Arrived in Hanoi three weeks ago and am staying on the fringes of the Old Quarter’s tourist vortex, surrounded by people on vacation. It feels a bit like a Caribbean beach resort scene grafted onto the dense, frenetic, polluted urban core of a Southeast Asian capital, with Tevas and synthetic activewear in almost equal ratio to the motorbikes, street-sellers, and small restaurants run out of the ground floor of a family’s apartment duplex. Two streams, the foreign and the local. And then all the phenomena born in their turbid confluence. Special emphasis, here, on the hawkers. In the Old Quarter you go from A to B only via a string of offers that all begin with “hello!”, a kind of brachiation of sales pitches: one each, at least, for fruit, dining, and motorbike taxi service, and, if you’re a white male of a certain age, anywhere from three to what feels like two hundred for massages. If I took every offer for massage I get walking around the Old Quarter, I’d have been gradually pulverized by now, and would locomote the city not on legs but as a grinning and slightly sunburned pale soup running its gutters. To be honest, the Old Quarter has a way of making you feel that’s already what you are.
Alongside all this there’s a deeper river. This is the one of the century-old building where I’m sitting now, which was home to three families for generations until it changed hands to this cafe’s owner a few years ago. One of the original doors stands mounted on a wall in the courtyard; while the young tourists (or occasionally old—there’s a bimodal distribution with peaks in the 20s and 60s) decide over French toast what to do with their brief time here, the green paint, barely visible now, is still slowly aging within the wood, so faintly tinged now from its last painting that it looks driftwood with that soft inner sheen from whatever sparse motes of kelp or seaweed the sea, in bringing it in, hasn’t washed away. There are many doors like this in the city, doors upon this deeper, slower river, and like this one, beyond the wall its bolted to, they open into time, where stand the Banyan trees, which in only two of their generations span the whole thousand-year life of the city. The larger ones have prop roots as thick as trunks descending from rooftop height and at first you take them to be separate trees, until you follow their sinewy upreaching skyward and see they’re actually holding up massive lateral limbs branching out way up over your head, and then they look like legs. The tree is a giant organism paused mid-stride. Only it isn’t paused. It’s moving right before your eyes—this is the actual, literal truth—and it’s only that you are here too briefly to see it.
So much of what’s here does feel, in fact, impossible to grab onto over the course of such a relatively short stay (five weeks in Hanoi) and while working. I’ve decided to leave on the ground any grand ambitions about doing / understanding / indeed even photographing this place. There’s too much and the time is too short. And so instead I’ve started working on the raw scans of some of the pictures from Vidin this past winter. The image on the main page is one of those. There is a path that runs from the city center through semi-wilderness to a mostly Romani suburb. Cutting through the wilderness along that path, where the only train tracks in or out of the city also run, is the quickest way between the suburb and center, since the roads between them all run obliquely, one road taking you too far one way, the next doubling you back, and since many of the people living out there don’t have cars, they come and go on foot along the path throughout the day. I asked some of them if they would allow a portrait.
May 17 2025