Hoi An

The Stylish Coat I was Never Allowed to Wear, circa 2005

What can I say about Hoi An, the UNESCO designated World Heritage Town?  How about: “Deliciously relaxing, relentlessly sewing garment town?”  I came to Hoi An in early 2005 and loved the town.  I have to say it was one of the highlights during my travels through Vietnam.  Despite the local’s efforts to persuade you to buy, buy, buy, the town seemed like a great place to relax.

Six years later, just as many garment shops line the streets, with all their employees inviting you come in to have something made.  People selling tourist trinkets still demanded that you buy from them.  Western tourists – young backpackers and older, package-tour travelers alike – still mostly outnumbered the Vietnamese in the old section of town.  Little appears to have changed.

I don’t remember much from Hoi An the first time around except that I loved the food, I loved sitting by the river and looking at the boats, and I got a bunch of clothes made that I really didn’t wear much.  My better half always made fun of one of my coats, so I donated it to the New York Cares Coat Drive.  Now a needing New Yorker now has a pretty flash winter trench coat.  I also donated most of the rest of the clothes I had made in Hoi An, but I do still use the stuff sacks.

This time, I didn’t really want any clothes made.  I’d like to say it has to do with an intellectual stance that stems from a graduate degree in development, talking with visa applicants in the garment industry, and reading Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, but really, it’s about being lazy.  You would think that getting good clothes in Vietnam would be easy.  Lots of the good stuff we wear in the US is made here, right?  There are tailors everywhere begging you to let them make beautifully fitted garments for you.  Your imagination is the limit.

Well, the global distribution chains preclude the good quality stuff from being available here in Vietnam.  Those clothes are made for export. Many companies even buy the cast-offs so they don’t wind up diluting the brand image by being available overseas.  And, then there’s the fact that I’ve done it once and remember the back and forth that goes with getting your clothes fitted – anything that isn’t super simple requires multiple fittings from people who really don’t care.  How can you when you’ve got dozens of different people everyday coming through your shop?  Well, OK, you can, but your pay is not determined by the perfect garment, rather the garment that gets that paying customer out the door and onto their next city.  Because when you’re on holiday, what are the chances that you’re going to come back and complain?  So quality, in general, and easy are kinda out.

Then you add in that I know that the person who made my shirt or jacket or coat earns about $200 per month, at most.  More likely they earn about $150 a month.  Yes, you read it correctly.  One hundred fifty dollars.  I have it on good authority – the workers themselves.  A group from Da Nang came through and I asked each of them what they made. That’s what they told me.

So, when someone says a shirt will cost you $20, you know the worker who spends say 2 hours making that shirt gets somewhere between $1.40 and $1.90 of that $20. The rest is materials, rent, wages for the English speaking staff who took your measurements, and of course profit.  As Pietra points out in her book, the girls in China who are working in textile factories are so much happier doing that in deplorable conditions than the alternative life they left on the farm, where mind-numbingly tedious repetitive tasks await them.  It’s likely the same for the folks in the shops and garment factories where they work in Hoi An.  Still, there’s something galling about the store-front person charging $20 when the person producing what I want doesn’t even see 10% of that.

So, with all this in mind, I was happy to just look, enjoy the clothes in the windows, enjoy the architecture of the old town, and soak in the little bit of sun we could get before the tropical depression arrived. And arrive it did.  Before we get drenched, though, we got to do my favorite thing: eat.  Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but eating is so much more pleasant when you’re not soaking wet.

My better half did a great job planning for the trip.  She found a highly rated cooking class at the Morning Glory Restaurant.  Let’s just say my faith in Vietnamese food has been revitalized by the delicious dishes we cooked.  I don’t know much about traditional Vietnamese cuisine, but the heavy use of sesame seed and oil, as well as the “Chinese 5 spices” leads me to believe that Chinese traders in the town left their imprint in the cuisine as well as the architecture.  Regardless of who can claim credit for the delicious cabbage soup, the to-die-for mango salad and barbeque chicken, or the bánh xèo, I ate it all and was very, very happy.  The pace of the class was good, as were the portions of food.  The only complaint is that the hard stuff – like some of the pastes and sauces – was already done for us.  But, if that’s my only complaint and the plate below is just one of the things we made and ate … I’m fine with that.

Lunch

Back at the hotel, we rested and stayed out of the rain.  For the money, the Hoi An Pacific Hotel was just fine.  It was more expensive and lacked charm.  It was a big Asian hotel.  There’s not much more to say.

Bargaining with people was interesting.  Now that I speak some Vietnamese, it’s a lot more interesting and challenging.  It’s interesting because I can actually talk to them – a little.  It’s challenging because in Hoi An, they speak with the “yuh” of the south.  I would say something like “ow zai” and they would say “ow yai”.  You think that’s not much, but through it into a native speaker’s mouth, at the native speed, add in some weak everyday life vocabulary of the listener (me), and you’ve got a real mind bender coming into your ears when all you wanted to know was how much this thing cost.  It’s not a southern drawl to the New Englander’s ears, it’s a bit more like Spanish and Italian.

In talking and observing, I learned two things.  First, the girl working at the state-run shop selling lanterns and stuff has a ninth grade education.  She said her family had no money for her to continue school, so that was it.  Where is the nearest Blue Dragons office? And why didn’t someone put her there?  (Answer: Blue Dragons has the Hoi An Children’s Home that helps kids who would otherwise drop out of school, and I don’t know why she didn’t go to them.).  What change can this girl see in her future?  Marriage and kids.  That’s about it. I know what makes me sad – it’s not her choice to work in that shop, it wasn’t her choice to stop going to school.  She was born into a family that doesn’t have much money and she’s just stuck in that cycle.

The second thing I learned is that when you actually know what something costs, you’re much better at bargaining.  Let’s go back to dress making.  Marjie has a cute dress that she wanted replicated, except the dress is more like a Sunday outing dress than a work dress.  If you just lengthen the skirt part below the knees, then you could.  Easy, right?  We walked into one shop and asked how much it would cost to replicate the dress.  The employee said $55.  I laughed, said we bought it for $12 in Hanoi, and we walked out.

This simply proves my point. We know what it cost to buy it off the rack.  The other person didn’t. She took a wild guess for a price we might think is reasonable and came up way outside the bounds of what makes any logical sense given that we know about how much it should cost.  Even when you add in a premium for tailor-fit clothes, you would think the cost shouldn’t get much higher than about $20. Oh well.  Next trip, we might try to negotiate from the position of “This cost us $12 in Hanoi, can you make it for a competitive price?”

Though the 9th-grade dropout story makes me sad and the crazy prices of the shopkeepers irritates the crap out of me, I do love Hoi An.  Good food, cool architecture, and best of all, my better half bought 10 small lanterns for $4.  Now that’s a bargain.