Bi's Scope - A Perspective on Culture and Life

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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...

The Line Used to Be

You could ask for kem at Hiệu kem Bốn Mùa — Four Seasons, the shop was called, though under the ration system there had only ever been the one — and that was the whole menu: one kind, one price set by the state, poured from the same batch for the child in front of you and the one behind. You queued for it outside the round pavilion on Lê Thái Tổ street, the one everyone still calls Nhà Tròn , the round house. The line did not move quickly, and nobody expected it to. Waiting was most of what the system offered besides the cup itself — a reason to stand outside on a summer evening, next to people you hadn't chosen and couldn't skip past. I did not think of any of that as anything but an inconvenience until I was sitting inside the same round building decades later, on granite that didn't exist when I was a child, waiting for a bill instead of a cup. Understanding what actually happened to Hiệu kem Bốn Mùa on Hồ Gươm — how a state ice cream counter became a Hapro café wi...

Where the steps met water

In a folder marked hs: 78.693 , inside the Résidence Supérieure au Tonkin records at the National Archives Center I in Hanoi, there is a photograph a French explorer named Firmin-André Salles took in 1896. It shows a gate the French sometimes mislabeled Grand Bouddha — the temple's own name is Quán Thánh, and the deity behind its doors is Trấn Vũ, not Buddha at all — and it shows, at the base of the gate's stone steps, water. Not approaching. Not visible somewhere past a wall. Touching. The lake's edge sits directly against the lowest stone, the way a threshold sits against a floor. I was standing at the intersection of Thanh Niên and Thụy Khuê a hundred and thirty years later, four lanes of traffic between me and a lake I could hear but not see, when I understood that the water in that photograph had not receded on its own. It had been asked, for decades, one project at a time, to leave. That asking is most of what this essay means by Quan Thanh Temple's history wit...

Eleven Phins in a Basin

The woman who runs the coffee stall on Nguyễn Thiếp Street keeps eleven phin filters in a plastic basin under the counter, and no two of them close the same way. She reaches for one without looking. This morning it's a squat aluminum body whose base plate no longer sits flush — warped just enough, after decades of boiling water, to rock a half-degree against the glass tumbler underneath it. She doesn't notice. Her hand has already moved to the coffee tin. I take an identical filter from the basin while she's occupied with a customer. It weighs almost nothing, lighter than the spoon resting inside it, cold at the rim and faintly warm at the base where the last brew touched it. Four pieces separate in my palm: a lid, a cylindrical chamber, a perforated disc the vendors call tấm nén — the press — and a base plate, rế phin , sold on its own because it wears out first. The holes across the disc aren't evenly spaced. A few sit slightly wider than the rest, one punched at a...

Al Noor Mosque, Hanoi

By the time I stepped into the courtyard at 12 Hàng Lược, the Friday sermon was already three sentences past its opening line, and no one turned to notice a stranger arriving late. The Adhan came through the open doors in a register that didn't ask the street to quiet down for it. It simply laid itself over the noise already there — a moped idling in low gear, someone counting change over a stack of red paper, a kettle going off two doors down. I had expected the sound to sit apart from the market the way a foreign object sits apart from a body: tolerated, maybe, but never absorbed. It didn't. The call and the change-counting moved at the same volume, in the same air, the way two things move when they've been doing this for longer than either can remember. Men knelt in rows that spilled past the doorway, because the hall inside had already filled. Al Noor Mosque Hanoi is not a recent arrival. It is the last standing anchor of a community that began arriving in the 1880s...

Hanoi Sticky Rice, Before the Street Wakes

Six-thirty in the morning, and the intersection in the Old Quarter is still half dark, half lit. In front of a shuttered storefront, a line of people stands in a straight column along the sidewalk. No one talks above a murmur. No one checks a phone. At the head of the line sits a basket wrapped in thick cloth, a thin column of steam rising straight out of it before dissolving somewhere below the eaves. I had arrived with a wrong assumption. In a city where motorbikes thread through half-second gaps in traffic, I expected a sidewalk rice stall to run on the same tempo — scoop fast, wrap fast, pay fast. But the woman selling it, seated low on a plastic stool, didn't shorten a single motion. She held a thin blade and shaved slice after slice off a block of pressed mung bean, each sliver curling as it fell, thin enough to look like a petal, onto the turmeric-yellow rice underneath. No one in the line urged her to move faster. The mung bean block hadn't been sliced in advance. I...