Tet in Saigon

Previously, we have mentioned the importance of Tet for the Vietnamese -- in Western terms, it's Christmas, Thanksgiving, and New Years wrapped up into one long holiday. In addition to many Vietnamese leaving their cities of work to return home to families, it's also a time for businesses to clean their shops and make offerings to temples and shrines, and for families to recall their ancestors. Flowers play a huge role, and the yellow flowers -- connoting gold, for prosperity -- are a big seller. One of the challenges is that the flowers are big, but the means of transportation are small. Here, you can see the standard Vietnamese solution to this: just keep piling on the luggage until you can't believe the scooter can carry it!

In the center of Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, the city shuts down one of the major streets that runs up from the river, and re-dedicates it to its original purpose, a flower market. The city actually takes liberty with its original role, and transforms the street into a 5-block-long extravaganza of flower displays, everything from bonsai trees to rare orchids to intricate arrangements of flowers. Predictably, the street becomes a photographer's paradise, as couples line up for their holiday portraits.

We read that the migration of so many people at one time into and out of the major cities creates significant stresses on the food supply system, so the government pays subsidies to producers of rice, flour, etc. to assure an adequate supply. In addition, there are government-sponsored programs to assist the poor in making their pilgrimages. It's clear that Vietnam, while far from a wealthy country, appears to have significantly reduced/eliminated the deep poverty that perhaps characterized many of its villages and cities in the immediate post-war period.

The pre-Tet traffic was almost surreal -- a continuous stream of scooters, buses and cars. Just as remarkably, the post-Tet traffic made Saigon feel like a ghost town, as families stayed indoors the first few days to celebrate amongst themselves. Here, pre-Tet, a group of monks takes comfort on an echelon formation to cross a busy street in downtown Saigon.

Our hotel celebrated Tet and invited us for the celebration: they hired a local troupe of dragon dancers to perform the dances that welcome the new year, and then a band that belted out disco-like songs celebrating the new year for the 15 guests in attendance. Here, the troupe assembles itself outside the doors, just before midnight, ready for its grand entrance. Below is a short video Jon took of the evening. The sound isn't too great, but you'll get a sense of their celebration, especially in Cholon, or the Chinatown section of Saigon.

Just past midnight, a group of hotel guests arrived via bus, surely to visit their families living nearby, and, consistent with the tradition that one's first visitor across the threshold in the new year must be greeted as a harbinger of the year to come, the hotel staff lined up and greeted these sleepy and slightly-disoriented guests with the traditional "lucky" red envelopes of cash. We too received one of these envelopes --- 500 dong, or about 2.5 cents -- and watched as hotel staff chased the manager around the lobby for their "lucky" envelopes. Clearly, this was more about the symbol of giving than the gift itself!


Along the streets, each business had a shelf outside the door where offerings could be made; in the days around Tet, each shelf contained a carefully-maintained grouping of offerings. Depending on where one lives, one places fruit on one side and flowers on the other; these offerings are also found at shrines and temples throughout Vietnam, and, in a more common and less ostentatious practice, incense sticks burn everywhere as offerings -- with the curbs that run along the streets even having specially-drilled holes in front of most businesses for the burning sticks.

After a few days of domestic focus, the people of Saigon return to the streets to celebrate Tet in the public square, with tens of thousands of scooter-borne families descending on the squares and streets that continue to be lit up with lanterns, flowers, and colored lights. It was a remarkable experience, seeing a city wind up and wind down and then re-wind up for a single celebration -- a celebration that continued as we left Saigon for the plane trip to Hanoi, in the north of the country.