The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World.

by Jennifer Baggett

  Now it was Holly’s turn to lose it. She jumped between Jen and the driver to block her. He leapt back, then darted in to spit at us again. Finally, the schizophrenically unstable driver raced back to his car and slid behind the wheel.

  We didn’t stick around to see what happened next. Jen and I grabbed Holly, threw some bills over our shoulder, and ran like hell in the direction of the lake.

  Our showdown with the cabdriver rattled our cages, to say the least.

  Holly, who strongly felt that we should have ditched the scene a lot earlier than we did, became distracted and withdrawn. Jen, who believed that we’d never been in any real danger, had no regrets that we’d stood our ground and gotten my stuff back. And I was grateful that both of my friends had stuck by me in a crisis, but I felt horribly guilty that I’d compromised their safety. I replayed the scene over and over again in my head, questioning how I could have done things differently. Eventually Jen told me to stop beating myself up. We’d gotten my stuff and everyone was safe, so we might as well put the whole thing behind us. And once we’d reinstalled ourselves in the Quanghiep Hotel and gotten a few fitful hours of sleep, that’s exactly what we tried to do.

  According to the carefully plotted Excel chart schedule that Jen had created, we had nearly two weeks to spend exploring Hanoi, the longest stretch of time we’d devoted to any major city since we’d started traveling. While smaller villages and rural areas appeal to me more than population-dense metropolises (there’s a sameness to big cities, whether you’re talking about Hong Kong, Nairobi, or New York), I was fascinated by Hanoi, a place that during its thousand-year history has served as the seat of the ancient Viet Kingdom, the crown jewel of French Indochina, an incubator of socialism, the headquarters of Communism, and most recently, the cultural and political capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

  Like many cities across Asia, it’s in the throes of transition. Prior to receiving its current, somewhat unimaginative title of Hà Nôi (which means “inside the rivers,”), the city was called Thang Long, which means either “ascending dragon” or “to ascend and flourish,” depending on where you place the accent. Either way, the title seems to fit. Modern-day Hanoi has risen from its war-ravaged, impoverished third-world past to emerge as one of the continent’s most cosmopolitan, upwardly mobile cities.

  It’s also one of the youngest. Thanks to a baby boom after the end of the Vietnam War (called “the American War” in these parts), nearly half of the population is under the age of thirty and a quarter are under fifteen, a demographic shift that we spotted as soon as we left the Quanghiep Hotel later that afternoon for a walk through the Old Quarter.

  Spiky-haired, fashion-forward teenagers were all around us—they roared past on shiny chrome motorbikes, chattered animatedly into microscopic mobile phones, crammed into cybercafés to play online dance and soccer games. They were even break dancing to the nation’s own politically correct, cleaned-up version of hip-hop music in Lenin Square. The young people didn’t even acknowledge old man Vladimir’s towering presence as they threw themselves into gravity-defying, tendon-twisting moves at the foot of the square’s twenty-foot-high bronze effigy.

  As Jen and I watched the dancers, Holly got to chatting with Allen, a college professor on a field trip with some communications students from Maryland. He explained that the statue, along with hundreds of other monuments built by the Russians in the latter half of the twentieth century, had basically become a relic of Vietnam’s political past.

  Though the country technically stands behind its Communist ideology, during the past two decades it has granted an increasing amount of economic and personal freedom to its citizens. In the mid-1980s, the government instituted a series of reforms known as Dôi Mói (renovation), which essentially allowed people to have their own free-market businesses and conduct trade abroad. Not only did this help foster good relations with the capitalist West, it ultimately transformed the nation’s economy into one of the fastest-growing in Asia, second only to China. Capitalism and tourism have exploded here in almost equal measure, with the number of international visitors quadrupling in the last decade.

