Allison and I went vintage shopping for a dress-up-a-decade theme party. Hanoi is vintage challenged because of the socialist history, which means a lack of flannels, polyester, zoot suits, brimmed hats, platform shoes, etc. It was a fruitless exercise, that would have been better suited for Saigon, where vintage stores thrive from the city’s own flow of retro clothes, as well as imported materials from Tokyo and Taipei.
To our pleasant surprise, however, we found an abandoned office complex at 60S Thổ Quan that had been taken over by squatters. These were young people who had already been booted out once, but had returned, in a more official capacity, and were setting up all kinds of shops and cafes. They were hip, well-coiffed, and tattooed (one sees tattoo in the capital in a way that one didn’t see a few years before). They scrounged up a rack of oversized t-shirts or basketball jerseys. Some made their own jewelry, while others were busy at a hip-hop dance studio. There were cats at multiple stores, the more unfortunate ones were leashed.
I began to notice that there was a collective intensity and passion for studying Japanese in multiple stores and cafes. And then it dawned on me that I might have walked into Hanoi’s version of a Murakami world. The soundtrack supported my theory: Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and some bebop jazz. Bookshelves were filled primarily with the Japanese writer. Now it’s a matter of figuring out these aspirations…at the very least to not lose a cat.
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