E73: Remembering a Hanoi we once knew — with journalist David Stout

0:00Vietnam is hustle, it's energy, it's food, it's family, it's dignity. It's all of those things brought together. It's a place that's been through incredible hardship and somehow coming on the other end with an open hand and an open heart. Welcome to You Don't Know Vietnam. They show that demystifies Vietnam for global audiences by talking to the creatives, trendsetters, business leaders shaping the market. Forget what you thought you knew about Vietnam, it's no longer that, as you're about to find out. I'm Ian Payton, co-founder of WCC, an editorial agency that helped global brands enter Vietnam

1:02and matter to Vietnamese audiences with always on hyper-local content. In what's a slightly different episode, I sit down with my good friend and journalist David Stout. Because before I co-launched WCC in Vietnam and before David went on to report from Myanmar, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Balkans and now Saudi Arabia, we spent our days together making a print magazine about Hanoi. Now, as Vietnam moved through another remarkable period of rapid change, we spend a few self-indulgent moments reminiscing about that time. We remember the Hanoi 15 years ago, some of our favorite stories, how it's changed, what might have been lost along the way, and the spirit of Hanoi that remains unmistakably intact. David Oy. You know, it's good to see you, sir. How are you? I'm very good, thank you. Thanks for joining me on You Don't Know Vietnam. It's good to be here. Very happy to be here.

2:02Recently, I was reflecting on our time making a magazine in Vietnam back in 2010, 2011. 15 years ago. There were some days, weren't there? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't quite know if you knew just how much Vietnam was going to change back then. But what did those days make in those magazines in Vietnam mean for you? It was the best days in analog Vietnam. In my mind, like, that world that we existed in does not exist anymore. You know, the Nokia's, um, uh, Brent Day, where you'd waited the magazine office for a guy to actually drop off, like physical copies of your work. You have it in your hands, you see it in person, you see the way the colors came out, you're handing them off to motorcycle drivers, they're going to deliver them around to physical locations, where actual people you know will pick it up and read it, and have opinions on it, and like it, or dislike it. It was a time of being in person. It was a time of being in place. And there's some of the happiest memories I have.

3:03For those very reasons, is everything was so personal. We reported the stories in person, the pictures were done in person, we interviewed people in person. Things that just don't really happen that much anymore, unfortunately. And I think, uh, the happiness of the memories and the fondness for that time comes a lot from just the dynamics we were working in. There were two versions of the magazine. And for those listening, it was called Word magazine. There was Word Ho Chi Minh City and Word Hanoi. And they were kind of doing the same thing, which was kind of like celebrating out and about expat culture, let's say expat, I don't like the word expat, but let's just say that for argument sake. It was about burgers, cocktails, you know, which there were many of back then to be fair. But I remember when we touched down in Hanoi and got our hands on the reins of the word, we were like, no, no, no, no, no, Hanoi has to be different. I don't mean instead of derogatory, but it was kind of like a glossy tourist guy in a way. Like you said, food, drink, nightlife around town. Kind of like Instagram before Instagram,

4:05these little like just like snippets of nightlife and people dancing, and people would grab the magazine and hope to kind of see themselves in it, you know, was I spotted around town? Am I going to the cool places? Am I eating the right food? Do I know the restaurant tours who are new on the scene, etc? That's fine, you know, and I think especially for certain cities, it works a lot better, but I think the consensus that we came to was that Hanoi had much more to offer. It was a much deeper place. And then if you wanted to explore that, it was a perfect place to do it. I mean, it's just such a wellspring for the curious. And I think we just thought we could do more with it. And then that brief period we got the reins of the magazine and we were able to enact our vision on it. We kind of took it that direction. I think some people were responded to and positively. There were some detractors, of course, but ultimately for whatever a year and a half or two years that we got it, very proud of. Trying to capture a little bit of that Hanoi spirit that made you are so fond of. Yeah, there is a spirit, isn't there, in Hanoi?

