Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

The calendar changes in Vietnam on January 1, but the new year doesn’t really come until Tet – the start of the lunar year that usually falls in late January or February. It goes something like this:

Preparation: Ong Tao, the kitchen god, has been privy to each family’s secret business throughout the year, so it is time for him to return to heaven to make a report to the Jade Emperor up there. On the 23rd day of the 12th month, a farewell dinner is held for him, before he rides a big fish up for his weeklong visit to heaven. To aid that trip, families burn paper fish, horses and clothing to be transformed into a spiritual state for Ong Tao to use in his travels. People also release fish into lakes and ponds, which in Hanoi are sold by men with clear plastic bags of live fish hanging from their bicycles. Also, Ong Tao has no pants. Legend tells us that either he is too poor to afford them, or he burned them in the hearth fire or he was in such a rush to get back to heaven that he forgot them. Either way, he makes a fairly unimposing figure to be determining each family’s luck for the next year.

Cultural note – There are actually three kitchen gods, two men and a woman, who represent the three legs of the tripods traditionally used in Vietnamese cooking. Ong Tao is the most famous.

After Ong Tao leaves, families can start cleaning (which is not allowed during Tet) and decorating for the holiday. Huge flower markets open all over town, where people can buy kumquat trees and miniature peach trees with light pink blossoms. Also, the traffic gets so bad that I once couldn’t figure out a way to cross the street even when all the vehicles were stopped.



Giao Thua: In Hanoi, where people are “modern,” the city holds a semi-Western-style New Year’s Eve celebration with fireworks over Hoan Kiem lake. At midnight, though, everyone goes to the pagoda to pray and give offerings to gods and ancestors. The midnight prayer constitutes the Giao Thua ritual (giao meaning to give and thua meaning to receive), symbolizing the passing on of life and the recognition of that gift by the current generation.

First day: This most important day is reserved for visits with the husband’s family. The first visitor to a household in the new year determines the luck for the whole year and must be carefully selected. My friend Matt “ate” Tet with a Vietnamese family, where the matron selected herself to be the first visitor and simply left the house, took a walk around the block and returned to “visit.” Also, money of equal amounts in envelopes is exchanged as Tet gifts, so that everyone eventually ends up with the same amount he or she has gifted to keep poor families from actually losing a lot of money at Tet.

Second day: is for socializing with the wife’s family and close friends and potentially for gambling, if you’ve had a really good first day.

Third day: Visits from other important people like teachers and doctors occur then. The “first visit,” if counted only for non-family members, can also happen on the third day. That was the more traditional practice, but since Vietnamese people have started using the later days of Tet as time to travel, the first visit has moved up in some households. Items for the ancestors, who have returned for the new year, are burned for their departure at this point. Those first three days involve a lot of cooking for women and an intense amount of rice wine drinking for men.

Later: Businesses and shops reopen on the fourth day and life returns to the streets, which empty out during this family-oriented time. On the fifteenth day of Tet – the first full moon – there are ceremonies at temples. Vendors also use the final two weeks to sell the last of their banh chung, an incredibly rich, glutinous rice cake stuffed with meat and mung beans and wrapped in banana leaf – the delicacy of the season.

Happy Year of the Ox!

My life as a sea turtle judge

As you’ve probably gathered from Scott’s posts, work trips in Vietnam are not the stuffed-shirt affairs we’re used to back home. The riotous drunkenness to actual work ratio is somewhere between much more likely and guaranteed to be heavily tipped in favor of the former, but I thought an excursion to judge school children’s drawings of sea turtles might be different. I was wrong.

When our marine program manager’s son’s birthday kept her from traveling one weekend, my boss in communications and I were selected to attend some project wrap-up activities in her place. The project was to educate coastal communities about sea turtle conservation through extra-curricular lessons for middle schoolers. To show what they’d learned, students at two schools were holding back to back contests over a weekend where they would put on skits, sing songs, read poems and explain artwork they’d created about sea turtles.

Here’s what I wrote about the weekend for work: http://iucn.org/about/union/secretariat/offices/asia/asia_where_work/vietnam/?2487/Student-Contests-Promote-Sea-Turtle-Conservation Here’s what actually happened:

Our two provincial government escorts woke us painfully early each morning to eat spicy fish noodle soup and then sit in a café for 45 minutes while strong Vietnamese coffee dripped into cups of sweetened condensed milk in front of us before driving through little seaside villages to the schools. On Saturday, it was raining heavily when we arrived so we drank equally strong green tea while waiting for the weather to break.

When it did, the children’s performances were truly adorable. Of course, my level of Vietnamese is so far below a sixth grader’s that I couldn’t legitimately judge their work, but I could run around taking pictures of them waddling around with paper cutouts of turtle shells on their backs and doing unrelated dances that their teachers seems to have thrown into the mix just for cuteness' sake.



After the competition, we walked through a field to a farmhouse – I never fully understood that, but best not to question – for more green tea followed by a seafood feast. With beer and rice wine the only beverage options, I selected beer, figuring it would be the less lethal choice (that would prove to be a mistake). I proceeded to watch two representatives of the local department of aquatic resources, two from the department of education, a school principal and any number of teachers get red-in-the-face drunk and deliver round after round of overly congratulatory speeches to one another. Then I was slipped an envelope with the equivalent of $3.50 in it and sent on my way. That seems to be the standard “thank you for showing up” amount.

At that point, it was still only about two in the afternoon. And how do a 40-some-year-old employee of an international environmental organization, her American intern, and their two government guides spend a free afternoon in rural Vietnam? With three hours in a private karaoke room coercing the American to sing obscure English-language songs over more beer, of course. The mass consumption of caffeine and alcohol left my stomach in dire need of a solid meal by that evening, but instead my boss insisted that we’d eaten too much and should walk to the market to pick up a meal of bananas, oranges and a single sweet potato each to eat alone in our separate hotel rooms. My pitch to add yogurt to the mix was rejected because “citrus and dairy can’t be eaten at the same time.”

I woke up the next morning with traveler’s sickness that would last the next two days – turns out the ice in my beer the day before wasn’t filtered – for a similar contest at a school with enthusiastic young teachers eager to practice English phrases like, “my heart is full from meeting you.” This particular booze-fueled lunch ended with the principal standing as if he was going to give a speech, but instead singing a love song from his province – directly to me. That performance was followed by another song from him, a song from a government official and a ditty about Hanoi from my boss.

We left and drove to Hue, the nearest big city with an airport, with two separate stops to drink tea on the side of the road with people who were never introduced to me. I disappointed Mr. Anh, one of our government friends, by saying I’d rather see some of Hue’s sights than go back into a dark karaoke chamber. He grudgingly took me to a very nice pagoda/monastery and walked me across the city’s famous bridge before dinner. Not surprisingly, the meal was early enough to allow us time for hours four and five of karaoke for the weekend, before I finally got to drag my tired and dehydrated self back onto a plane for Hanoi.