Travel Diaries #45 - Việt Nam Vô Địch
All dreams must die, and we all have to go home at some stage. But what better way to go out than watching your adopted country take part in the final of a minor international football tournament
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I’m leaving next week.
After almost three years – or 33 months to be more precise – of living and working in Hanoi, I’m leaving Vietnam forever.
I’ve always been leaving really
Never belonged here.
Though with not a trivial amount of effort I at some point managed to force a piece of myself into its wiry, sallow hands, and in moments asked for nothing in return.
And although I could have many more happy days, I’ve been mentally checked out in some ways for a long time.
The decision made a long time ago, and a weight lifts. A measure of lightness enters the window of the world around. Everything becomes easy. Your awareness of the impermanence of all, enlightened. You become more conscious. Lucid, like the moment you realise you’re in a dream and the reality you’re in begins to accelerate around you until it distorts and takes on impossible dimensions. The game is up. Everything converging to one point. You can scramble to do as much as you can and would like to before you wake, especially now with your newfound awareness of the extent of your power in this world that you realise you’re no longer a part of, being drawn to the waking world beyond, or below, but the meaning of the dream is now set in stone from the moment of realisation. The lesson learned, the dream imprinted.
It doesn’t even matter now if you remember it when you wake up.
And shortly after it’ll feel like it never existed.
Like all places, it dissolves.
Soon I’ll wake up.
Everything you remember from a place in coalesces in one rapid moving image. Copies copied upon copies, copied upon copies, a beautiful concept given an ugly acne-infested word – a palimpsest.
The sights, the sounds, and the scents of course.
But the more specific senses too:
The tight squeezes and crushed spaces and the deafening noises, the warm embraces and throbbing hums.
A jarring shuttersnap of phosphene.
And your life all flashes before your eyes as you start to realise where you were dreaming all along.
***
Tonight though – before you wake up – the stirrings of almighty life, the city is heaving.
Football is coming home to Vietnam.
We’ve seen the potential here unleashed before: earlier in the year played out in a coating of snow somewhere in China, the country’s under-23 football team against the much-feared Uzbekistan, half-time taking an hour for the first snow most of the Vietnamese players had ever seen in their lives to be cleared from the pitch. Heartbreak in the 118th minute after a draw;
A million or more took to the street in celebration, in noisy but dignified and heart-warming support of their heroic representatives.
Maybe tonight they’ll win.
The heat and brown and yellow and green and the smog and the traffic
Tonight Vietnam face the mighty Malaysia – this time it’s the senior team, though it’s only the South-East Asian games rather than the whole continental one. No-one cares what it is. They lost the last time. No-one cared. The party still happened.
I was too young for Italia ’90, though I now have some intimation of what it must have been like.
The birth of a nation.
The superpowers don’t get it. Success is humdrum for them; self-confidence is commonplace.
There’s been no journey from rags to riches, no attainment of glory from modest beginnings or the brink of a personal abyss. They’ve been born into it. To falter is an ignominious temporary disgrace. To know of nothing can’t even be fathomed.
The result of that match mattered little, and you will never feel as alive as you will in the throes of an unrelenting crowd of several million people as all live and breathe and watch as one as Vietnam take part in the final of a minor international football tournament.
It’s the taking part that counts.
Blue plastic stools under fluorescent garage forecourt lights
We sit knees-up to our elbows at the bia hơi at the junction of Bat Dan, near the western wall on the edge of the Old Quarter. A city’s heart doesn’t pump closer than to a spot like this. Chicken feet and bowls of snails and toothpicks and peanuts and chipped beer glasses and Honda 50’s with panels beat on with the back of an old saucepan. The old lady and her team of sons struggle under table-sized trays of twenty beers at a time.
They yelp and sweat and squirm and wipe their brows and laugh.
The game kicks off.
Spirits are high. Friends are made with the nervous smiling shuffle of clinked glasses through uncommon language.
People cheer each other for anything. A new friend. Another shot. Cheer the team for less: another shot – off target. A pass. A throw-in. No-one cares.
Klaxons and vuvuzelas and pots and tin cans.
The excitement builds and builds. It should be a formality. The game’s only on out in Mỹ Đình. If you could somehow mute the noise around here you’d probably hear the roar from out there just as loud.
