Seven weeks living in our apartment, we were booted by a new management company who wants to renovate the entire building. Our building was directly across from the grandson of Pham Van Dong, who was North Vietnam’s prime minister (1955-1976) and postwar Vietnam’s (1975-1987). We never met the family in the white house, but often heard, from the driveway/alley just to the home’s right, the comical squawking of two macaws who always seemed to be bickering with each other or bitching about their confining cage. There’s also a black vintage Mercedes Benz that hasn’t moved in quite a while–an immoiblized memorial, I imagine, to the grandfather’s glorious days.
The ridiculous yellow mansion on the left was recently built. The photograph deceptively glosses over the mansion’s stains of moisture and crumbling concrete walls. Its audacity feels outdated and insecure: still reveling in French colonial taste and the gaudiness of baroque excess. All so impractical–most evident by all the shutters that never open. A cavernous, closed existence on the inside. On a daily basis workers come out to the balcony on the right to dry some clothes on a cheap aluminum clothes rack. They look minute and out of place given the house’s scale and architecture. Living in such a behemoth space must have been unsustainable and unbearably lonely–particularly after its owner, the former CEO of ACB bank, was imprisoned. Recently, half of the mansion has been divided and turned into a spa and home stay. The opening party was a karaoke dance extravaganza that was as loud audibly as the house is loud visually.
What I’ll miss most are the lotus ponds to the left. They abut an amazing Buddhist temple. The ponds exude a peacefulness and the lotus’ cliched hope that beauty can and will arise out of muck and mud. But Hanoi developers are quick to dash such hopes, as the ponds are slated to become parking lots. Only in Hanoi, it seems, is it possible, literally and metaphorically, that cars will replace lotus flowers.
southeastbysoutheast.travel.blog 