  As Holly, Jen, and I wandered through the maze of streets just north of the lake, we saw firsthand how quickly entrepreneurship had gone from being a dirty word to the name of the game. New businesses—hotels, guesthouses, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, art galleries, clothing stores, souvenir shops, tour operators, and travel agencies—had opened to service the flood of foreigners, and we got the distinct sense that everyone wanted a piece of the action. And why not? As Tsu had explained in Sapa, catering to tourists is often a far more lucrative enterprise than, say, rice farming or fabric dyeing. It makes good financial sense for young people to switch from trades their families have practiced for generations to ones that may pull in fifty times the profit. And therein lies the tourism paradox: the greater a destination’s popularity, the less authentic it becomes.

  In few places has the proliferation of tourism occurred faster than in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, a warren of thirty-six tangled lanes and double-knotted passageways situated just above Hoan Kiem, or Lake of the Returning Sword.

  Though the Old Quarter fills only a single square kilometer, there’s more than enough humanity crammed into it to fascinate an observer for months, if not years. We had less than two weeks left to explore. So each morning, after getting scrubbed down and layered in our single set of mismatched winter gear, the three of us would step from the familial hubbub of our guesthouse and into the freewheeling pandemonium just outside our front door. Blaring horns, bicycle bells, high-decibel shrieking, and the ever-present rush of traffic provided the sound track as we navigated through the jumble of passageways between our lodging and the lake.

  In centuries past, this area—a trading hub strategically located between the Royal Citadel to the west and the Red River to the east—functioned as the economic heart and soul of the city. Skilled artisans and craftsmen worked shoulder to shoulder on specific streets that eventually took on the names of the goods sold there—shoppers knew what they were getting on Sweet Potato, Bamboo Shade, or Pickled Fish road. These merchants lived with their families in ultraskinny buildings, known as tube houses. Because the residents were taxed on the width of their properties, many homes and shops were constructed to be just nine or ten feet wide—but could be five stories tall and up to 150 feet deep.

  Back then the streets were frenzied trading floors where salespeople hawked their wares at earsplitting pitches, negotiated rapid-fire deals in order to edge out next-door competitors, and replaced hastily displayed merchandise as fast as it was sold. Today, other than the threat of getting nailed by a wayward scooter or losing one’s hearing from the nonstop honking, the only thing that has really changed is the variety of goods on hawk.

  Rather than tracking down coffins, charcoal, fish sauce, and chickens on their respectively named streets, Jen, Holly, and I had an easier time finding knockoff handbags, fussy stiletto heels, bootleg DVDs, cheap plastic toys, bins full of fruit-flavored candies, tins of chocolate, paper fans and lanterns, kites, baseball hats, and piles of mass-produced sportswear separates that had likely migrated down from factories in China.

  Commerce congested every passageway. Pushcarts, stalls, and tables full of merchandise hogged space along the main arteries. Barbers offered haircutting services (complete with chairs, mirrors, and draping cloths) right on the pavement. Farmworkers in conical hats slipped through the crowd balancing slender wooden poles on their shoulders. Along the way, they tried to unload the produce—bananas, green beans, tomatoes, pineapples, and grapes—from flat bamboo baskets suspended from the ends of the rods. And, as I learned the hard way, if you want to take their picture, you have to don the pole and hat yourself, then pay for a few pieces of fruit.

  What little sidewalk space wasn’t taken up by parked bikes, motorbikes, and baskets was used to create makeshift cafés. Plastic kiddie chairs and miniature stools no bigger than a singl
e butt cheek were organized around equally tiny tables under bright blue tarps. Nearby, men squeezed fish paste over strips of sizzling meat and chopped vegetables inside woks; women squatted over hubcap-sized pans of glutinous white rice and tended to enormous cauldrons of pho bo soup above open wood fires.

  As they stirred, a beefy blast of steam, richly scented with cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves, swirled into the atmosphere, seducing anyone who happened to catch a whiff. Since we’d arrived, I’d become almost manic about getting my hands on soup as often as possible. I’d even started eating the stuff for breakfast, standard operating procedure for the Vietnamese.

  Traffic lights were nonexistent, which made crossing the major streets surrounding Hoan Kiem into a daily death wish—if we waited for a break in the traffic, we might as well have waited forever. The only way to make it across safely was to step off the curb directly into a raging river of oncoming chrome and steel, staring down helmeted drivers, who would then part around our bodies as if we were Moses and they were the Red Sea. Every time we made it to safety without being hit or dragged under the wheels of the rampaging vehicles, it felt as if we’d experienced a miracle.

