Christmas in Hanoi

I had planned to eat Christmas dinner at the Green Mango. Several of my colleagues had tentatively committed to doing the same. But when the time came, I just couldn't summon the appetite or the energy. I walked past the entrance and kept on going until I found myself at the supermarket, where I replaced my stocks of bottled water and tissues and headed home again. I spent most of Christmas day in bed, fully clothed against a clammy chill, preparing to teach a Friday night class. In the evening I heard party sounds spilling down from De's penthouse apartment two floors above me. The party apparently had migrated to my building from the Green Mango. I expected somebody to knock on my door at any moment, but I dozed off and when I woke up everything was quiet—except for those two cats that fight a grudge match outside my bathroom window five nights out of seven. The Vietnamese have eaten all the birds in Hanoi—the only ones I've seen so far have been in cages—so I don't understand why they've allowed these two cats to live.

Whether it's my advancing age, my body's unfamiliarity with a new virus, or the ineffectiveness of Vietnamese cold and flu medicine, this flu has been the worst of my life. I'm lucky it struck at such an opportune time, when my light teaching schedule was even lighter due to holiday breaks. Most of the past two weeks I've spent lying in bed reading, dozing, and watching the predictable but exasperatingly slow evolution of my symptoms. Only twice did I have to pedal through gray, gritty streets in suit and tie, book bag on my back, to arrive at class with a sweaty torso, achy head, stuffy nose, and cottony mouth and try to give a roomful of hopeful students their money's worth.

I haven't minded being in what you might consider a Christmas backwater during the holidays. I've had my fill of the aggressively commercial form Christmas assumes in the US. For me the best part of Christmas is the heightened fellow feeling of the season and that feeling appears to be widespread all year long in Vietnam. Although they aren't Christians, Thanh offered to give me his bicycle as a Christmas gift, Thu gave me a beautiful pen and a box of green bean cakes, Van gave me a magnificent scarf to guard against the winter chills, Nga gave me bananas, tea, coffee, and vitamin C, Huong, Mai, and Linh offered to help me learn Vietnamese, and two restaurants this week have given me free pots of tea with my meal.