We left for our Lunar New Year trip to Malaysia on January 24th, flying to Kuala Lumpur and then taking the train to Penang. When we left, the corona virus was unraveling, but it had not yet been declared an emergency. There was one case in Vietnam. We boarded the plan with face masks on for the whole family. There were a spattering of passengers also donning the masks, but it felt like maybe we were overdoing it. We had one container of hand sanitizer and some wipes.

We explored KL for a few days and then went to Penang by train. The train station in KL was out of sanitizer, but in Penang we bought some and went about our days. We enjoyed the city, but as we followed the news a feeling of creeping unease arose. Suddenly, lines appeared at pharmacies selling hand sanitizers and masks.

Was this a pandemic? Yes. Our daughter sneezed at a train station, and a menacing British man confronted her. The children’s school created a new health policy–a runny nose meant no school and a doctor’s clearance note to return. The AQI in Hanoi hit 400.

We decided to spend some extra time in KL as we waited for this to play out– not wanting to be trapped behind no fly zones and city-wide quarantines. No school and terrible air were a rough combination. Two days later the schools closed in Hanoi, and they remain closed. Meanwhile, we enjoyed our time in Malaysia, more on that later.

We’ve returned to Hanoi to discover a new normal. A city in which people were once reluctant to wear pollution masks is now masked. At our favorite cafe folks work away with covered faces.

The efficacy of the masks is debated, but they signal a new normal. They are a sign of the global alarm that moves from catastrophe to catastrophe. We are now at a historical moment when air, water, and even intimacy among friends, forms of privilege, are no longer free, requiring purifiers and costly membranes.

The school sends daily home study units for music, gym, art, math, and reading. We have some childcare. We’re waiting this out with great uncertainty. We know we can come home to Nashville. The Vietnamese government is doing an excellent job of containing the virus, controlling alarmist memes, and so for now things are static. Meanwhile we are spared the racism that we might face in the US.

In lieu of an overdue post about our travels to Thailand and Singapore, I bring you the dashboards of Grab and taxi drivers around Hanoi.

I have long dreamed of traveling to Sadec to see the town where Marguerite Duras grew up and wrote about in her novel The Lover. This is the town where in real life she fell in love with an ethnic Chinese Vietnamese man, about whom she’d write in the novel. I had always imagined the town as a small and ramshackle, and the guidebook suggested that there was not much to see there. Sadec is a lively and beautiful city on the river. The main industry is flowers. Green houses abound, small and large, over tiny canals. One recently has the city identified Duras as a tourist attraction. They’ve partially restored a section of the lover’s home. His family was the wealthiest in town, and when the left during the revolution the land estate was parceled out and part of the home became a police station. The house is also the only place in Vietnam where it is legal to screen the film version of the The Lover, which is too racey for the censors here.

The tour guide in the museum/house of the Huynh Thuy Le focused less on Duras as an author and more on the beautiful love story between the young couple. Perhaps you’ve heard of the French author our guide asked us. We were also told that the family donated the property to the government after they left Vietnam. You can spend the night there and watch the film.

Jenny W. came for a visit and Allison met her in Saigon for a boat trip on the Mekong river. The trip was made more poignant with new dire reports that by 2050 the delta may all but disappear. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html

Along the river was a mix of industrial and agricultural areas. There were large freighters carrying soil for making concrete, fishing trawlers, and a few ferries taking locals across the way. It was a beautiful and peaceful ride and we saw few tourists on our route.

We discovered the charms of Taipei over fall break. This was the perfect urban adventure for a family that likes to eat, and walk, and eat, and then eat some more. We were delighted by the parks, the bubble tea, the subway, and the mountains. We stayed close to Da’an park, and wandered the streets in the evening. Simone climbed the monkey bars nightly, while Lev indulged in his new hobby, eating street food.

Arcades: Ben and the kids discovered their shared joy of these games. You can’t win by lifting the claw up, but have to strategize knocking things around and shaking the claw. At one arcade a teenager noticed us eyeing his technique and won two nice gifts for the kids. This one was a fail, but at the pokeman machine by our apartment we won 20 figurines over our 6 days there.

Eating: We spent a lot of time eating. Some highlights included the soup dumpling as Din Tai Fung, street food, and the bubble tea!

Sights: Lest it appear that all we did was eat, we also saw some sights. These included an hour-long gondola ride, the Chiang Kai -Shek memorial, the parks, and some temples too.

Taipei is my new favorite city and I can’t wait to find my way back to Taiwan.

There has been a lull in our blog as we have faced the difficult realities of living in Hanoi. We have observed a series of unfolding environmental catastrophes here.

Mercury: On August 28th the Rang Dong Light Bulb factory caught fire. Residents were told to evacuate and then not to evacuate. The factory said they no longer used mercury in the manufacturing of the light bulbs and then admitted a few days later they indeed used mercury. As anxious westerners became hysterical on social media, we avoided the area, but wanted to believe the factory. No one was to consume food sold in the area for a period of one month. Then word broke over a week later that there indeed had been mercury. The first seed of doubt was planted: How was one to know?

AQI: Then the AQI spiked in October to record highs for Hanoi. We awoke one morning unable to see the lake out of our window. The air continued like this for days, and we began to worry about the children, about the winter, about what would happen next. It hit and stayed at 200. Not like Delhi’s recent 1200 spike, but still it was an apocalyptic scene.

We made phone calls, found spots for the children back in Nashville and in Saigon schools and then took off for a week trip to Taipei. Again and again we contemplated leaving and then decided to stay. One year is a short time and we have much winter travel planned. But a new cynicism has set in about the air and the environment. The burning continues, cars and motorbikes have no emissions enforcement, energy plants run on coal. Development here moves at a furious pace and from our window we see the future that has already arrived. We breathed in the delightful clear air in Taipei, only a week after we drove past the Taiwanese factories contributing to the air pollution in the idyllic countryside of Ninh Binh.

Meanwhile, the government and outraged bloggers spent time disputing whether IQ AIR’s website accurately listed Hanoi as the worst air (instead of the 2nd worst). Reuters reported that “the criticism of AirVisual snowballed after Vietnamese Facebook user Vu Khac Ngoc, an online chemistry teacher with almost 350,000 followers on the site, said in a post that AirVisual was manipulating its data to sell air purifiers made by its parent company, IQair.”

Water: On October 8th, a tanker dumped oil into the Red River, contaminating the water supply of many residents in Hanoi with styrene and other contaminants. Rumors abound about what happened and why. It took days for the water to be declared unsafe, even after residents complained about the blackish color and the stench. The company knew about the contamination, but did not take action. Our area was unaffected

Seventeen days after the contamination, and after days of declaring itself the victim, Vinaconex Water Supply Joint Stock Company (Viwasupco) finally took responsibility and apologized. The water has been declared safe but some residents are still afraid to drink it.

The Worry: Living in Hanoi is about moving forward. It is about hoping that the purified water your purchase is as advertised, that the food you buy is not contaminated, that air masks work. The locals worry, we worry, but life continues. It reminds us of the importance of trust and the fragility of that trust. As Trump fights the EPA clean air standards, and images of a distant melting ice cap circulate, living here means we cannot avert our eyes. The Mekong Delta is now threatened with its very existence, the air is in free fall, and water is contaminated. None of this is new. Contamination here is as much the product of development today as it is the history of war. We have the luxury of leaving, but those living here do not.