5:06It's relentless. That's what I love about it. Yeah, so many stories to tell. So rich, isn't it? It just felt like if we weren't telling those stories, what were we here for, you know, what are we here for? And at that time, there weren't a lot of people telling those stories. It's not like it is now where you have, you know, the kind of influencer economy and all this sort of digital content springing up everywhere because you got it kind of feet the beast. International travel was different back then. People's exposure to the world was very different than it is now. And I think we were doing something that there wasn't a lot of space for. And outside of the occasional big newspapers, it would do some stories occasionally that were very good. But it wasn't like a regular diet of stories of that Hanoi. And luckily we were able to do that. Somehow we found ourselves in a situation where we were able to do that for a period. You got any favorite stories? You know, I'm really proud to stay very happy with the many faces Hanoi

6:06column that we instituted that gave, I think they're the magazine, the ability to meet these like incredible characters, you know, just to give a slice of life of he's just kind of towering figures in Hanoi that were just a bit every day but would reveal the city. Whether it was 103 year old great grandmother living with four generations and two bedrooms or the veteran from the American wars or someone who was making handmade instruments or collecting old music. It just gave this like sense of who was in the community and what their interests were and what their histories were. And that matched with like amazing portraits from Aaron Joel Santos, Dominic Bluett. I thought it just kind of gave a gripping portrait every month of who your neighbor was, you know. You can live in a city your whole life and not know your neighbor. And I felt like that column kind of gave an insight into kind of the depth of the city. It was almost like stories were flying at us and we just could like pick them out of the air, you know. At that time it felt like the magazine almost wasn't big enough. There was just I remember one day just dragging by in the in the parks in Hanoi.

7:10You see people with them there to have a string between like two posts or two trees and they just have all these bird cages on it. They were like one man like fiercely going around and moving the birds to different positions on the wire and that's something like what's going on over there like every park I see. There's like men smoking cigarettes drinking green tea and like just staring at birds like with this like fever's devotion and like one guy's moving them up and down the wire. And then it turns out they're like training songbirds and this is like this ancient subculture of trying to raise birds to sing better and how to train them and how you put them next to a bird. That's a little bit better with singer but not too much better than the bird gets shy and stops singing and how you feed them and this like just intense relationship these men had with their birds. It was something that you could easily dismiss as you're driving on a motorbike taxi around town and not really think the wiser of it but then you just kind of peel back a little bit of a layer and there's just this amazing story and history and this this colorful kind of subculture there and it just felt like the city I mean you know better than me but at the time

8:11and just at the city which is bursting full of that you know and that was so much of why I loved Hanoi it was that it had this ancient character to it its history was alive and living in the people that were living in the city and I've traveled the world a lot since then and not every place is like that. In fact fewer and fewer places are like that the world is getting homogenized and it extraordinarily wrath and rage. I mean everywhere you go is starting to look more more similar. You run an Airbnb it looks like the one you got in Bangkok looks like the one you're sleeping in in Barcelona the coffee shop in France does a lot of the different than the one in Shanghai and all of a sudden the world becomes very semi and what I loved most about Hanoi and I think still has a lot of that it's just got something so unique to it that it's it's got its own place in the world and it defends it not in an aggressive way but the people hold on to these things and I think that's what a lot of what makes it so special and why is it it's a it's like a dreamland for storytellers if you really want to dig in there's just so much there earlier you mentioned

9:12the 103 year-old yes how did we even find the 103 year-old we had amazing fixers we had amazing translators and honestly they were our keys in our way into the city we wouldn't been able to do 95 99% of the stores we did without just amazing Hanoians who were just there and amazingly resource and just knew their city so well that there was something that interest us they could help was find it my memory is that again this is what makes Hanoi so different if you're in a downtown city these days you kind of see mostly people from the ages of 45 to 40 yourself it's just kind of a that's what you're going to see those are the kind of people and Hanoi you see like babies you see toddlers you see just people who are extraordinarily old it's very rare in the west or whatever like we used to question old people and Hanoi you see them having this rich social life hanging out in parks going to cafes together you name it they're hanging out with the grandkids whatever so you would just see these people that would look just pretty ancient almost and I was like

