Portrait of Vietnam

Time for another post on Vietnam I think. For the bulk of this post I'm going to try to relate an encounter I had with a young man I met in the town of Da Lat towards the south of Vietnam. The pictures will all be of my attempts, with varying degrees of success, at taking photos of actual human beings.

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Before I set off to Vietnam I was determined to have a go at getting some portrait work done. It isn't something that comes naturally to me as I'm not much of a people person and I tend to get a bit shy about asking strangers if it's okay for me to pap them. Also, the second you ask if you can take someone's photo they often stop doing the very thing that made you want to take a photo of them in the first place. With this in mind I took a mixed approach; sometimes I would ask permission, often providing a monetary incentive, and at other times I would surreptitiously snap on the sly for a more natural look.

This lady seemed to just be chilling out during the scorching midday heat in Hoi An

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He didn't ask me not to use his real name, and perhaps it's an unnecessary precaution, but the conversation I had with a young man that I'm going to call Tuan (a common Vietnamese name) was probably not one he would want broadcast around the world. It's unlikely that his comments would ever be traced back to him but discretion is the better part of valour.

I met Tuan in the mountain town of Da Lat; his job was to cover the reception of the hostel we were in for the night shift which appeared to run 7pm-7am. We had arrived into Da Lat later than we had anticipated as our overnight train from Da Nang hadn't set off til one in the morning and then we had to get a bus ride of several hours duration up into the mountains. Once we arrived we were a pretty ragged looking bunch who just wanted a shower and some clean clothes.

This little boy and his mother were trying to sell bananas and water to passing tourists at the floating market in Ben Tre

It was Tuan's job to collect our passports and take down our details. This wasn't unusual, everywhere we had stayed up until this point had taken our passports, but they had either just taken a quick copy or kept them for an hour or two and then returned them. Tuan wanted to keep them permanently in the hotel safe. This was not deemed acceptable by some members of our party and so I was tasked with their liberation. I explained the situation to Tuan but he couldn't quite fathom it, he couldn't see why we had a problem and, judging by the massive stack of passports he had, most guests did not have a problem with this. After going in circles for a while he finally told me why he had to keep hold of them; each day, at about half past seven, he would take the passports of all the guests in the hostel that day to the local police station and give the details to the authorities. Again, this didn't feel particularly unusual, I presumed this is what had been happening our whole trip, except that everyone else had been happy with copies. A quick conflab with the girls and it was decided that we didn't want our passports going on an excursion without us and so I went back to Tuan to try to find a mutually agreeable resolution. After much circular debate, and to the incredulity of Tuan, I decided I was going to go with him to the police station.

This is the son of the tailor in Hoi An that I mentioned in a previous post. He was shy initially, hanging back and playing with his mothers measuring stick.

Da Lat, being in the mountains, had a climate similar to Britain at that time and so it was that the two of us set off into the cold, dark, rainy night and begain to chat about things other than the administrative burden of a hostel. It turned out to be about a 15 minute walk each way which gave us plenty of time to exchange stories. He started, which I often find to be the case in these sorts of situations, by asking about the Queen and how it is she goes about ruling our country. This led to an impromptu tutorial on the current coalition Government that we have; not an easy task under any circumstance. Once we'd built a bit of rapport I decided to give him a bit of a grilling on what life is like in a one party Communist state. Did he feel free? Did he want to vote? Is life good? Would he like to see change? It should come as no surprise that he wasn't very positive about the Government. He talked about how anyone who wanted to build themselves a house had to not just go through the convoluted official channels, but also to pay the appropriate bribes. These are particularly extortionate if you're not a member of the Communist Party. Far from membership being compulsory, as in many one party states, there are actually lots of people who are not allowed into the Party: anyone with a history of dissidence, either personally or in their family, anyone that has links to America, and anyone that is too overtly religious, especially Catholics (although traditionally inclined to Buddhism and Taoism, most Vietnamese would call themselves atheists).

Over time he stopped shying away and started behaving more naturally.

At this point we had arrived at the police station where Tuan dutifully joined the back of a small queue of similar looking young men, all with a little bundle of passports. Inside there was one rather corpulent and surly looking officer who was mostly watching what appeared to be the Vietnamese version of East Enders. He alternated between completely ignoring the young lads and suddenly barking something unpleasant sounding at them. The boys all took it in turns to sit at a rickety, old desk and enter the details of their guests into a large, old ledger of the type you would imagine went out of fashion in Victorian times. Although the amassed boys may have known one another no one spoke. The station had a severe and unfriendly air, the boys did not want to be here, they didn't want to have to do this; previous experience implied that it was wholly unnecessary, I suspect that it was merely the whim of this particularly objectionable police officer. When Tuan's turn came around he appeared to offer a few words of explanation as to my presence as I was rather sticking out; the officer gave a sort of snarl and turned back to his soap opera. He didn't look at me.

This lady was sculling her way through the floating market of Ben Tre in the Mekong

As we returned to the hostel Tuan began to talk more effusively. He clearly didn't like the local police. It is the police that insist on the bribes so that new house builds go smoothly. He talked of how dangerous the town was because the police didn't go out at night. The police get paid a lot to do very little, so long as local criminals don't involve the tourists then they are pretty much left alone. He told me of the time that a woman who had just been assaulted by her husband came running into the police station for protection only to be ordered to return to her husband and apologise to him. Officers are given big houses very cheaply and can afford to send their children to school and care for ill family members. It would seem there are definitely advantages to being on the inside.

This man is playing the traditional dan nguyet, or moon lute; essentially a 2 string guitar that sounds like this

During our earlier negotiations I had felt guilty for not trusting Tuan and our short journey together had revealed him to be a bright, honest young man who was just trying to not piss off a guy who could probably make his life very difficult for him. I talked to him a few more times over the couple of days we were in Da Lat and always found him to be very interesting and informative. One time when we had an internet connection to hand we looked at maps of each others countries and discussed our homes more; we talked about the Arab Spring and how China was once again trying to bully and intimidate Vietnam. He spoke bitterly of the Chinese. Like many of us, although Tuan disliked the people in charge he was clearly very fond of his country, it's landscape and it's people; and rightly so. He was full of suggestions of places for us to go in the south of his country even though he himself had never had the chance to visit most of them. Tuan was just one of several people that I met in Vietnam that have really stuck in my memory. Generally I keep to myself both at home and abroad; I'm not a talker - not when sober. But one thing I do love is being able to get a first hand perspective on situations I could otherwise never really understand. After spending one fast paced holiday in Vietnam I would claim no special insight into the country's workings but, when talking to Tuan and people like him, for a few short minutes, I got it.

As we arrived back at the hostel from our little trip to the station I asked Tuan, given all the monetary benefits in such a tough environment, if most young men aspired to be police officers. "No," he said, "we'd rather be poor."

This lady was having a slow day in Vinh Long market in the Mekong delta