Vietnam: Chuc Mung Nam Moi
Chuc Mung Nam Moi means Happy New Year.
Patti has been offering Tet greetings to every waitress, bicycle rental agent, hotelier and Grab driver for a week. Even when they would cock their heads and regard her quizzically because she may errantly have said ‘Happy Gout Year’ or even ‘How many monkey live in you toilet now?’
But she kept wishing them Happy New Year, getting closer to perfect pronunciation with each attempt.
Language is so crazy. We all use it, though how (and how well) varies greatly. American Americans are largely monolingual, but most people in the rest of the world speak at least two languages— usually English and their own. It’s weird over-hearing Germans ordering Vietnamese coffee in English— but it’s definitely the dominant linguistic currency, not only here but in most of developed world.
It is said that learning a foreign language is the best thing you can do for your brain. And the difficulty of mastering a second language cannot be overstated. Mastering, hell— merely wishing someone a Happy New Year is hard enough. I personally am still working on THANK YOU, though I have gotten pretty good at BIA (beer). It’s like these Vietnamese have a different word for EVERYTHING…
I have apologized to our teachers at the Go Vietnamese Language School for the regrettable condition of my dried-out American brain. I am doing some version of My Best, and also breaking out my most earnest smiles, which do count for something in the classroom as well as on the street. I think the teachers believe I am trying and don’t actively dislike me even if they do probably complain to their boyfriends at night about what a dolt I am.
It’s a different story for Patti. To be fair, it is kind of her job. She has been granted a sabbatical from her position of authority at an institution of higher learning, and her calling for the quarter is to study the language and culture of Vietnam. This encompasses more than ordering those delicious seafood pancakes and wishing strangers Happy New Year. She started working on Duolingo months before our departure and is also naturally comfortable in a classroom. She studies in the evenings and is generally much more focused on her goals than I am on mine. Let’s just say she has goals…
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We arrived in Da Nang on the shore of the South China Sea on a Saturday afternoon, having flown from DaLat on an airplane. At first glance, Da Nang looked even more international (white) than DaLat had, after our motorcycle trip through the strikingly Vietnamese Mekong Delta.
And that is definitely the case. Da Nang is Vietnam’s third-largest city and it fancies itself an emerging hub of tech, tourism and finance. There’s a lot of development going on here, with lots of cranes on the skyline and wheelbarrows on the sidewalks. A great example was right on the other side of the wall from our bed at the Livie Hotel, where an elderly couple was building a 4-story apartment building with a hammer and a chisel. The banging began before 8am every morning and on day 4, we told the unimaginably pleasant and accommodating Korean girls at the front desk that if they could not re-room us, we would need to check out at once. They called our bluff with a deep bow, apologizing profusely for not having any rooms available on the opposite side of the building. They promised to refund the unused balance of our pre-paid 2-week reservation. And out the door we went.
As it turned out, it was not particularly difficult to find a replacement flop. Even in a bustling vacation beach town during the week before Tet—which would be like booking a room on a day’s notice for Christmas week in Leavenworth. Or Malibu. I don’t know— I’ve totally lost track. I can’t tell where we are or what time of the year it is. It’s 78 degrees and humid but there are Christmas trees in the hotel lobbies and cumquat tree lots along the roadsides.
Tet is the Vietnamese observance of Lunar New Year. The celebration is much like the western Christmas holiday season in that it lasts a month and involves much gifting, decorating, travel, fireworks and downtime with family. Also food & drink. And karaoke.
On the third night in our second Da Nang hotel (the homey Oasis Apartments further downtown from the bangin’ Livie) Patti heard music coming from the street five stories below. We’d just gotten home from dinner at Alice’s Restaurant and were stuffed and pretty much ready for beddy-go, even though it was before 9pm. We’d been hearing a lot of profoundly bad singing throughout Da Nang all week, including from a locals-only karaoke yard across the street from the Oasis, on the corner by the bus barn. But the sound that caught Patti’s ear this night was novel— it sounded like a saxophone.
There aren’t typically a lot of reeds in Vietnamese music, and this was definitely a tenor sax. Plus it sounded live. We figured we’d better check it out, so we got re-dressed and took the elevator to the street. Circling the block, we found an entrance to the large fenced lot and stepped inside the gate, sidling up to a palm tree to get a discrete look at what was going on. From a distance, the party at the center of the courtyard looked like every other pre-Tet neighborhood gathering we’d been walking past all week. Several oilcloth-covered card tables were pushed together, surrounded by plastic chairs and stools. The tables were piled high with food, drink, candles and incense and at the head of the gathering was an elder (usually male) clutching a wireless microphone in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, eyes closed and singing badly through a gigantic sound system overdriven to ribbons.
It didn’t take long for a representative of this party to notice us lurking the perimeter. He strode directly to us with a wide smile and in excellent English asked our names and invited us in. Before we could say ‘oh, we were merely curious and don’t wish to intrude’ we were seated at the table with a plate of deep-fried liver rolls & barbecued chicken feet and several beers each. As it turns out, we had stumbled onto a year-end company party for a developer planning a 36-story $300M condo tower on the site. The mostly male employees literally lined up to enthusiastically shake our hands and tell us in varying levels of English how happy they were that we had joined their party. It didn’t matter who we were or where we were from— they were simply tickled to have guests, because that’s the mood the Vietnamese are generally in this time of year.
The owner of the company insisted we join him at his table at the very front, and in the worst English of his entire crew told us repeatedly just how stoked out of his fucking mind he was that we were there.
And then of course, it was our turn to sing.
Patti and I had known this moment would arrive eventually and had agreed in advance that the most internationally-known (if not necessarily loved) popular song of all times was of course Hotel California.
The band pulled up the charts and a pair of Italians who had slithered in joined us in front for a pretty serviceable version of the punchline hit. The crowd lost its mind and no one yelled ‘fuck the Eagles’ in any language.
It was the experience we’d been waiting a month for. We’d come close in a few venues with glimpses into the shadowy interior of Vietnam, the mysterious unlit tiled rooms behind the storefronts. But until this banquet we’d only been voyeurs. Now, exchanging farewell hugs, handshakes and high-fives with our new friends for life, we felt like we’d broken through to the other side—arriving as participants. We weren’t exactly naturalized and we sure as heck were not going to be fluent by the time our Vietnamese classes ended. But we’d seen the actual vision and done more than simply entertain it as an agreeable possibility. We’d survived a company Christmas party and were ready to pop the cork on Tet.
It officially starts in the morning, and we are off to Hoi An with the light to dig it to the very fullest.
Chuc Mung Nam Moi…