A year ago, two years ago
The streets are packed. People crowded around TVs in every corner of the street, every bar and restaurant, every home. The traffic has abated slightly from normal. The ones who are still driving are rushing through errands, family members and friends accompanying the drivers blowing whistles and beating drums from the passenger seat on the back. Kids and grandmas and aunts and uncles march up and down alleys banging pots and pans.
Worship, play, Worship, play///Worship-Worship///
Play//worship, Play, Play
Play and worship, Play///Worship-Worship///
The beers keep flowing by the jugful. Everyone’s drinking them. Peanuts flying everywhere. Faces are painted. Cigarettes chain smoked. Silly hats on heads.
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
That’s how the chant goes.
The one I can remember.
Vietnam – champions!
Vietnam – champions!
At half time the flares go off, in the middle of crowded streets.
Four years ago.
Boy racers with haircuts tearing up and down the road on scooters planting their flags in the ground. The red and the yellow star. Conga lines through the madness. Young fellas banging pots and pans and almighty chants going up.
Rosy tanned cheeks with yellow stars on red patches.
The gaudy throb of neon lights and signs.
How the streets they swell
While the animals make their way through the crowds
If you keep listening you can hear it for miles
And trust everyone quicker with every faint smile....
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Lads with mullets – before they ever came back here, they’d only just came into fashion in some places – and sleeve tattoos and studded jeans delivering cheap frothy beer by the armful.
The unce unce unce of Vinahouse pounding from speakers.
You’d wonder how they ever got invaded.
A kid in a Pokemon hoody and slip-on shoes bangs a neatly painted red and gold drum while the crowd adores, his parents nowhere to be seen and no need to be.
Bike trips and dead chickens
Nguyễn Quang Hải – he’s the only one I remember, he’s the only one who ever scores – puts in a cross that gets volleyed home.
The world turns upside down.
We’re only a goal up in the end but it doesn’t matter.
No way back for Malaysia.
They can’t run anymore, shattered.
Game over.
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Absolute scenes. Carnage. Madness. Passion. Fellas with flags wrapped around their shoulders bawling their eyes out.
And the crowd goes wild
And the camera makes you seasick
An older gentleman with sun-aged leathery skin and the cheeky smile of an oul’ codger sidles up to our table, dressed in an army uniform and flip-flops. He plants on the table what can only be described as a large transparent vase, fit to hold about a gallon of rice wine, or there would be if it didn’t also contain a snake the length of a hurley and thickness of a child’s welly coiled around the inside of the bottle. He pours shots for everyone into small glasses. The picture of the contented modern Buddha, all-knowing smile and bottomless reserves of spirits. He pulls up the sleeve of the left arm of his jacket and flips over his wrist to proudly show us his scars. His army get-up is no fancy dress: running along the length of the inside of his forearm from his wrist to his elbow is a scar that looks like a small intestine, or the snake that’s flavouring his bottle of moonshine. He mimes shooting with a rifle and explains that he got the scar fighting with Americans.
He pours more shots.
He welcomes us all to his country.
We are not worthy but we do the honourable thing and cheer the latest round:
Mot, hai, ba – dzo!
As the chant goes
One, two, three – yo!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Kids giggling on their dads’ shoulders will never remember this but they’ll grow up with it a part of them. Their smiles show it. Generational memories.
Their fathers are proud of them already, just for being born.
Grown men cry. Middle-aged men in army combats, glassy-eyed from home-made moonshine and sheer joy, beat their chests and shout things like
“HEPPY!” and
“VERY GOOD!”.
God, it's so sweet of you and I know you're proud
And the car bomb hits quick, click, faint, smile
This is it.
This is what we’ve travelled here for. Days like this.
It makes it all worthwhile.
6,000 miles across space. So far away from home you can’t even recognise yourself.
3 whole revolutions of the sun. A life lived apart from reality.
It won’t even make sense when you go home.
An aberration.
What use will all this have served you when you go back?
What use will your memories be when no-one else speaks the language they’re in?
With no-one around you to share it with.
It’ll be like you can’t even remember it yourself.
Like trying to explain a dream.
***
A million motorbikes flood the streets the likes of which you’ve never seen, flags draped across multiple lanes of traffic, noise blanketing the open lakes and mingling with the humidity and the sense of love and belonging and the exhaust fumes and the charcoal grills at the side of the road.
Bike trips and dusty highways
A spontaneous parade takes us deeper into the Old Quarter, the beating heart of a proud nation. Everyone’s selling beers, everyone’s buying them.
