Signs of the times: poof!

For most of the nine years or so that I've been in Vietnam, I've lived in the same district of Hanoi in Quan Hai Ba Trung on the edge of Thong Nhat Park. I've always loved this neighborhood, I suppose precisely because it is such a neighborhood. In fact, perhaps village is a better way to describe it: there's the chua, the den and the dinh, there's the informal market that takes over Tue Tinh in the morning, there's pretty much any kind of street food that I could possibly want within a three block radius, and there's any number of miniscule cafes where I can sit under a cay da, have my morning coffee, and read the paper. And as I make my little circuits during the day, there are all my neighbors to nod to, ask after their health, complain about the heat or the rain or both.

One of the things that has characterized my experience of this little village has a sense of stability. The same little shops, the same xe om drivers on their respective corners, the bicycle repair men and the fruit sellers, the pho ga on Tue Tinh, and the pho bo on Trieu Viet Vuong. Granted, there were changes from time to time: shop fronts have been spiffed up, there was the fleeting appearance of an upscale pho shop, and an entire block of Nguyen Binh Khiem has been appropriated so the Interior Ministry cadres can park their new cars (which given their official salaries I can only assume they must be paying off over the course of several hundred years). But for the most part, things hadn't changed much since I first came to my little village in 2001. That is, until the "poofs" started happening last year .

Poof! chi Thu and her little convenience store disappeared, the shop front taken over by a store selling overpriced Buddhist paraphenalia, and chi Thu and her family supposedly relocated to a Khu do thi moi. Poof! anh Cuong, my barber for years, gone, apparently to begin a new career as a taxi driver. Poof! chi Hang, my pharmacist, disappeared, and her neighbors don't know where she went. I could go on, but you get the idea.

I know it's anecdotal, but it seems pretty clear the rate of change in the fabric of Hanoi's urban core is increasing. Inflation, skyrocketing land prices, and changing expectations are all conspiring to turn my village into something different. Into something that's less of a village. I don't ask after the health of the employees in the shop that sells the Buddhist paraphenalia, and they don't ask after mine. And when the space that used to be chi Hang's little pharmacy finally becomes a multistory office building, I'm willing to bet the security guards won't even let me inside to ask after the health of anyone. And that makes me a little sad. My village isn't gone yet, but I can feel it going.