  After our run-in with the heroin-crazed cabdriver (whose reputation had swelled to almost mythical proportions in the retelling), all three of us were now motivated to forge a more positive connection with Hanoi. In all our months of travel, we’d yet to meet a destination that we didn’t like—or at least one that we couldn’t get along with—but the harder we tried to get on Hanoi’s good side, the more roundly we were rejected.

  Still ill equipped for the freezing cold temperatures, we ventured to the city’s discount-clothing district to layer ourselves in even more coats, sweaters, gloves, scarves, and pants. Initially, we had a blast sorting through the piles of fabric and outfitting ourselves in a ridiculously mismatched combination of colors, patterns, and textures, but I was taken off guard when the women working one stall refused to let me try on a pair of pants, indicating that my five foot four, 125-pound butt was far too enormous to yank them up. Considering that a goodly percentage of the ladies around me barely cleared five feet and might have weighed 90 pounds with their boots on, I could understand that they might worry that I’d stretch out, rip, or otherwise damage the merchandise. But when I finally tracked down a pair of size XXL workout pants, the stretchy Lycra kind that could safely contain an elephant’s quivering saddlebags, one of the women snatched them away, shrieking a string of Vietnamese phrases at me as another held her hands out wide in front of my hips in the international sign language for “fat ass.” Holly tried to reassure me that being called fat was a compliment in Vietnam (“Even though it’s not remotely true! You look amazing!”), but my obesity had clearly affronted their sensibilities.

  The fun didn’t stop with clothes shopping. Vendors who’d set up wooden carts and stands along Ngoc Quyen Street completed rapid-fire transactions with local customers but often ignored me when I tried to place an order. One man stonily agreed to sell me two forlorn-looking oranges for several times the local price, but when I countered with a more reasonable number, he hissed at me to get away from his cart. Bargaining and negotiating, an integral part of public marketplaces worldwide, didn’t seem to be universally accepted here. We knew it wasn’t uncommon to charge locals one price and outsiders another, but here the discrepancy almost felt like a form of punishment, some retribution for our general pasty-skinned, wide-hipped, big-nosed offensiveness.

  Though some vendors wanted nothing to do with us, others were dogged in their determination to sell us something, no matter how politely and repeatedly we declined. Each afternoon as we walked around the lake, laser-eyed men hawking stacks of illegally photocopied guidebooks and paperbacks would hustle into our path, using their copies of Lonely Planet: Vietnam, The Killing Fields, and A Short History of Nearly Everything to barricade our movements.

  At one point, frustrated that she couldn’t walk a hundred yards without being accosted, Jen set her chin and decided that she was going to stick to her route, no matter what. For a few seconds, she and one of the guidebook guys played chicken on a stretch of the sidewalk: he bore down on her, frantically rattling off the names of the paperbacks in one long unbroken string of words; she continued looking straight ahead, no more interested in buying them now than she’d been on her first three laps around the water. At the very last second, when they were just inches away from colliding and sending thousands of poorly photocopied pages directly into the lake, the tout flung himself left and hurled a few “fuck yous” in her direction. It was as if Jen had committed the vilest of offenses just by minding her own business. To my amazement, when we’d lapped the lake the next time, the same sales guy moved in to approach our group again. We leapt off the path and called it an afternoon before it came to fisticuffs.

  In each instance, the three of us wondered if we could possibly be imagining things—the undercurrent of hostility, the uncanny sensation that certain Westerners were tolerated as long as they were interested in parting with their greenbacks at every possible opportunity—or worse, if we were doing something to bring misunderstanding and misfortune upon ourselves. It was entirely possible. We’d been traveling at a breakneck pace for the last few months, crammed into tiny rooms on top of one another, and we’d all grown road-weary and snappish. The initial freshness and excitement of the trip had long since worn off, and the reserves of humor and energy we had so often used to deflect aggressive touts, money changers, tour operators, postcard salesmen, beach boys, T-shirt hawkers, and taxi drivers had been all but drained. We tried our best to blow off the bad apples, to remain calm no matter how frustrating the interaction, but we didn’t always succeed.

