Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

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The Muong Village

The woman of the house set the steamer on the fire, and I asked her the names of the things on the porch. It was the question of a guest with nothing else to ask. She answered one by one, without thinking. The pestle leaned against a post, its head worn smooth by hands. The steamer had begun to give off vapor. A paddle hung crosswise on the wall, its paint flaking in patches, half a day’s walk from the nearest river. Every word she said was a word I had known since childhood: chày (pestle), mái chèo (paddle), chõ xôi (sticky-rice steamer). Only they came from a different place in the mouth, heavier and slower, as though each sound were weighed before it was set down. I wrote all three in my notebook, crossed them out, and wrote them again. The letters would not hold what I had just heard. Out in the yard, the wind on the slope carried the smell of cooking smoke and damp wood. A child ran past, calling to someone in a voice whose meaning I could guess but whose tones I could not. ...

Tò He of Xuân La

The dough is cold before it is anything else. A fist-sized lump, dyed the deep red of gấc , a bright-fleshed local gourd used for centuries as a natural dye, pressed between a thumb and forefinger that have done this motion so many thousand times it no longer looks like sculpting — it looks like breathing. There is no workshop door to knock on here, no sign, no kiln. Just a low stool, a folding table, and a wheeled wooden chest parked at the edge of a road in Phượng Dực commune, on Hanoi’s southern edge, where a version of this craft has been made for something like three hundred years, or closer to five hundred, depending on which elder in the village is asked. No one can point to a founding date. In a craft passed hand to hand rather than written down, the years float. The artisan doesn’t look up while working. A stem of dried reed is already threaded through the base of a half-formed bird — its purpose not yet visible — while a seam of red bleeding into pink, where two colors of do...

The Ice Cream Stick at Number 35

The cốm ice cream stick melted faster than usual in my hand, probably because I had stood too long in the jostling crowd in the small forecourt of 35 Tràng Tiền. There were no tables. There were no chairs. People held their ice cream between two fingers, leaning aside to avoid one another, eating while standing as if that were the only way it had ever been done. I took it for the inconvenience of an old shop that had simply never been upgraded. Only a few weeks later, when the wooden door at number 35 closed for the last time, did I understand I had been looking in the wrong direction. That standing habit — formed over decades of having nowhere to sit, rather than chosen as a style — only became worth noticing once people knew it was about to disappear. News that Kem Tràng Tiền was closing its shop at 35 Tràng Tiền spread faster than any sale the place had ever run, and the queue on 15 September 2026 stretched longer than any summer afternoon I could remember. The Standing Plac...

Măng Đen Coffee, Under the Pines

The mist comes early to Măng Đen in the first days of January, settling over coffee gardens set above 1,200 meters, under a canopy of pine. This is peak harvest—the only season all year the cherries ripen, timed to the highlands’ brief dry spell. Pickers here don’t strip whole branches the way growers do with Robusta at lower elevations. They move tree to tree, taking only the red cherries, leaving the green ones for another pass. I arrived with a familiar expectation: a cup thick, dark, bitterly strong—the taste that has defined a whole plateau for decades. What came was a pale amber pour-over. The scent of pomelo blossom rose before it touched my lips. A bright sourness like ripe apricot, a trace of red apple, then a mellow sweetness of sugarcane in the finish. Not bitter. Not heavy-bodied. Nothing like anything I had ever called “Central Highlands coffee.” The person pouring explained it simply: an Arabica varietal, grown above 1,200 meters, processed by an entirely differ...

Without the Wheel

The jar sits on the counter of a workshop in Quarter 7, dark red going to charcoal along one shoulder, its surface too rough for a bowl and too fired to still be earth. No handle. No glaze. When I lift it, the walls are colder than the room around them, and lighter than the size suggests—as if the clay had learned, somewhere in its firing, exactly how much water it needed to hold and let the rest of the weight go. Run a thumb around the belly and you find them: shallow ridges, circling the jar at intervals that are close but never quite equal. There is no repeating motif here, no stamped or carved pattern that asserts itself as decoration. One ridge sits a hand’s width from the next, then a little more, then a little less, the way a person’s stride shortens on ground that isn’t flat. I ask the young man minding the shop what made them. He shrugs—some tool, maybe, or the way the clay dried on one side before the other. He doesn’t think it worth explaining to someone holding a water ...

Cà Ná: Notes on a Fish Sauce

The time I stood inside a vat house on National Route 1A, I was ready for the smell of a fish market at low tide—something sharp that announces itself before you cross the threshold. What reached me instead was warmer: a toasted, almost caramel note, the kind that comes off bread crust rather than the sea. It rose from a clear stream running out of a spigot near the floor, amber going toward the color of strong tea, catching the afternoon light through a gap in the corrugated roof. I had assumed decay. Eighteen months of fish and salt under a coastal sun should smell like rot—the reasonable assumption of anyone who has walked past a market stall at noon. I was wrong, and being wrong told me something being right never would have: whatever was happening in that tank was not decomposition being tolerated. It was decomposition being directed. A woman near the spigot adjusted a wooden tap with the practiced indifference of someone who has done it every morning for thirty years, caught ...

The Road Along the Dike

The provincial road out of Hanoi toward Phú Xuyên doesn’t look like it’s following anything. It curves the way roads curve when they’re avoiding fields, not tracing history—past a stretch of laundry hung to dry on a grass slope, past a stall selling rice paper and battery packs, past a man patching a soft spot in the embankment with a shovel and a bucket of clay. For most of an hour I drove believing the road ran beside the embankment. Then the shoulder narrowed, the ditch on the right disappeared, and I understood I’d been on top of the dike the whole time. The route south toward Phượng Vũ village runs along the crown of an earthwork that has been rebuilt so many times it no longer announces itself as one. This is, more or less, the same line of earth that Phạm Duy Tốn followed south out of Hanoi in 1915. He was a working reporter sent to see what remained after the dikes broke, not a writer seeking atmosphere by retracing personal ground. What he found on this road, and what he mad...