Ramble On, Rose: Field Trips in Hanoi

I spent a week in Hanoi, strolling around the old city and seeing what there is to see. And there is a lot to see, so this is a long one.

I went to the Vietnam Women's Museum, which focuses on the contribution of women to Vietnam's history and culture. They had some good displays on the cult of the celestial mothers, a belief system revolving around 13 goddesses, and a video about women working as street vendors, which is grueling, dangerous work. They also had a lot on life as a woman living in tribes like the Black Hmong:

One of these displays finally answered why I've met so many elderly women in Laos and Vietnam with deliberately, evenly blackened teeth. I thought that it might be some kind of jungle dental hygiene; turns out it's for fashion. Starting at around 12 or 13 years old girls coat their teeth with tree resin before bed. It's rare these days among young tribeswomen, but I met a woman in her mid-70s who told me that when she was a girl in the mountains of Northern Vietnam, "no man would look at you if your teeth weren't black".

There was a room devoted to various tribal fashions:

This one is really wearable, actually.

But the vast majority of the museum's displays focused on the role women took in Vietnam's various military conflicts. The photos and posters on these floors were incredible.

Nuns and monks calling for the release of political prisoners.

"Protest against repression". Those women are pulling barbed wire with bare hands.

The propaganda posters were awesome.

"Heroic, indomitable, honest, and responsible."

"Protect and control the village."

"Every person is a soldier."

That wasn't just talk. People from the north went south via the Ho Chi Minh trail to join the war effort, leaving mostly women to protect their homes and keep things in order. Those women repaired roads destroyed by bombing, worked in medical care, communications, and transporting goods and soldiers. But they were also literally soldiers: in the south women represented 40% of the guerrilla and militia forces.

I probably shouldn't love this, but I do. Look how tiny and fierce she is.

They were not playing.

What else did I do in Hanoi? I went to a water puppetry performance, an art form that involves filling a stage with waist-high water and controlling the puppets using wires that extend underneath the water and behind a curtain. Water puppetry dates back to the 12th century and originated in flooded rice fields.

There were some musicians accompanying the show who were perched off to the side on an elevated stage.

The woman in the foreground of this photo is playing a Vietnamese string instrument called the cong chieng, which was traditionally played only by men. Unmarried women were forbidden to listen as their parents feared that the music would make the girl fall hopelessly in love with the musician (even then parents hated the idea of their daughter with a musician, I guess). The played plucked at it with flighty hand movements, producing a shrill, vibrating, psychedelic sound that didn't strike me as being particularly seductive, but what do I know.

I also took a trip to the Hoa Lo Prison Museum.

Arial photo of the prison before most of it was torn down.

This prison was built beginning in 1886 by the French, and housed Vietnamese prisoners, particularly those agitating for independence from French rule. They were held in inhuman conditions and subject to torture and execution.

Many of the rooms had dummies in them, which will FREAK YOU OUT if you 're walking from one room to another and not expecting them.

Or if you walk up to a cell door like this one and peer into the darkness.

Gah!

Seriously, though, things were bad here. The prison's capacity for inmates was 600 people, but in 1954 the records show that it held more than 2,000 people, including women and their children.

The subhuman conditions made it a symbol of colonialist exploitation.

Beginning in 1964, the prison had new inmates: American pilots who were shot down over northern Vietnam. These pilots (among them John McCain, eventual candidate for president) ironically nicknamed the prison the "Hanoi Hilton". While the Vietnamese insisted that the prisoners were being treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, pilots were actually subjected to various forms of torture including rope bindings, irons, severe beatings, and prolonged solitary confinement. The aim of the torture was not to acquire military information, but to break the will of the prisoners and force statements from them criticizing the U.S. and praising the Vietnamese. It worked: almost every American POW made a statement of some kind at some time. They held out as long as they could and then said whatever they needed to to survive.

The displays on this chapter in the life of the prison are pure, unadulterated propaganda. One video I watched there told visitors that pilots nicknamed the prison the "Hanoi Hilton" because of the excellent conditions there. Another display reads that "During the war, the national economy was difficult but Vietnamese government had created the best living conditions to U.S. pilots for they had a stable life during the temporary detention period (sic)". The photos of pilots staying at the prison showed them decorating for Christmas, playing cards, watching films, and playing sports:

According to the museum, the place was essentially a health club. Standing by these photos I was joined by an American man in his mid-60's, who glowered at them with his jaw clenched and then gritted out, "I don't know who they think they're fooling with this," before stalking out of the room. I don't either. It's not as if these men disappeared; one of them ran for president, and the torture he endured in those rooms was written all over his body. It made me angrier than I expected.

But let's not end with revisionist propaganda! I also went to the Temple of Literature, because, well, how could I not.

The temple was built in 1070 and hosts the "Imperial Academy", Vietnam's first national university. It's dedicated to Confucius, sages, and scholars, and is a lovely refuge from the city humming all around it.

Here's "the Well of Heavenly Clarity", although it looks more like "the Pond of Sublime Antifreeze".

Massive stalae of doctors laureates were placed on tortoise shells which line one of the courtyards. Students who have better things to do than study come to the temple to rub the heads of the tortoises to pass their exams.