Living in the Old Quarter

April 02, 2010 4:54 PM GMT+7

VGP - Living is sharing, but probably nowhere this is truer than life in Hà Nội’s Old Quarter.

The old house at 87 Mã Mây Street

The history of a single dwelling in the Old Quarter can teach a great deal about this hard-to-follow axiom.

The house at 51 Hàng Đào, for instance, was built in 1930 for one family and served as housing for the family, as an ancestral worshipping place, and as a location for the family business of selling silk.

On the ground floor, there were a shop, a common room, a sleeping room, an inner yard, a kitchen, a backyard and a toilet. On the first floor, there were a small room, a courtyard linking the roofs of the house, an ancestral worshipping room, and a large yard used for silk drying. The house is about 3m wide and 50m long. Sunlight enters the structure through open yards and courts, giving the house an open feeling and healthy atmosphere.

In 1954, with the establishment of the new government in Việt Nam, a second family of eight persons moved into the house, living in the outer room of the first floor while the former owners occupied the rest of the house. The shop, after being used as a joint-undertaking by the State and the private sector, now is a portrait-drawing workshop operated by three artists. Currently, there are three generations living together in the house. The eldest, after his retirement, helps two of his children run a shop in the corridor facing the street in the evening and the room behind the portrait-drawing workshop. Other residents of the house earn their living outside the Old Quarter.

The house at 51 Hàng Đào is among the very few old houses whose original architecture remains intact. Built after the period of the “tube house,” the structure nevertheless is deeply influenced by the same architectural traditions and urban conditions; the house presents a distinctive example of the evolution of domestic housing arrangements in the quarter over the course of the last seventy years. As the house is narrow in width, the second family must go through the first family’s area to reach their space. The inner yard, kitchen and the back garden are used by both families. Obviously, given such close living quarters, neighborhood and community relationships play an important role in the life of the people in the Old Quarter. Ideally, each individual’s needs are recognized by the whole community, reducing potential conflicts bred of living so closely together.  

One positive consequence of the conditions of the quarter is that people tend to help each other in small matters such as shopping, cooking meals and looking after each other’s houses and children. Of course, important events such as weddings, funerals, and death anniversaries become major opportunities for community effort. Life in the Old Quarter of Hà Nội is equivalent to that in a big house in which all members must harmonize their individual personalities in order to live together successfully as a community. As the people have so many things to share, the way they use their time is flexible. For a vast majority of the Old Quarter’s inhabitants earn their living by merchandising, they spend most of the day at the shops, which are open at 8:00 every morning and do not close until late in the evening. During these long days, the people also share many other activities – eating, buying things in the market, chatting with fellow traders and neighbors, watching TV and taking care of children.

Lã Vọng fired fish - a delicious food in Hà Nội 

One of the most pervasive and wonderful aspects of the Old Quarter is the variety of food on offer throughout the day. Here, foodstuffs and ready-to-eat meals constitute probably the largest sector of economic activity. At times it seems as if half the people in the quarter are engaged in preparing food for the other half. Everything is available: raw, non-processed, roughly-processed and completely-processed foods are available, not to mention the more recently introduced category of fast foods. Some street vendors have sold foods in this quarter for decades, following the same itinerary every day at exactly the same hour. Foods commonly served in the morning include bún ốc (round rice noodles with fried snails), steamed sticky rice, bánh cuốn (rice crepes), phở (flat rice noodle soup), bún ngan (round rice noodle soup with duck meat). Around noon, light meals predominate: giò (pounded pork pie) and chả (grilled chopped meat) and in the afternoons vendors offer cakes, steamed sticky rice and sweet puddings. The changing foods and activities throughout the day produce a comfortable rhythm of life that the denizens of the quarter have become used to over the generations, though the rhythm can be hard for the casual visitor to sense, given the sometimes overwhelming noise and traffic and the general crush of humanity.

In the Old Quarter, though one does not find the rows of huge trees typical of other parts of Hà Nội, the people who live there make a plenty of room for nature, growing pots of ornamental plants in every available spot – on narrow sun-roofs, balconies, kitchens and in small yards, which, though scarce in the quarter, are highly valued as refuges from the nose of the streets. Dogs, cats and ornamental birds share the cramped space in the Old Quarter with their owners. If they have to make a choice between a larger space and a convenient life in other localities and the cramped, inconvenient life in the Old Quarter, a vast majority of the people here would choose the latter. Despite the less than perfect material conditions, many citizens of the Old Quarter would not exchange their small homes for larger spaces away from the district in which their families have lived and done business for generations./.

By Nguyễn Hải

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