10:15these people have seen a lot they lived to the 20th century the Southeast Asia it was extraordinarily turbulent time and only at that period in Vietnam was a kind of starting to economically come out of like a very deep hole the younger generation was starting to experience a life that was very very different from the people who came before them so I wanted to see if we could find somebody that was a roughly around a hundred years old or so and just talk to them and see what see what they had to say see what memories they had and we found this woman who was at the other and was at she was 103 years old she was living in a two bedroom apartment with four generations that's Hanoi families together all ages crammed in there her granddaughter brought her out she was wearing silk gals die and sat down and I believe it was me and Aaron were there for the interview it was very clear that she couldn't really hear that well she couldn't see that well her daughter or granddaughter was kind of like yelling the questions into her ear and trying to see if she could kind of make heads or tails of it and at some point she just I think she just really gave us only like

11:18one or two lines and it was a dog wherever my family's on I just wanted to be with my family and then you know her her her family kind of filled in a bit of her biographical history so the story ended up just being like three or four graphs it was just like a very short thing but it said a lot which was that this is this is a pillar of the city it's a bit of the turbulent background of the history to I mean I think her husband had been dead for almost 50 years at that point she'd been living with her family and other generations had come about and aged and she was still there and even though it was what 15 or 16 years ago I still remember that day so so vividly such a you know how often do you get to do that do you get to meet these kind of people and and that was what the magazine offered was opening doors and having conversations with people that maybe you'd see on the street and you'd be like interested in wanting to know what's coming on and on what's in we are you just see characters with these just amazing

12:19gravitas walking around that you just want I just this is my personal bureaucracy I just want to come and grab them and say tell me about you know tell me a bit about your life when you were able to never let you down so that that was one one case of that I remember feeling a little bit disappointed that we couldn't get more from her and you were like she's not saying anything else or if you want to say is I only want to live with my family wherever my family live so we ended up just putting that on a full page spread with the big 103 and Aaron's portrait which just it's quite moving really isn't it what check kind of says everything I mean you just see she looks ancient she looks just like she's just lived this enormous life and she had and again when you're back home maybe away from the it or places in Southeast Asia just old people are sequestered you don't get to see them in public that often you don't get to talk to them I think it's it's too our detriment to break these chains between the generations we have so much to learn from

13:20people both older and younger than us and the moment we stop having those communication channels I think it's just it's it's not good for us as people you know it's not good for humanity and it's something that the the only way I knew had maintained and I hope it's still maintained and I feel like it probably is I was particularly proud of the way we treated the Hazang cover story you know because back there nobody had heard of Hazang even within Vietnam really if you have been lucky enough to go to Hazang it's because you were lucky enough to have someone tell you about it I remember the first time someone said to me about going to Hazang I was like well what's there and they said you just have to go and that was enough for me so we went later on we decided to do a cover story about it and I was so proud of the way we treated it because we didn't reduce it to a a travel guide we didn't really want people to go instead you went up with Aaron Joel Santas and just documented the stories of the people you met on Vietnam's northern frontier and it became

14:25encounters on the frontier and I was a bit mad at Aaron because even though we didn't want to reduce it to a travel guide I still wanted to show Hazang's colour in the photography and he messaged me from the nightburst and was like oh yeah by the way I've only taken my black and white film camera which is the most Aaron thing to do ever and it turned out amazingly he processed the pictures in his bathroom there were drips of water on them and scratches your copy in your story tanned out so so well I forget when exactly that Aaron told me he was only going to bring up old film cameras and only be shooting in black and white he there told me that before we met at the bus station or like when I arrived at the bus station I remember my head thinking I oh man is this the best idea to limit herself to only one format but of course he nailed it and captured the aesthetic and the mood and the vibe that we were going for which is this place is just kind of this time capsule at the time the big place to go in northern Vietnam was Safa you know it was

