In Hanoi

On the perils of travel writing

Just as 2024 was getting underway, I found myself in Hanoi on a business trip—my first visit in around twenty years.

Now, The English Republic of Letters is not a travel blog. And as I found myself writing about the visit on the way home, I began to remember why.

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I barely recalled any details from my last visit except for the eat-all-the-bits-of-a-snake restaurant (you'd be surprised) and the motorbikes. Fortunately, no snake banquet awaited me this time. But the motorbikes are still there, though two decades later, the number of cars has increased, as I might have expected. The Vietnamese economy has been growing steadily all that time.

During this trip, it was the motorbikes that claimed my attention again. I was mesmerised, watching them line up at traffic lights, only to then roar across the junction in chaotic unison at the green light. It was as if the age of the machine had just begun, and in the madness of invention and new energy, the only reasonable thing to do is ride their bikes at speed and without apparent destination. I watched them shift and squeeze through the modernising streets, the shabby low rise, the soulless new towers. The motorbikes were a near constant as we all drove past the refurbished colonial houses, which are now home to bijou cafes, tiny boutiques, and empty galleries lined with kitsch paintings in the local naïve style.

Motorbikes poised to roar across a busy junction in Hanoi

Yet I felt relaxed crossing the roads, despite the weaving of the Hondas across the treelined boulevards. I remembered the advice I'd been given on my first visit, just walk steadily across the flow, let them see you, and they'll swerve. The whole driving philosophy seemed to be about living with the aleatory acts of others and trusting the oblique wisdom of a kind of Brownian motion which was in play. Even on the morning I left, with the grey rain streaming down and accumulating in traffic-slowing rivulets, my driver seemed effortlessly to zig-zag his way through the sodden molecular swarms of traffic without mishap. 

Immediately after leaving the airport, the energy of the streets, the heavy official architecture of government buildings, the half-finished consumer paradise alongside the empty lots and mobile kiosks of poorly dressed vendors selling fruit, all began to remind me of other so-called middle-income countries. With small variations in the kind of fruit, the insignia on government offices, and the makes of vehicles rushing around me, I could perhaps have been in Egypt, Ecuador, or the poorer parts of China. 

Yet “middle-income country” is a careless framing brought on by the lazy terminology that reduces cultures and countries to their economic status. Of course, the individual’s struggle to thrive and the deep chasms of economic insecurity that yawn all around are real and keenly felt in all such economies. But perhaps the least interesting thing about a place is its economic status, I reflected. What makes a city glow with boundless uniqueness is the confluence between its inhabitants and its history, its geography, its arts, and its trades, I thought. And how, I wondered, could the visitor even begin to chronicle that? The travel writer (or travelling writer) deploys anecdotes, wryly observed incidents, and the description of a few surface details. What we notice and what we choose to say describe us more than the city we're visiting, I reflected. 

If you must attempt the genre, I thought, you need to promise yourself that you'll refuse to indulge in summary judgement, writerly condescension, or facile conclusion. Easier said than done.¹ 

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Individuals that we meet will stubbornly, perhaps even gloriously, resist our impulses to romanticise or generalise (these aren't the same, but they come from a common reservoir of laziness). I spoke to someone from the south of the country, an economic migrant fleeing the hard labour of low-paid factory work. With a mother who died young of cancer and the elder daughter in a family crippled by the medical costs, she'd headed to the city to work in a tourist hotel. But that's a story, not a description of a place. And there I am, using labels like “economic migrant” to make the narrative emblematic. Reality isn't built that way. 

When I start writing about a place I visit rather than live in, I almost immediately distrust this urge to describe or categorize—the rash but understandable attempt to summarise or explain. We can't stop ourselves from trying, nor can we stop ourselves from failing to do justice to a place, whatever that may mean. There's often little real judgement in the travelogue, just a thin ledger of dubious evidence. You strive to capture the special moment of arrival with your ostensibly true, yet wholly unreliable, writings of first impressions. You hear a story, you rush to write it down, and you mistake it for the truth. 

Lake of the Returned Sword and Turtle Tower

I stand by Hoàn Kiếm Lake (Lake of the Returned Sword) to gaze out at Turtle Tower. Nearby are some would-be influencers, perhaps from South Asia, clamorously filming their latest TikTok or Instagram videos. They are lively, energised by their surroundings. I catch the word “money” shouted excitedly several times and wonder if they aren't somehow closer than me to the spirit of this insistent city of restlessness. On the steps of the nearby opera house, though, despite the roar of the traffic at this busy junction, locals are standing in subdued silence. Behind them, the opera house looms like a heavy old cake, to which a thin layer of French colonial icing still clings. It represents the celebration, if that's the word, of a marriage that began under duress and ended in bloody rejection. 

Hanoi Opera House

But the people standing on the steps pay no attention to it. They are staring out at the traffic. Demographically speaking, this is a young country, and most of them are probably in their early twenties. Little seems to distinguish them from their peers swerving in the light rain through the relentless traffic on their motorbikes. Perhaps they're waiting for a ride, sheltering from the drizzle, or just thinking of buying their bike. On a wall nearby, I see an advertisement that describes buying a Honda in terms of a dream come true. I can't help asking myself: If that's a dream, what would a nightmare look like? 

So there I go again, with my hasty judgement and the sneering observation: is there no way to turn them off? Is there no mute button for the pronouncements of the privileged traveller? 

But I'm stuck with myself—the voice that is as insistent and noisy as the motorbikes that move around me like a river around a pillar of a bridge. Through immersion in the current of traffic, I aim, without success, for the humility and neutrality of a functional landmark, thinking, in vain, how it may be better to be observed than to observe. My senses are already reeling with the cacophony, but I stay alert and cross the stream of traffic one last time before disappearing into my hotel to start packing. Soon I'll begin the slow journey home, during which I'll settle down to update my personal diary with an honest account of my visit and where I'll end up writing these words instead. 

1. Of course, there are some travel writers or writers who write about travel that get it just right. Here’s a brilliant example by

Laurie Stone

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