Hội An: Magical and Frustrating

Hội An is a city of lanterns, dating back thousands of years. Hội An used to be a central meeting port between Vietnam, China, and Japan. People who emigrated from China and Japan brought foldable lanterns with them to remember home. Over time, this evolved to Hội An having their own lantern style, a foldable silk cloth lantern.

The lantern shapes can be a variety of things: garlic (which looks more like a hot air balloon), lotus, diamond, cake (or wu cake), papaya, ink bottle, umbrella, and even a UFO! If the wide part is on the top, it is a sunrise, if it is on the bottom then a sunset. The sunrise is also known as the young woman, and the sunset is known as the old woman. They are made of bamboo and silk and hang everywhere in town.

Lanterns bring luck and happiness to your family. Many people follow the Buddhist religion, so they celebrate the beginning and middle of the month, aligning with the lunar calendar. They eat vegan food on that day and bring offerings such as lanterns (or make lanterns). You can place a paper lantern lit with a candle in the water for a wish, and watch it float down the river - which is pretty magical.

Over time, the river that flows into Hội An brought silt into the river and canals, rerouting international industrial trade to Da Nang - a less protected port on the ocean. This meant that Hội An, and its old town, started to grow a bit sleepy. In the 1990s the government made intentional decisions to preserve the downtown in look and feel, turn certain areas into ticketed areas for tourism, and switch out normal street lights with lanterns. They started the monthly “lantern festival” on the evening of every full moon in 1998. Slowly but surely, the tourism space noticed and tourists arrived. Vietnamese tourists. International tourists.

Now, if you go to any travel blog, it says you must visit Hội An, as it is beautiful and accessible, and you can ride boats with lanterns. There’s an entire industry around getting custom clothes tailored in silk, cotton, or linen. A custom suit starts at $125, and a custom dress is $60. It is on the central coast and near everything. Small enough to explore and large enough that there are plenty of American breakfast restaurants and amazing food, so you feel at home.

All of these things are true, yet I am left with a mixed reaction to the town - at least about the old town.

The Magical

Lanterns are pretty magical. They are used in street and restaurant lighting. They are strung up downtown across the street in a variety of looks and sizes. It was amazing to walk around and see the variety. There are completely white linen ones, multi-colored ones, hand-painted ones, plus big and small ones. It is magical to walk around and check it out.

There’s an amazing diversity of cultures. You are in Vietnam, but most of the population is ethnically Cantonese from the emigrants from China in the 1800s. The historical buildings include The Japanese Bridge, The Cantonese Assembly Hall, and old family houses the family still lives in. The town sells you a set of 6 tickets for $2, and you choose which places you visit, one ticket each. We went into four, as Tim got COVID before we could finish the list and I wanted to make sure I really didn’t have it.

Japanese Covered Bridge

Cantonese Assembly Hall

Quan Thang Ancient House

Old House of Tan Ky

The classes and workshops are for tourists to learn more about the culture. We took a lantern-making workshop that was incredible. The host was amazing and made this complex process feel truly accessible. You got to pick out the sunrise or sunset variety, along with the silk color. It felt truly fun to make something with our hands and something we could keep. He also taught us about the history of lanterns, which I explained above. Tim and I made matching lanterns. His was purple, mine was blue. We each had the accent of the same orange to make them pop. It was so much fun.

We also signed up for an incredible cooking class. Unfortunately, we are rescheduling because Tim has COVID and I wanted to do it with him. However, we recommended it to friends who did it, and they loved it! There are classes for coffee making, tours, and many things for anyone to see. Plus you can just go hang out at the beach, and chill also. There is a lot to offer tourists who go and plenty of things to do.

At John and Kaitlin’s wedding this summer, their first dance was incredible. You could tell they had taken dance lessons and were just very comfortable with one another dancing, it was a beautiful representation of their partnership. Just incredible. I had been thinking of taking dance lessons with Tim for years (thank you COVID pandemic….), and Tim turned to me after watching them saying “we should take dance lessons.” Swing dance, lindy hop, is incredibly popular around the world. It’s had a huge resurgence over the last 20+ years, and I want to learn this with Tim. We realized we could take a lesson every week while traveling, as many of these places will have some type of swing dance community. I did a random google search with Tim and found the Instagram and Facebook of an organization in Hội An, and was able to connect with the organizer who is a teacher herself. While the lesson could not include us both because Tim had COVID, I ended up doing a lesson with just me. It was so nice to practice something I know and brush up on form, skills, and the transition from the 6-count to the 8-count. Here we come Lindy Hop dance floors!

We were here for the lantern festival and the mid-autumn festival. While the lantern festival is something that the local government created, the mid-autumn festival is a big deal in Vietnam. It is the children’s festival. In the evening things really come alive. I met up with people from the Ha Long Bay cruise who were also in Hội An. We walked around that evening and it was lovely. I started by getting drinks along the side of the river, then we walked over and watched a lion dance. Teenagers did a lion dance where they stacked themselves three people high as the lion - then had a sparkler thing shooting from the lion’s mouth. It was quite the show. We got into a lantern boat and lit candles into the river when the river is already full of them. It was incredible and beautiful. The river was lit by boats with lanterns and candle lanterns alike.