15:28the easiest place to get to it was the most known on the Southeast Asia tourist back packer trail at that time and if you wanted to go to Hazang it wasn't easy somebody in the know had to tell you the bus rides were very long and then once you got up there there was zero to little tourists down for sure should basically so yeah it was me and Jill Santos our friend Nop who was translating and ultimately guiding us through the landscape we were on some old motorcycles that the gears barely worked it was really foggy for a lot of the trips you were just driving into the abyss with these massive cliffs that were dropping off next to you almost got attacked by a dog at one point which is like theorously trying to get up this hill on this weak motorcycle is this farmhouse nipping at my heels and but yeah I mean at that time I remember I was reading a lot of anthropology about Southeast Asia I was reading a lot of more academic works about people who lived in the

16:31uplands and I thought that was just an amazing story to tell which is these people are the kind of vestiges of ancient empires and people that didn't necessarily want to join the the former kingdoms that were ruling the valleys and the paddy states at the time the mountains were their freedom the mountains were where they went to live their life and express their culture and you saw that in dress you saw that the way they prepared and grew their food buried rituals whatever you know and I just thought it was this preservation it was this this this time capsule of these lives and these cultures and just let me just to Vietnam you see that all all over the world and people who live in high altitudes communities whether it's in Afghanistan or Albania or the Andes mountains I mean it's a real human phenomenon that people go up into steep terrain when they want to get away from whatever the big kind of monolithic culture that is governing whatever kind of system that they want to move away from so the idea was to be a bit more anthropological and I think if

17:37that was the mood of the story but not trying to be academic trying to make it more about the colors the life the kind of way the people living up here their connection to the land etc and it was told during a time when the place had not really experienced mass tourism I know it's very different now and of course you always have mixed feelings about that because what you maybe knew or saw is maybe not there different but at the same time I can't forget anybody who wants to open experience the kind of beauty of a place like that it makes perfect sense that eventually the secret was going to get out that there was this amazing place up in the border with China with this rich history these beautiful kind of limestone formations just these wonderful people so I thought we captured a great moment in time with that story after Hazang we then got a real feel for doing long form almost like documentary style features in the magazine as part of this kind of push to make the Hanoi version a little bit more rich and a little bit more

18:39curious about the country that we are living in the other one I was really fond of was that cover story where it just said Cha on the front tea and you went out and wrote probably about like three or four or five thousand words on Vietnamese tea culture I can't believe the workout I mean you know those workouts that exist anymore but yeah we yeah I remember that of course what did you learn about Vietnamese tea because I think Vietnamese coffee is talked about a hell of a lot both in Vietnam and globally but tea is huge and really quite different isn't it teeth was the lubricant of life basically in Vietnam that was my understanding of it there were tea rituals there was tea with family there was tea with friends there was tea with co-workers it was at weddings it was at funerals it was in every facet of life like tea was present and that was my a sense of what I wanted the story to be that it defined the agriculture outside of rice tea was

19:43I think one of the most grown crops so it was tied into the landscape it was tied into your social life it was tied into your family life and everybody had some kind of relationship with it everybody had some kind of story that was linked to it and I just felt like it was worth worth trying to to dig into it a bit you know whether it was like ice cream tea in the summertime with buncha or some kind of lotus tea that people would drink in the winter there was just something about it that it was just so pervasive of course coffee's there as well but I just felt like in a way is that coffee wasn't tea was it was more important everybody's life uh fast of everybody's life in a way that just the few other things were just wanted to kind of delve into that a bit and try to tie all of those disparate elements into one kind of narrative that was the that was the the idea