Everything that is good and beautiful and weird and wonderful about the country is on display tonight. Crowds and noise and generosity and kindness and madness and motorbikes and food and drink and things that don’t make much sense.
There’s safety in the hospitality, there’s generosity in the wildness.
Dusty roads and rice apocalypse clouds
Posing for photos with smiling on-duty police officers in military uniforms.
An open top army truck trundles through and everyone hops onto the back.
Rice wine shots and coffees and eggs and dead chickens
Horns honk and toot and rattle
Revelry spilling from bar to bar, up ones stairs and down another.
Monsoon rains and thunder and mundane floods and dead cats
No-one remembers, everything turns to a blur.
Chung cake and spring rolls and pancakes and pork
They could settle wars with this. With football games and the chants on the terraces.
I’m leaving here forever next week
No-one even remembers who won at this stage
Ai-Len! Roy Keane! Robbie Keane!
The westerners, the foreigners, the strangers in an ordinary land
Lanterns and bars and clubs and trucks and bikes
Home and away, devotion and devilment.
Kids running in and out of narrow shops
A bunch of lads on the sesh and a bunch of mammies watching over them.
Beeping horns and hens and cows and hens and dogs and school drums
A crowd of louts cheering and shouting and banging and leaping on the back of an army truck, waving flags like shipwreck survivors hugging grannies and kissing cops on their baby-faced cheeks.
The warm wrap of smog and burnt rice smoke on your face on a hazy morning on West Lake
This is all new to Vietnam, it is new to us, this is all old, we’ve all been here a hundred thousand times before.
Jungles and waterfalls and alleyways and meats and sweat and rice and music and fish sauce and incense
There is music and there is noise and there is dancing and there is marching. Chaos bleeds into order into chaos into order.
Slowly waking up to reality
You could have landed here this morning from the other side of the world for the first time in your life and joined in this as one with all who wear their hearts on their sleeves, their yellow stars on their shirts tonight.
The world swirls and dissolves around you as the night comes in for the kill
No one could ignore this racket, no-one would be left out
But it’s still made it all worth while.
Time speeds down or speeds up it’s hard to tell – you start to see it disappear once you know you’re leaving
33 months of my life just to be here tonight. All building up to this moment. Someone else’s win, a team of men from a place kicking a ball for some reason, for no reason.
A neighbour with a gentle soul hands you a bag of fruit for your grandmother back home, just because they heard she was still alive.
Holding onto any good reason just to feel alive, and feeling it.
It all fades to black as the army truck slowly chugs around crowded streets
A million motorcycles or more.
You can’t sleep on forever
Everyone smiling, everyone laughing, everyone crying.
Something has to give – you or the dream
Vietnamese and Tây alike.
Light starts to come in on a world that’s going on without you
Friends you never knew til you moved to the other side of the universe, from twenty miles down the road
You’ve been called home though life goes on, somewhere, as if you were never here
Arms around shoulders, throats going hoarse, singing ‘til the eyes roll back in your head
You’ll remain only as a ghost
A feeling of pure ecstasy
And your memories will be the only tether left to this reality, and they’ll change ever so slightly every time
Everyone makes it home but no-one makes it out alive
And from now you’ll only ever exist as a memory, and so will this place
It's the same sound
It's the same, same sound
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
As you’re pulled away from it all just as you begin to wake up to the reality you’re in
Drums keep pounding, beers keep flowing, voices keep roaring, horns keep blowing, engines keep revving
But it’s too late for this world
The streets are alive as are all those who march through them
Vietnam Vo Dich!
Vietnam Vo Dich!
You could have learned more Vietnamese while you were here
A journey to the end of the night, though the night never ended, it goes on forever without you after you leave
You could have done so much in this world of dreams, but that’s it, that’s all for now
Things will slip away forever but all of this will be burned deep under your skin and beneath your skull ‘til the day you leave the earth.
Gone forever
The pull of black of the night surrounds and turns to white as you’re pulled out of your snoring slumber
You can only hope you remember something to take home with you
The dream ends though
Hope that something resonates
As all dreams must
We won
You’re slowly waking up as the night fades on beyond you, never ending
We all smile, as the old song goes
We all sing
The scenes at the final whistle
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Great as always. Vivid imagery and storytelling and the photos are the cherry on top.