Seeing the same people around town - both on the tourist track and a shopkeeper or two we befriended. We would run into people who we had interacted with because it is on the tourist track. We also chatted with the owner of a Cashmere store on multiple days, and I saw him this morning as I was leaving. It was truly like connecting with an old friend. This offered a friendly community when our community is only accessible through a phone call or zoom call away, not surrounding us. It felt like a town where we could run into people. This included people we’d taken the lantern-making workshop with or were also on the Ha Long Bay Cruise. It was nice to get a sense of “I know this place” in an area so foreign.

The food and cafés made me feel at home. The food is amazing - both Vietnamese food and Western. The French toast and pancakes here are as good as any American diner, and they come with a better offering of fruit on the side! There is a variety of coffee and tea for you to choose from. The décor is hip and modern, and just lovely overall.

There are a couple of truly unique shops, with amazing prices. We bought two amazing silk table runners from an organization that is completely run, owned, and operated by people with disabilities. I was in a café eating breakfast on my last day, this morning, and noticed they were selling orphaned tea cups for $1 each. Beautiful ceramic teacups. I bought 7 unique cups, as an odd number in Southeast Asia brings you luck. And we got to do as it is done here!

The support we got from people when Tim got COVID. People here were really kind to us. The hotel helped us by immediately putting me in a separate room and letting us know we could get anything. The minimart down the street would walk my groceries to the hotel with me, as I was buying lots of food for Tim. Our friends from the lantern-making and Ha Long Bay would ask after him and me. The pharmacy was offering a buy 2-get-a-third-box-free deal on COVID tests, which felt like a funny joke to me given our circumstances. All in all, this was a decent place for one of us to get sick given the circumstances.

I am grateful for all of these elements and did enjoy these pieces of Hội An.

The Frustrating

The town, the old town, is geared towards tourism. Almost every shop is geared towards collecting money from tourism. This is true in plenty of places, but I have not gotten followed so consistently before. You are walking down the street and literally get followed by women trying to convince you to buy tailored clothes from their shops. They start the conversation politely and it goes into a sales pitch really fast, as you are walking a good 100 feet with them following you. It is deeply awkward and made me feel like they saw me as a walking ATM. And I love to observe and see places anew while staying in the fabric of that place and being relatively anonymous.

It was a shock after Ha Long Bay and Hanoi, where you are either anonymous or in a bubble. If someone sees you have an interest in their shop, sure they will call out to you. But they will not follow you down the street and respond with an aghast “why not?” when you very politely say that you are going somewhere. In Siem Reap, we would be walking and be asked by tuk-tuk drivers every 3-5 minutes if we needed a ride. I’d just say “no thank you” and they’d move on. You do your hustle, and respect my space and autonomy to say “no” and we are all good. At one point, by myself, I was walking by the fabric market already familiar with this. A woman walked up to me and started talking at me and following me for a block. She asked, “what do you want?” “I don’t want anything?” “Tell me what you want and I can make it for you.” I turned and said flatly “I want you to stop following me.” Thankfully, she left.

With the town being geared toward tourism, we tried to find unique things to buy and had high hopes based on reviews. We did end up buying two amazing silk table runners from a store run by and supporting people living with disabilities. They also made runners. It was incredibly unique, but many other places had the same generic stuff. The art galleries, and there are many, had the same style of paintings. And almost all had a coy beautiful woman in it. It was almost ironic because the women of Vietnam are well respected and empowered. Many are supporting their families. They are shopkeepers, running tailor shops, business owners, and hotel managers. They are smart, savvy and fierce. I would buy a painting of a woman conveying this reality in a heartbeat. But that’s not what is being sold to me. And the downtown lantern scenes were all the same, there was no variety of styles across 8 different shops. You could see the pixels in the reproductions of downtown lantern scenes sold, which was also disappointing.

The tailoring stores also had outdated fabrics, which made me sad because I really wanted to get custom clothes made. However, I couldn’t justify the effort put in with my lack of enthusiasm for fabrics there. They were busy and a bit dated, from the late 1990s and early 2000s with dense patterns for a more mature or conservative dresser. I like loose patterns or bright smart colors. Something that makes a dress feel whole. They did not offer patterns that I was excited about.

Outside of these separate things, which I was feeling two days in, Tim also discovered he had COVID in Hội An. We were there on Monday evening and took COVID tests on Wednesday morning. He came back positive and I came back negative. (I continued to be COVID-negative every day with two tests daily, using an over-the-counter test and feel fine.) This was a bummer and meant that I became the logistics maven to get us two hotel rooms and ensure he had meals delivered and medicine with him. Enough water. I asked the hotel for real plates and silverware, and to ensure they are exchanging his sheets and towels every day at the door while he was isolated. That, by itself, was exhausting. It did give me some time off from the frustration of the things mentioned above and that’s okay too. I took a weekend and watched Netflix, just focusing on getting Tim meals and not being responsible for anything or frustrations.

My Final Thoughts

Hội An is pretty damn magical, but know before you go that it is intentionally-built tourism. Go beyond the old town, which I didn’t have time to do between Tim getting COVID and taking a weekend. They have a school with an amazing cooking class. You can go snorkeling. There are beaches. Day trips along the coast to chill. And it is just overall a very versatile place. I feel like my expectations were high and then things evolved so much that I stayed attached to the old town and did not experience all that it has to offer. Plus the constant “selling” coming at me was draining and impersonal.

It is worth visiting and is magical. Just curate what you do a bit to not get caught in the frustration. Spend one day downtown and the rest exploring the other areas.