Imagine a tempestuous night, a gale ripping rooftops. A thin, one-handed fisherman named Nguyen Thi Hung huddles in a weathered wooden boat—his home—as Tropical Storm Washi thrashes Halong Bay, in northern Vietnam. The storm splits a fishing boat in half; it kills a shrimp farmer in his field. Hung loses a few nights of work at sea. He worries about his next catch. He always worries as he toils beneath his boat’s blazing lights, which beckon squid to the murky surface: Will he catch enough? It depends on luck.
Just south of China, Halong Bay is saturated with beauty—nearly 2,000 limestone isles jutting precipitously from the lapis-colored sea. It’s the place to visit in Vietnam today, but it is more than that; it’s a place of historical eminence as well. For it was here that some of Vietnam’s first people got their start, more than 25,000 years ago. They lived in island caves and survived by the sea. They fished. They ate. And they set the tempo of a culture. Even today, from its wet rice paddies with fattened fish to a coastline longer than California’s , Vietnam so depends on water that the same word, nuoc, means both “water” and “country” in Vietnamese. As everyone living on the bay understands, a Vietnam without water is a Vietnam without food.
These days, Halong Bay makes it into every guidebook. It is a place where tourists are told they can “discover the real Vietnam.” Thousands of visitors bob on these waters, crammed onto wooden junks fashioned to look antique. At the same time, Halong Bay is a place where people like Hung work hard and eat cheap, just beyond the tourists’ gaze.
It was in Halong Bay, on my first excursion to Asia, in 1996, that I ate some of the most memorable meals of my life. Nine years later, I am still haunted by the flavor of an exquisite curried crab that retains a vibrant place among my taste memories. Today, I live in Thailand, where the fish is good— but not good enough to banish the memory of lime-drizzled fish, of meals prepared by aunts and mothers in the corridors of ancient Vietnamese villages. It was time, I thought, to revisit Halong Bay.
And then Tropical Storm Washi blows ashore.
But I will not be deterred. After waiting around in Hanoi for the storm to pass, I scuttle off to Halong City by taxi. This is not an especially pretty town, but it makes up for that with its truly outstanding seafood. Strolling through the streets, I pass a humble little restaurant called Toan Huong, where customers are crowded inside and out, and tables clog the sidewalk. I spot a gathering of a dozen relatives, three generations, with grandma at the center, and I instantly know this is the restaurant for me: No respectable Vietnamese family takes grandma to dinner at a dump.
It is boisterous. Traffic beeps, a passing man pushes a make shift cart of steaming corn. And then it comes: the largest, juiciest crab I’ve ever seen, its body resting on a bed of fried lemongrass and garlic. I crack the crab, smack my lips, and am reassured: My Halong Bay remains.
And so do the idiosyncrasies of Vietnam. Just as I finish, the cops arrive, brandishing nightsticks. They topple tables, snuff out grills, and confiscate food from stalls across the street. A Vietnamese sidewalk is no place for capitalism. I’ve seen scenes like this several times, in back alleys and neighborhood streets. It’s the sort of daily subjugation that hides behind a smiling facade. A day later, the stalls are back and the cops are there relaxing. Honestly, if running-dog street stalls were vanquished, where would the proletariat drink tea?
The next morning, I board a ferry with dozens of commuters to the “other” Halong City, across the bay, where fishing families moor in the harbor until their next trip to sea. They’re anchored 100 yards from Cho Halong, a cacophonous market that hangs its rump over the water. Taxi boats shuffle people to and fro, but the real action is in the market itself.
It’s a whirlwind of activity—crawling shrimp, slithering eels, snapping crabs, and shoppers hunting for perfect specimens. Vendors crouch on plastic stools beside their seafood caboodle. Sellers wear rubber boots and grubby togs and stash money in their bras. Buyers show up in high heels and gold chains, stuffing bills into wallets held high. A girl with squid wants me to buy; I tell her I have no kitchen in Vietnam, and all the women tsk-tsk at the tragedy.
There are smells here, definite smells: the fish, the diesel motors, the stench of a bubbling sewer, all black sludge and garbage on the market fringe. I hire a 16-year-old girl named Tuoi to row me around the boats surrounding the market. Men peel vegetables as we pass, women cuddle babies, dogs snap at intruders. Anyone who thinks the fishing life quaint need only spend a little time with Tuoi. But they rarely do, she tells me. Most tourists are much more inclined to skip the city entirely, heading straight for the bay.
And there it is: all those limestone nubs sprouting from the sea, with hundreds of new “antique” junks heading toward them like a trail of ants across the water. I have booked an excursion on the Emeraude, a swank remake of a 19th-century French paddle wheeler. When it sets sail from the dock in Halong City, I strike up a conversation with a young deckhand named Nguyen Giang, who is pleased to have an American along. “Now our two countries have very good economic and political relations,” he tells me. I tell Giang I want to learn more about the fishermen who live and work on the waters around there, but he can’t help. “The fishermen never come to town,” he says. “They stay on the boat.” Though Giang has spent most of his years in this coastal province, he says that he knows no fishermen.
But, then, that’s not his job, and cultural education is not the point of the Emeraude, which is there to offer splendid scenes from a privileged perch, with lounge chairs, soft jazz, and a bartender always on hand. The drinks are chilled, the cabins cool, the dining room fully sheltered from the elements. As I stare across the water, I can make out fishing villages floating near the shore.
