In Vietnam there is not much that separates the producers from the consumers. You don’t have to go to a far-flung industrial zone to see where your stuff comes from, you can just walk down the street:
Early on in my time here, I went to a store to buy a green picture frame. They didn’t have the colour I was after so the woman from the store took a black frame outside onto the footpath, whipped out a can of green spray paint, and voila, I now had a green frame.
My first thought was “Man, this is shoddy”, and hesitated over buying it. But then I realised that if they had originally had a green frame in stock, I would have cheerfully bought it, even though this is exactly how it would have been made anyway. It was seeing how it had been made which devalued it.
This is why in countries like Australia, manufacturers go to great lengths to gloss over a product’s provenance and to eradicate all trace of the human hands that made it come into being. Evidence of the manufacturing process is a flaw: we prefer to believe our stuff just… materialised.
This subject has been on my mind recently, because it’s been staring me in the face:
That is the view from our window. On the upside, we now have a lake view, and on the downside, we now basically live inside a building site.
Due to its omnipresence, Hanoians know a lot about construction, and now, so do I. The noise of things being built and things being knocked down is the city’s soundtrack. The cicada whine of the circular saw; the reverberating hum of the machine which straightens out those big long metal poles; the plink-plink-plink of bricks being stacked; the, umm, jack-hammering of jack hammers.
The construction site outside our window has gone through a number of stages involving all of these sounds. The most exciting stage was probably when we woke up to see a Vietnamese Stonehenge had appeared:
The worst stage was when a truckload of gravel was dumped, and then shovelled down a corrugated iron chute from about 11:30pm till 3:30am. And then again from 6:30am:
Do you know what gravel sliding down corrugated iron sounds like? Like GRAVEL SLIDING DOWN CORRUGATED IRON.
Being experts in construction, Nathan and I know that the worst is yet to come. We watch the site’s daily progress with dread, shooting hateful looks at the gravel-shovelers and the plink-plink-plinkers. Unfair, really, since their lives are much worse than ours. They live onsite, in a crappy humpy that rattles and shakes on a windy night, they work under the baking sun, and while I complain I no longer have any privacy, at least I can close my curtains. These guys can’t have a wee without my beady eyes glaring down at them from on high.
The construction site’s current stage can only be described as a dog’s breakfast:
I look out at it, then can’t help but look around our house, my mind seeing through the paint and plaster walls to its skeleton. Our apartment must once have been just like that pile of poles and planks. And I think, “Man, this is shoddy”. I remember how our landlord once warned us against having a party and the guests all dancing at once for fear of the building collapsing. We laughed this off at the time, but now I’m not so sure.
For a country with so many fakes, there’s something honest about the Vietnamese mode of production. The part played by the human hand is not just present; it’s in your face. And so too is the knowledge of its fallibility. Now please excuse me, I have some cracks I need to inspect.
My first thought was “Man, this is shoddy”, and hesitated over buying it. But then I realised that if they had originally had a green frame in stock, I would have cheerfully bought it, even though this is exactly how it would have been made anyway. It was seeing how it had been made which devalued it.
This is why in countries like Australia, manufacturers go to great lengths to gloss over a product’s provenance and to eradicate all trace of the human hands that made it come into being. Evidence of the manufacturing process is a flaw: we prefer to believe our stuff just… materialised.
This subject has been on my mind recently, because it’s been staring me in the face:
Due to its omnipresence, Hanoians know a lot about construction, and now, so do I. The noise of things being built and things being knocked down is the city’s soundtrack. The cicada whine of the circular saw; the reverberating hum of the machine which straightens out those big long metal poles; the plink-plink-plink of bricks being stacked; the, umm, jack-hammering of jack hammers.
The construction site outside our window has gone through a number of stages involving all of these sounds. The most exciting stage was probably when we woke up to see a Vietnamese Stonehenge had appeared:
Being experts in construction, Nathan and I know that the worst is yet to come. We watch the site’s daily progress with dread, shooting hateful looks at the gravel-shovelers and the plink-plink-plinkers. Unfair, really, since their lives are much worse than ours. They live onsite, in a crappy humpy that rattles and shakes on a windy night, they work under the baking sun, and while I complain I no longer have any privacy, at least I can close my curtains. These guys can’t have a wee without my beady eyes glaring down at them from on high.
The construction site’s current stage can only be described as a dog’s breakfast:
For a country with so many fakes, there’s something honest about the Vietnamese mode of production. The part played by the human hand is not just present; it’s in your face. And so too is the knowledge of its fallibility. Now please excuse me, I have some cracks I need to inspect.
