You will see more than a dozen grades of sugar for sale in the marketplace. The cheapest stuff looks like a block of yellow wax. All of it is riddled with ant and bees. Village children often chew on sticks of raw sugarcane as a treat. You can also buy sugarcane juice (sometimes flavored and occasionally even iced) on the roadside.

SUGAR

The mill was in the center of a vast yard of kindling needed for the eternal fires that smoldered under the vats of agitating molasses. A river meandered behind the cords of wood and a ship lay tethered to its bank, lazily regurgitating tarry black sludge. The raw molasses had come all the way from Can Tho province at the southernmost tip of Vietnam. Rather than waste the space between barrels, the entire hold had been gutted and molasses dumped into the bilge. It was now being sucked out by a vacuum cleaner, looking like the world's ugliest bilge water. Bits of debris floated among the dirty brown bubbles and the pump made convulsive sucking sounds. When the hose ate a brick and ceased to function a young boy was sent down with a plastic pitcher and a bucket. He dipped the molasses to the last half inch and then used a dirty rag to sponge up the rest. Two crusty men waited on the deck for the last sticky tinful, then shouldered the immense vat hung on a bamboo pole and trotted down the narrow walkway with extraordinary balance and nonchalance. I followed warily, my sneakers sticking to their footprints. The molasses made its way through the back door, where it was poured into one of several kiddy-pool vats built atop a glowing fire and continually agitated by several rotating paddles. It would churn for seven days, gradually changing hues from black to mahogany to beige, until it was lumpy with sugar granules and the paddles slowed to a standstill. The bread-like mass was then culled out of the vat by shirtless young men, their skin the color of half-cooked molasses and glistening with a sugar glaze. From there it went into a centrifuge, where it was washed until it turned the color of bleached sand. This time it crumbled when they tossed it onto a knee-high pile on the floor, burying dozens of greedy bees and flies. I had the tremendous urge to kneel and carve a sand castle out of that glistening white mountain. It looked so dense and shapeable, just asking for tunnels and turrets and tiny sculpted stairways. Excerpt from Hitchhiking Vietnam

 

Baguettes are one of the more appetizing remnants of the French colonization of Vietnam. Crisp and golden brown on the outside, light and airy on the inside, they're sold within hours and delivered to virtually every corner of the country via a complicated network of bicyclists and walkers. Day-old bread is usually dried in the sun, cut into quarters, fried, and sold in the marketplace. You will recognize the breadsellers from the baskets they carry on their heads - the bread is usually wrapped in a layer of burlap - and their sales cry - Baaaaaan Meeeeeeeeeeiiii! Sandwiches made with baguettes are sold in wheeled stalls and tables in every major city.

BREADMAKING
I crossed a small bridge spanning one of the myriad canals that make up the flat and soupy Mekong, and waved to a young man poling a wobbly boat beneath my feet.

"Where are you going?" he asked in Vietnamese.

"For a walk."

He pointed at the bottom of his boat. "Come for a ride!"

I agreed, as much to escape my meteoric trail of children as to experience life in a flat-bottomed canoe barely larger than a coffin.

He was a breadmaker returning from his nets. Several six-inch fish flapped and twitched around his legs. From nine p.m. until six a.m. every night he made French baguettes, he told me. He offered to take me to the bakery where he worked. I hesitated for a moment, but he had flour in the crook of his arm and along his hairline, and so seemed harmless.

The bakery was in full swing when we arrived. The owner sat in the front room before an enormous accounts book filled with columns of tiny, penciled numbers. "Come in!" he said in greeting, his face wreathed in a genuine smile. He seemed not the least put out by an uninvited stranger in the middle of his morning shift. He insisted on leaving his books to give me a personal tour, and his joy at discovering my stumbling Vietnamese was without bounds. He seemed more proud of me than his hard-won bakery, and plied me with a steady stream of soft drinks and buttery candy while escorting me through his cottage factory.

We followed the beehive activity into the oven room where two shirtless young men seized unbaked sausages of dough, sliced their tops and loaded them into the ovens that lined one wall. They were experts, heaving the long narrow platforms onto their shoulders with choreographed precision, thrusting them inside and snatching them back out like magicians, leaving behind unbaked bread evenly spaced inside the oven. Beams of sunlight filtered through air so dusty with flour that it seemed to hang in translucent curtains that danced and swirled.

The bread that emerged was golden brown and steamy soft inside. It tasted like the perfect Parisian baguette, and was one of the few positive remnants of the French occupation. I obviously wasn't the only one who thought so. "The ovens run for eighteen hours at a time and make ten thousand loaves a day," the owner told me proudly. "Where do they all go?" I asked, for I had seen neither trucks nor loading docks when I came in.

In response he took me to yet another room where the loaves were disappearing through a side door into the waiting baskets of an army of bicyclists and market walkers. I watched as a dozen young women covered their wares against the roadside dirt and pedaled away, taking turns to sing out the lyrical "Ban Meeeeiiii!" as they carried them to every house and shanty for miles.

I ducked back inside and found my way past vats of dough and an assembly line of tousled black hair and shiny shoulders. In the darkest, deepest corner of this human-powered bakery, I caught a brief glimpse of a lone man standing silently. He was covered with flour, like an old wraith with a halo of gray, powdery hair. He spent his days pouring sacks of flour onto scales whose weights he could hardly lift, then smoothing out the lumpy mixture with fingers gnarled with age. The air was so thick that it tickled my nose.

The men worked nine hours, six days a week, and earned twenty dollars a month. I had rarely seen such attention to detail and efficient use of human energy anywhere in the world. It belied my earlier impression of Vietnamese productivity - an old woman sitting long hours beside a few scattered bananas, waiting for a sale. I was impressed.

If you're not interested in becoming a baker or a sugarmaker, there are lots of other ways to set up business in Vietnam...

Back to "Life in Vietnam"