  We’d decided to stay in Hanoi for as long as we did in part to give ourselves a chance to rest and to rebuild our reserves before continuing with the trip. But we’d chosen to stay in the most highly trafficked part of the city, and one that we later learned is notorious for the prevalence and sophistication of its scam artists. Most attempts to get visitors to part with their money involve overcharging for rides, returning incorrect change, or rerouting travelers to a different restaurant or hotel from the one they intended to visit. Others were more direct: Holly’s purse was slashed while she was walking through one of the markets.

  “This women just kept bumping into me and bumping into me,” Holly said later, retelling the story. “I remember feeling irritated that she was walking so close to me that she was actually hitting me, but I felt rude telling her to back off. Eventually, I just got fed up, turned around, and stared her straight in the eye. That’s when she turned and ran. I didn’t really know why—until a few seconds later, when I felt my wallet slip out of my bag.” Apparently, the woman had been razoring through Holly’s shoulder bag as she walked but hadn’t been able to grab the contents before getting caught.

  After that, we considered whether it was wise to continue trying to force-fit a relationship that clearly wasn’t working.

  “I mean, it’s unrealistic to think that we’re gonna love every single destination that we visit,” Jen reasoned. “Maybe Hanoi just isn’t our kind of town.”

  We chewed on that idea for a few minutes, and I felt a little defeated. Could we really have such irreconcilable differences with an entire city? The three of us quietly considered packing up our stuff and making our way back to Bangkok. And we might have done just that—retreated nearly a week ahead of schedule, trying the whole way home to rationalize our hasty departure—except that, as it turned out, Hanoi wasn’t ready to give up on us.

  That night, in pursuit of what might be our last meal in town, we stepped inside a mysterious little lounge we must have passed by half a dozen times during our forays in the Quarter. I was startled to find the place packed and steamy warm inside. Our eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the dimness of the room, which was barely lit by a few scattered candles, when I heard our names called out in the darkness. I could make out the silhouetted mop of rambunctious
curls and the distinctive French accent long before I could see the face.

  “Jennifer! Holly! Amanda! You’re here? I thought you had already gone!” Emanuel shouted, throwing kisses in every direction. He’d tried to e-mail Holly, but the messages had kept bouncing back.

  “But this does not matter now. You must come over to meet my friends,” he insisted, pulling us over to his table and introducing us to a hip-looking crew of local Hanoians, a couple of his European expat roommates, and a cute American guy in a blue baseball cap. Emanuel explained that the group was celebrating the inaugural issue of a national magazine that his Vietnamese friends Ngoc and Tuan had helped launch.

  “Yes, please, sit down,” said Tuan as everyone shoved over to make room for the new arrivals. Several oversized issues of the magazine were spread out between everyone’s half-empty pint and wineglasses, and I couldn’t resist picking up a copy and flipping through the pages to examine the images of girls in deconstructed shift dresses and sexy interior shots of Hanoi’s lounges and nightclubs. It hardly mattered that I couldn’t read the fine print or even make out the Vietnamese words in the dim light. There was something thrilling about holding a freshly printed full-color glossy, a feeling I can trace directly back to the sixth grade, when I first got my hands on my cousin’s copy of Seventeen magazine.

  The promise that the pages held back then—that just by reading, you might discover the one critical nugget of advice that would transform you into an entirely new, prettier, more popular person—had blown my eleven-year-old mind. I didn’t know who dispensed these powerful truths about life, boys, fashion, and lipstick, but I was pretty sure they must be all-knowing goddesses, tapped into a knowledge bank to which we mere mortals would never have access. It was only after getting my first assistant job in publishing years later and realizing that the women penning these extraordinary works of literature were twenty-four-year-olds like me that I felt a teensy bit hoodwinked. What next—The Wall Street Journal is written by college business majors?