Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

The bottle lands on the scale still warm from someone's hand. A two-liter PET bottle, crushed flat along its ribs, a grease smear across the label where a kitchen rag wiped it just clean enough to sell but not clean enough to look new. The scale is a rusted mechanical arm bolted into a doorway too narrow for a car, set into an alley behind a wet market in Chợ Lớn — Ho Chi Minh City's old ethnic-Chinese quarter, where the house numbers still follow a sequence that stopped making sense to anyone but the people who live there. A man in flip-flops watches the needle settle, calls out a price half in Vietnamese and half in Cantonese-inflected slang, and writes the number by hand into a ledger gone soft at the corners. Behind him the room goes back further than the doorway suggests, built for something else, repurposed, the ceiling low enough that a tall man ducks nea...

A man at a roadside stall sent me up this hillside — I'd asked where to see the harvest up close, and he tilted his chin toward a dirt track and said to find whoever was up in the trees. The farmer up there never agreed to be written about, so he stays nameless here. He climbed into his own lychee trees the way other men climb a familiar staircase, without looking down, one hand finding a branch he'd clearly used a hundred times before, a cloth sack already slung crosswise over his shoulder. From the ground, his wife called up the count as clusters came down: four, three, six, a number scratched each time onto a scrap of paper held against her palm with a thumb. It wasn't six in the morning yet and the heat hadn't started; what had started was the smell — leaves crushed and bruised off the branches, and underneath that, the sweet rot of fruit that had dropped early and split open in the grass. Behind that unhurried pace sat headlines I'd been reading all week: a w...

The brazier had been burning since two in the afternoon. It sat in a glass cabinet on the sidewalk corner — charcoal low and patient, a pan of pâté resting on the grate above it, sweating gently into the winter air. Hanoi in the Northeast Monsoon is not cold by any standard that earns the word, but it is cold enough: a sky the color of unglazed pottery, a damp that settles in the wrists. The street was Lò Sũ, or somewhere near it — I have been back enough times that the corners have begun to rearrange themselves in memory. What I remember clearly is the plastic stool, shin-height, and the way the bánh mì was handed to me already warm, the crust still crackling from the grill, held in a piece of thin paper that immediately began to spot with grease. I had expected weight. That is the honest account of the expectation: a sandwich assembled with the logic of abundance, each layer a statement. I had eaten bánh mì elsewhere — in Saigon with pickled daikon pressing against cold cuts, in ...

He told me about the sound before he told me anything else. Not the varietal, not the score sheet, not the buyer he'd met in  Buôn Ma Thuột  that morning. The sound came first, the way the important detail in a story always seems to arrive out of order. He'd been standing in a coffee yard in  Đắk Lắk  — a private one, poured concrete in front of somebody's house — when his first step landed on a cherry that had been drying since sunrise. It cracked. Not a soft give, but a clean, brittle snap, followed by another under his other foot, and another, until walking across the yard sounded less like walking and more like something being methodically undone. Nobody around him looked up. That was the detail he kept returning to weeks later, over coffee that had long gone cold in front of us. If the sound had meant nothing, it wouldn't have needed an audience so unbothered by it. Its lack of drama was the first clue that it wasn't decoration. The yard itself was conc...

I have often heard people in the "phố cổ" (the Old Quarter) say that Hàng Mã has all four seasons.  In the three hundred and thirty-nine meters from the "Phùng Hưng" (the railway arches running parallel to the old Hanoi rail line) to the "Hàng Đường" intersection, the street's inventory rotates according to both lunar calendar and Gregorian calendar. At the back of every shop, behind whatever the calendar currently requires of the front, the permanent inventory holds its position: paper houses, ceremonial clothing in adult sizes for ancestral burning, paper vehicles at full scale, hell bank notes in denominations that appear to track real-world inflation as though someone has kept the books. These goods predate the festival tourism, predate most of what the street now sells. What to call that — whether it too counts as one of the four. Spring — Tết Nguyên Đán, Nguyên Tiêu The red of "Tết Nguyên Đán" (the Lunar New Year) arrives as st...

The cassette was a "băng Sơn Ca 7" — one of the commercial tape series that moved du ca recordings through southern households in the late 1960s and early 1970s — and it lived in a wooden cabinet alongside yellowing school notebooks that smelled of pencil shavings and mildew. I was eleven. The voice on the tape was already cracked before it reached me: warped by heat, by repeated playback, by whatever had happened to the magnetic ribbon inside. I heard it as weather. Not music exactly, not language exactly — a pressure system moving through the room that had no name I could give it yet. It made the air feel different without explaining why. Years later, I found the photographs. Printed on paper that had bronzed unevenly at the edges, stills from evenings at "Quán Văn" (the outdoor student gathering space at the Faculty of Letters courtyard on Đinh Tiên Hoàng Street, where Khánh Ly and Trịnh Công Sơn performed regularly through the late 1960s) — the frames so comp...