20:45you reckon we knew what Vietnam was becoming back then in 2011 I can't say for for sure I knew where it was going but it definitely felt at that time like we were living in a place that was undergoing massive transition and that the 20th century in Vietnam had been an enormous amount of upheaval you know a series of colonization to string of very devastating wars periods of famine enormous amount of destruction to an easy piece and trying to find its way in the world of its region and we were coming into a Vietnam that was just starting to experience abundance and potential was just kind of brimming whatever the old world was in the 20th century that they had gone through there was something needed that was in the wash and so I think we were seeing that that transition between that era and whatever this new era is which is just kind of mass development and injection of wealth

21:50its further integration into the global economy becoming a manufacturing power this emergence of a middle class that's doing with things that blow all over the world you're enjoying international travel getting plugged into social media and kind of being a part of the emerging global culture so did I know it was heading no it's hard to say it's still where it's heading but it did feel like it was just in this this period of mass transformation and that whatever energy that Hanoi had or Vietnam you kind of knew if it could ever be really really harnessed in a way that the country was just going to flourish because there's just an insane work ethic and creativity and there's just kind of endless hustle it like various places in my life I've lived where you just like 4.35 am there's just people outside just doing high-kick calisthenics just like shaking it out to get ready for the day and that was

22:53just kind of this this gritty determination it's just as it's just there and spades and so yeah it felt like at that time a new Vietnam was kind of was was being built and you know better than me how it's manifesting now but that was my sense of things it still feels like that now if anything even more so this mass transformation like that's the thing I think about Vietnam is it should continuously moving and changing and evolving you know I spoke to the former US ambassador Vietnam on here recently and he said it's kind of been happening steadily since Doi Moe you know the economic reforms of the 1980s but it's the last decade I think probably since you left that it's really just accelerated and it's not done you know I feel like it's it's accelerating even more right now it's hard actually to see somewhere that you love so much and remember so fondly change so drastically you came back recently what did you see it's a bit of a bizarre feeling

23:59because everything is so so so familiar but everything is just a little bit different everywhere the streets have changed there's new streets something that existed before isn't there anymore there's something in its place so you're kind of like this is all familiar I know this I know this area but I'm almost lost on it as well because the points of reference that I had before the physical markers a lot of them are gone have been torn down revamped so it was a strange experience to to be an episode you felt so connected to it still fill the energy but to not necessarily always visibly recognize it was kind of my experience but that fire hose of just enthusiasm energy whatever you want to call it every day when you would go out into the streets is just unmistakably I know it you know it's part and soul and brains are there completely intact the manifestations of that

25:02are always changing and shifting and looking a little bit different but the spirit behind it was not changed in my mind if you can describe Vietnam to someone that's never been before knowing what you knew then you visited it again recently like how would you describe it to our global audiences who really do have the wrong idea if any idea about what Vietnam is Vietnam is hustle it's energy it's food it's family it's dignity it's all of those things brought together it's a place that's been through incredible hardship and somehow coming on the other end with a open hand and open heart the relationships that I had there connections I made the people I met just the humility the grace all of those things combined there's just that spirit every day to

26:03wake up and just take the bull by the horns and make something out of the day that I just love about all the other things the aesthetics the beauty the contradictions it's just kind of the icing on the cake before a place that I think is just extraordinary special and I've since being in Vietnam I've traveled the world it's been to extraordinary places I've seen all sorts of cultures and landscapes experienced a lot but there's just something about Vietnam there's a thing about Hanoi in particular it's a city that still haunts my dreams and not everywhere it's like that you know still dream about Hanoi I still think about it in ways that I don't about other places so it's a place that can captivate you if you're willing to take the step and and do you open to it that's my feeling about Vietnam I don't know if it matches others but that's my two you've been listening to you don't know Vietnam I'm Ian Payton and we create content I'd like to thank DJ Gays and the beat

27:05Saigon for their epic soundtrack and a massive thank you to you for making it all the way to the end