Fifteen Minute Universe

As published at SubStack, 3/16/24:

[Cóc Cóc Coffee in Vung Tau on 3/7/24]

Again, I’m at Cóc Cóc Coffee, a five minute walk from my room at DC Homestay. Getting here, I passed dancing women at Triangle Park, then the only homeless man in the neighborhood. Perhaps 70-years-old, he sleeps on three stacked foam mattresses. He was brushing his teeth with bottled water. People must bring him food. His area is always clean.

Within a few yards of the homeless man is a woman about 50 who sells the cheapest coffee, undoubtedly adulterated. Her customers are aging laborers, never those smartly dressed or foreigners. Cóc Cóc gets a few whites and Chinese. When there’s no business, the cheap coffee vendor sings karaoke by herself. In her conical hat, she faces the wall with her microphone. Though we can all hear her, she’s modest.

Once I heard her sing, “Nếu em là giai nhân, em yêu màu áo trận, thích đời trai hiên ngang.” If I was a beautiful woman, I’d love the color of military fatigues, like a strutting man. It’s a song composed before 1975 about South Vietnamese soldiers. For at least 15 years after the war, you’d risk arrest singing that.

Although it’s nearly 9AM, I haven’t had a proper breakfast, but am munching on cashews bought from a store over a block away. They had to weigh these. From them, I also got almonds and walnuts, the last called dog brain nuts in Vietnamese. Hạt óc chó.

Across the street is where I got my glasses, and on this block, I had a key made for $1.06. He works from a tiny sidewalk stand. There was a gay themed eatery nearby but it went under.

A dwarf who sells lottery tickets just walked in. She’ll appear again after dark. Just stepping down onto the sidewalk is a challenge.

In the US, I owned a car for less than two years, and I don’t use a motorbike in Vietnam. Since I walk, any neighborhood I live in is turned into an intimate village. This has happened in Pakse, Busan, Windhoek, Cape Town, Tirana and Belgrade, etc. Of course, there’s always much more to discover, so even in the South Philly neighborhood where I spent more than a decade, I didn’t really know what was happening on the next block. Driving a car, though, you’ll see and understand next to nothing. Like screens, windshields are walls. Tools that supposedly alleviate isolation enable it.

Two doors down, a six-year-old girl is doing homework at the front of a liquor store. In shops, restaurants and cafes, Vietnamese tend to sit facing the sidewalk. They like to look outward. In an eatery, you may find a baby’s crib, sewing machine or desk, for one space must serve several purposes.

When open, most businesses are entirely exposed, so there’s no separation between inside and out. With more air conditioning, plate glass windows or brick walls have been erected. All the new coffee chains are like this. At any Highlands, Trung Nguyên Legend, Cộng, Coffee House, Vinacafe and the charmingly named Phúc Long, you’re protected from the noises, smells and liveliness of Vietnam itself. I’d rather sit on a low plastic chair in an alley among zooming bikes, itinerant food vendors, schoolkids and dogs.

Leaving Cóc Cóc, I may pause at Chicken Plus to pet the security guard’s puppy. A fat beagle at the shoestore on Trần Hưng Đạo loves to lick my face. I’ve interacted with humans too, of course. It’s only natural when you walk through an organic neighborhood filled with small businesses. That’s the charm of Oriental cities.

Many outsiders hate their congestion, though, but since Vung Tau is by the ocean, nature is right there, and there are also parks. Hanoi’s lakes provide relief from its sea of humanity.

By contrast, American cities are filled with dead zones due to zoning laws and black crime. Mixed use neighborhoods as advocated by Jane Jacobs 65 years ago are still extremely rare. Now, there’s the promise or threat of 15 minute cities, but don’t be fooled, for these won’t be locally evolved, but centrally planned, with severe enforcement measures. As utopian urban projects, garden city movement, City Beautiful, Socialist blocks and Levittowns have all flopped.

Quirks and eccentricities delight. In Jacobs’ beloved Greenwich Village, streets aren’t rigidly aligned but often diagonal. In Vietnam, snaking alleys multiply surprises. Taking an unknown shortcut is an adventure.

American cities have gone downhill for over a century. Here’s Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) describing the New York City of his childhood:

Through fluttering lace curtains a lonely piano might be pleading the cause of love, but except for that and the rumble of the elevated or the clop-clop of a cab horse on the cobblestones, the human voice struck the dominant note: chuckling, laughing, just idly talking, sometimes whistling and even singing […] This life, without motion pictures, without telephones, without radios, without television sets, without motorcars, without the vast volumes of standardized goods that must nowadays be bought promptly and consumed rapidly, was not destitute of amusement and color: but it found its variety in little changes, little differences.

No amusement or color is enough, though, for those deadened from an infinity of beamed titillations and come-ons.

This regiment may just end suddenly. Russia has launched a nuclear space weapon that, detonated, will knock out enemy satellites, so no more FaceBook, online porn, cellphone calls or even electricity and tap water. Your salisbury steaks, chicken strips, chicken pot pies and American cheese have all gone bad, but luckily, you still have three cans of chili con carne and two of gluten-free, kosher and 100% sustainable pole and line caught tuna in olive oil. Though warm, your cans of Coors have never tasted so good. You still have one and a half.

Sitting alone in your silent apartment, you wish there’s something to see or read, but adverse to anything not on a screen, you haven’t bought a book or newspaper in decades. Needing to hear a voice, you half sing, “Imagine there’s no heaven,” but finding the lyrics preposterous, you don’t just stop, but slap yourself, hard, in the face!

Outside, distant sirens wail, so civilization hasn’t gone entirely away.

[Vung Tau, 3/16/24]

[Vung Tau, 3/10/24]

[Vung Tau, 3/14/24]

[Vung Tau, 3/14/24]