Ho Chi Minh Hem

Ho Chi Minh City was the first stop Yue and I made in southeast asia. Coming from a summer of travel in Shanghai and Taipei, the biggest culture shock was how chaotic the groundlevel of the city felt. The streets are filled with weaving scooters who, carrying more things on their backs than I would feel comfortable having in a car, dodge blase pedestrians, teetering bicyclists, raging automobiles, roaming street dogs, and, most impressively, Yue and me.

At a first glance, HCMC feels almost “improvisational.” The sidewalks border on unwalkable, filled by parked scooters, knee-height restaurant seating areas, and cigarette stands. Similarly, the neighborhood alleyways (called Hem) are lined with people selling directly from the front of their homes. We saw stands that sold just soaps and detergents or stands for old electronics parts and wires. Each person seemed to have a very specific task they were working on- the person who strips the plastic coating off of copper wires or the person scootering with a bag of rubber balls the size of a small boulder on their bag. We even saw someone balancing what must have been hundreds of uncovered eggs on their sidecar. 

At the same time as we had these “improvisational” feelings, Yue and I were also in awe of how well everything seemed to just work. Each morning we were at our favorite bahn mi spot (Bahn Mi Hong Hoa), the cafe down the block from them scootered a load of their baguettes to make their own sandwiches. The vendors in the hem alleyways exchanged goods with each other, trading one stand’s vegetables for another’s grilled meats. Often, we would see one stand that just sliced herbs for multiple nearby pho shops. Everything was immersed in a giant network of exchanging items, driven by hundreds of thousands of people each playing very narrow and idiosyncratic roles. 

The whole operation reminded me a lot of the term “gig economy” that people would throw around while I was in college. The idea of a gig economy came from a journalist named Tina Brown when she was describing the job industry after the 2008 financial crisis (admittedly, this is a fun fact I googled for this blog post). In the article, she describes gigs as “a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces.” Brown describes this situation in a bleak tone; in the post financial crash economy, it was a system that let employers make an employee work just as hard for fewer benefits and less certainty. And I think, in this context, that this feeling of bleakness is warranted. In a 2009 NPR interview with Brown, a caller reports that her jobs ranged from wedding singer to web designer to family consultant to copy editing, all while being the primary caretaker for her kids. 

But I feel that the “gigs” we saw in HCMC had a different tone than the sorts of abstract, online consultancies that Brown talks about. It instead felt like the networks in these small hem neighborhoods had an underlying rootedness. People had small narrow tasks specifically for their community or region, not for some large scale corporation. And in that sense, the seeming “gig-ness” of it all was really that each person had a vital role for everything else to function. It seemed a lot more communal, at least from what I was picking up. 

My impression is that these sorts of narrow jobs are the underbelly of the local food scene in Vietnam, but maybe many other places too. The sourcing in HCMC seems narrower than large scale distributors, and this makes sense when considering the fact that many of these hem alley restaurants have a lot fewer customers than somewhere more commercial. Yue and my favorite raw beef pho restaurant, Pho Le on Ban Co, is only open from 5:30am to 10:00am, and only seats around 10 people. It makes sense that one person in the neighborhood could slice more than enough herbs for them, or that another could supply all of the noodles for a service. And the fact that someone does really pays off in the final product. 

In US cities, this sort of sourcing tends to only work for more expensive restaurants. I once watched a video from the Brooklyn restaurant Ilis (opened by Noma co-founder Mads Refslund) where one of their chefs explains their local sourcing process from NYC farmers markets and specialty stores. I remember realizing how many extra hours of labor and upcharge on luxury produce this must cost the restaurant, leading to their pretty staggering price of $225 per a person. Reflecting on this, it’s interesting to me how we faced the opposite situation in HCMC. Places with this local sourcing were by far cheaper than commercial restaurants or chains. Our meal at pho le cost less than $5 total for the two of us. Maybe it has to do with rent (most of the food at pho le is made in the front of the owner’s house). Or maybe it actually does have something to do with the efficiency of all these small roles within the neighborhood. I probably couldn’t give a very confident opinion on this question without starting to actually read some studies or books, so it’s probably a good stopping point for a blog post. Maybe I have already overstepped my limits as an outside observer here- I’ll have to think about it a bit more. Anyways, thank you all for following along with these posts as they slowly seep out.

Yue and I on the way out of a hem neighborhood

Some streetside improvisation

Burke