Viet Nam vo dich!

There's pandemonium in the streets of Hanoi tonight. What's going on out there right now makes Boston's celebration after the 2004 World Series look like a tea party. Vietnam won the AFF Suzuki Cup (SE Asian soccer championship) this evening. This is a very big deal, as Youke pointed out to me when she told me Charlie had scored tickets on the street and was taking her to the game.

I know that soccer (aka football) is the #1 sport everywhere in the world except for two places: Afghanistan, where the fan favorite is polo played with a human head, and the good old USA, where the favorite is a tossup between NFL football and WWF wrestling. Vietnam is partial to ping pong and badminton, but soccer is still #1 here. One of the 7 or 8 cable channels I get shows nothing but soccer 24/7. I often see people, usually men, watching this channel while they fry some fish or repair a bicycle tire in their combination living room/bedroom/workshop/retail outlet. My students often mention their interest in football. I didn't realize, though, until tonight, just how passionate this interest is.

I was sitting in my apartment around 9:00 preparing tomorrow's lesson and thinking about dinner when I heard a sudden mighty roar in the street. Instinctively, maybe because I had the soccer channel on, I thought of Youke and Charlie and the big football game that must have just ended with a Vietnam victory. I grabbed my coat and headed out the door to discover an amazing sight: my street, which is always pretty crowded up until about 10 or 11 pm when the shops close up for the night, was even more congested than usual and really noisy. Dozens of horns were blaring simultaneously, people were cheering raucously, and what most seized my attention were the red flags—hundreds of them—waving from nearly every motorbike.

I had a real struggle fighting my way through the thick crowd of slow-moving bikes to the pizza restaurant where my friend Huong waits tables. As a rule, Huong stops working between the time I appear and the time I leave. Her friends cover for her while she makes the most of another opportunity to chat me up and watch me eat. Tonight was different. She was so excited about Vietnam's football victory she barely noticed I was there. She made it clear that she was in anguish at not being able to rush into the street and join the celebrating. The TV above my table was showing the post-game awards and interviews and Huong alternated between looking at the TV and looking out the window at all the ecstatic revelers streaming past. I asked her if she had watched the game. 'No,' she said, 'I don't like football.'

I'm pretty sure the game ended before 9:00 but when I left the restaurant at 10:00 the party was just getting cranked up. I plowed back up the street to my apartment through a swarming crowd of delirious, laughing faces, chanting 'Viet Nam vo dich, Viet Nam vo dich', which means 'Vietnam can't be beat'. The street was awash in red—red Vietnam flags of all sizes, red shirts, and red headbands bearing the mantra 'Viet Nam vo dich'. A woman with a fistful of headbands tried to hand me one. When I took it from her, she started clamoring for money so I handed it back. All around me people were waving, laughing, pumping their fists, holding up a thumb or a V for victory sign. This was one happy crowd, believe me.

When I got to my apartment I grabbed my camera and headed back out. Luong Van Can street was a river of celebrants, two or three to a motorbike and five or six to a car. Everybody, it seemed was waving a flag or beating two pot lids together. On the sidewalk near Minh's Jazz Club two young men were pounding the hell out of a giant woooden drum with some heavy clubs. While I stood exchanging grins and high fives with passing people, somebody set off some firecrackers. Somebody else threw a cloud of sparkling confetti into the air. One boy whirled a long, sputtering sparkler around his head. Between snapshots, I joined in the chanting of 'Viet Nam vo dich'.

When I left the restaurant, Huong had said, 'I won't sleep tonight.' I assumed she meant because she was so excited. Now, as I sit here blogging at five minutes to midnight, with the drums, the cheering, and the firecrackers beginning to crescendo for about the tenth time since I started typing, I'm beginning to suspect she knew none of us would be able to sleep tonight for all the noise.

Now here's the punchline: all this ecstatic brouhaha has been going on for hours without being stoked to any significant degree by alcohol. Not to say nobody is drinking in celebration, but in the two hours I was spectating I saw nobody with an open container, nobody falling down, nobody being sick on their shoes, nobody trying to break anything or turn anything upside down, and nobody doing anything more foolish than banging on their mother's best cooking pot with a big metal spoon and grinning ear to ear. It's hard not to love this about the Vietnamese—when they're happy it seems to fill them up.