Here is a spoken word piece that responds to the alley.
Hem
Danny lives in a hem in District 5 in Ho Chi Minh City.
A hem is an alley, a stitch in time, holding the trafficked fabric of the city together.
It is in between, away from the main road, a narrow oasis of home-cooked meals and smiling grandmothers.
Hao Si Phuong is a triple-tongued phrase in Vietnamese.
Hao means chivalrous.
Si is a writer.
Phuong identifies this area as a place of trade.
This is a Chinese-Vietnamese district, a melange of business, faith, cuisine and architecture. It is also one of the most photographed alleys in Vietnam. You can find it on stock photo sites. But you won’t find Danny in those photos.
The inhabitants of Hao Si Phuong are quite tired of being postcards for nostalgia, representing some unchanging ideal in the tourist mind, a convenient location for documentaries. Nostalgia ignores the fact that Danny goes to school at 6am each morning, uniform pressed clean, on the back of his father’s motorbike. Or that his mother works in Vincom, one of a dozen local banks. Or that Danny is saving up to buy a tablet, because the alley pales in comparison to the world online.
At noon on a Thursday, the hem fills with incense and low tables of offerings. Fruit and fried chicken. Small bowls of rice. Slivers of mooncakes, glistening. They are placed before an array of gods raised above the television. The gods nestle in specially built alcoves, looking down on Danny and his friends as they play in narrow corridors, chasing ghosts and building their lanterns to go out tonight, under the Mid-Autumn moon, to ward off the carp spirit that once stalked these streets.
In photographs of Hao Si Phuong there are intricacies of Chinese architecture, splashes of colour in the facade of each house; some in temple-green, others a shimmering electric blue. There are motorcycles outside each door, emblazoned with the proof of their labour. Perhaps chivalry remains in the industry of everyday life, where the traffic is a sea one must part to cross, where every other young person is a start-up cafe.
An alley is a passage, moving from one life stage to another. When Danny enters the alley today, he will not find a way out on the other side. It’s been plastered over for a new condominium.
There is value in something that changes. And in what is left behind.
If Hao Si Phuong could be a concrete poem it would be an infinite alley of little stories, of Danny and his family, of mooncakes and clotheslines fluttering in the slow breeze. It would be metaphors that reach like tendrils of incense past the rooftops. It would steep like the lightly brewed tea you’re given when they ask you to sit and watch; how the light shapes the shadows of everyone who comes and goes, while the alley remains, as soft as a song.