We pass a cluster of rainbow-colored boats that look more like baskets than homes. I am intrigued, but the Emeraude doesn’t go near them. Instead, villagers row to us in little boats of wood and rattan, bearing coral and shells that they sell for $1 to $5 apiece. They lift their arms to the Emeraude’s deck, where passengers stand at the railing with cameras in hand, scrambling to capture the scene.
Later that night, the buffet boasts local crab, shrimp, squid, and fish, some of it good, some of it bland and overdone. Far more enticing to me is the panoply of goodies not readily found in Asia: Norwegian smoked salmon, French cheese, chocolate cake, Chilean wine. I indulge in second helpings, while fishermen occasionally drift into view through the restaurant’s portholes.
By early morning, I can’t sleep. I hit the upper deck just as the first dabs of light cross the sky. I am all alone, watching thousands of tiny fish flying from the water, chased by something higher on the food chain. Crickets chirp and seabirds sing. In the distance, I hear the sputtering motor of a fishing boat. That motor is the sound of a waterway in the morning anywhere in Southeast Asia. This is the hour when villages and nature wake, an hour that inspires me. I finally feel attuned to what is out there.
And yet I feel a nagging lack of inspiration. I’d rather be in one of those villages way out there in the distance, bones aching on a floating wooden floor, knees bent, struggling through my atrocious Vietnamese, eating food from the bay. I want to get right down to the lifeblood of this fishing world.
So when we dock in Halong City again, I seek out John Gray’s Sea Canoe, an American-run operation with a string of accolades for its eco-friendly adventures on water. Before too long, I am setting off from their boat in my own canoe. My guide, Nguyen Khac Tien, paddles me into pitch-black island caves, following the current straight through to sunny interior lagoons. These hidden phongs are full of life, inaccessible from the ocean at high tide; imagine each island as a cruller doughnut of limestone mountains, with a blue-green lagoon in the hole.
Tien leads me to the “lagoon of a thousand jellyfish.” The invertebrates swim toward patches of sunlight, and I pick one up. Its epidermis quivers in my hand, harmless. These are too small to eat, Tien says, but the tiny crabs we see on nearby rocks are food for locals. Inside another cave, he points to a rope hanging from rocks, where fishermen tie up for midday naps. In the cooler hours, little houseboats nestle in the nooks of these islands while men and women do their daily chores.
In the late afternoon, Tien takes me to visit Hung, the one-handed fisherman. His home is in a floating village called Van Gia. Two days after Washi has passed, men and women hammer on boats and houses, patching leaks and fixing gouges. Giant lights adorn each boat and, at night, jolt the sea with brightness. We paddle through around 4 p.m., which is dinnertime here for most families, who are gathering around pots and bowls on the upper decks. Hung sits with his wife and teenage son on a plastic sheet covering their wooden floor. He invites us into the circle and shoves a couple of whiskey cups our way. It is the first rice wine I’ve had this trip, offered with classic Vietnamese hospitality.
They all sit cross-legged with their toes resting beside aluminum pots of food, a dinner of rice with dried and fried sardines, sour fish soup with green papaya, and ca duoi, a small ocean fish that sells for about 14 cents a pound. It’s cheaper than squid, which costs eight times as much. “If the squid is still alive, we fry it or bake it with nothing. If not, we fry it with celery,” Hung says. But even that is a treat, because he can’t always afford the food he catches. He can’t afford a plot of land, like some villagers have. He can’t even afford a floating house, so they live on their squid boat, as many families do. “If we’re lucky, we can earn a hundred dollars a night,” Hung says. “But that may happen once a month. Often we come away with nothing.”
As we speak, a young woman rows through the village in a boat shaped like a huge bamboo tray. She’s selling cigarettes, beer, candy, fruit, crackers—the local version of the neighborhood 7-Eleven. In Van Gia, kids row themselves to school; they learn to swim before they learn to walk. They eat from the waters around them; everything else arrives on floating stores. There are no sit-down meals at restaurants. Most villagers rarely sit at a table or set foot on shore. Legs grow wobbly with time. “I go to land about once a month,” Hung says. “I don’t walk very well.” His life, like that of his neighbors, is firmly anchored in the sea.
It’s a life, a job, that has cost him plenty. Twenty years ago, before he could afford a boat and net, he fished using dynamite. It’s illegal, but people do it. Hung made a living that way. Until he blew off his right hand.
I paddle away from Hung and board the John Gray boat again. We set off into a gorgeous sunset with pink and orange cascades lighting the islands. Lounging in a deck chair, I take in the scene, as fishing boats wobble in the bay.
Inside, a feast awaits. It seems incongruous, extravagant: a salad with tomato-peel flowers and carrot florets, corn soup with shrimp and crab, a whole fish garnished with ginger and tomatoes-—enough to feed a family of eight. I sit on a plush red chair at a table with white linen. A uniformed waiter pours a glass of wine and sets the bottle to chill in an ice bucket. An evening breeze whispers through the wooden windows of this massive boat I have chartered exclusively for myself, three times the size of a squid boat and incomparable in elegance and sheer comfort.
The food keeps coming, I keep eating. I think of Hung.