanoi? (Are you the Autumn of Hanoi?)