2020. What a fucking dumpster fire.

Needless to say, there’s not been much traveling happening with me, so I’m going to take this opportunity to share something a bit different with you. As you may or may not know, this website started when I moved from Boston to Hanoi in 2014. I loved my time in Hanoi, but it came to an end when I decided to relocate to Nashville, Tennessee to try my hand at music. I started a band called The Great Palumbo, and this project is still where I spend all my time, money, and emotional energy. I don’t know where this thing is going, but it’s on its way! And I’m very blessed to have some super talented musicians along for the ride with me.

Today, we released some new music that was inspired by the time I spent living in Hanoi. And since this is the topic that put this blog on the map, I’m sharing it here as well.

Like most young Americans, the full extent of the U.S.’s military action in Vietnam was not something I ever learned about in school, so I arrived in Hanoi painfully naive to the atrocities that had been committed by my own country here just decades prior. But in spite of this ignorance, I experienced nothing but love in Hanoi.

This song is about experiencing that love, and only later realizing its significance.

Links to listen are below. It’s one piece of music, broken into two parts. For best results, listen in order from start to finish. I hope you enjoy it, but if you don’t, that’s okay too. This is the “art piece” for the year, so even if everybody hates it, I’ll still love it.

I think you’ll like it though.

Listen on Your Platform Of Choice

Some Reflections On Hanoi

I miss Hanoi. This website was a relatively new development in my life when I got there and I wasn’t very good at this blogging thing yet, so I didn’t document the experience in the way I wish I would have. I published plenty of articles (indexed here, on the Vietnam page), but none of them are really up to snuff with what I am creating now. This means that I am forced to rely a lot more just on my memory of it, because I don’t have quite as thorough a body of work to refer back to when I’m feeling nostalgic. And when I reflect on my time in Hanoi, the thing that sticks out to me most is this: peace.

There’s just something about this place. It seems chaotic at first glance, and the people seem a bit abrasive when you first meet them, but once you spend enough time here that you are able to transcend that hard, chaotic outer layer, there is something deep and powerful waiting under the surface. It’s an aura that is profoundly peaceful. I’ve experienced a similar energy in other places around this immediate region, but Hanoi is really something special, because it walks a fine line. In larger, more cosmopolitan cities of this region, this peaceful energy is diluted by outside forces. In smaller cities, towns, or rural areas around the region, this sense of peaceful zen is alive and well, but there’s a lot more empty space, which is peaceful in it’s own way, but not quite the same thing. Hanoi is the rare specimen that has scaled up to a level of density on par with cities like Saigon on Bangkok, but has not lost even one iota of that identity.

When night falls on this city, something happens. The light softens. The traffic gradually fades away. Families return home to eat together. They leave their front doors wide open so you can see directly into their living rooms as you walk through the narrow streets. The insects in the trees provide powerful walls of white noise. There’s something that happens that makes you feel like you’re not walking through city streets, looking into other people’s homes—rather—you’re walking down the hallway of a home that you all share together. Even as an outsider, I felt included in that familial dynamic, because the Vietnamese were so eager to invite me into their homes. This was hospitality that I had not earned in any way, but was freely given to me simply because I was a guest in their midst. The list of kind gestures I received during my time here is endless. And while I’ve been a lot of places now, and have been the recipient of undeserved kindness in many of those places, Hanoi was something special.

I’m sure a Vietnamese person might read this and think “this big dumb tây (foreigner) is just nostalgic; Hanoi is nothing special.” And while it is definitely true that I am nostalgic, I think you need to have the perspective of an outsider to understand how unique Hanoi really is. And I’m not just any tây; I’m an American.

Do you know what America did to Hanoi? When we talk about the Vietnam War, (or as the Vietnamese call it, “The American War”), we’re not talking about being at war with Vietnam as a whole. We were only at war with the North. And Hanoi is virtually the only major city in the North. So America was basically at war with Hanoi. America did some unforgivable things to Hanoi. And in true David and Goliath fashion, America got its ass kicked.

I remember when I was getting ready to leave for Hanoi, my father remarked “Man, you know, when I was a kid, it was just about the worst thing that could possibly happen to you to end up in HANOI!” Indeed, this was basically the death star to the entire generation of Americans who proceeded me. In fact, near the end of my grandmother’s life, when she was suffering heavily from Dementia, she told me, in reference to my having moved to Vietnam, that my late grandfather would have been “so hurt to know that you were betraying us like that.” LOL. It’s fine. I’m going to choose to believe that was the Dementia talking. But this negative connotation was not confined just to older generations. As I was leaving, my own friends would joke “Now you’ll be able to say 'Back in ‘Nam’!” Of course, this is a joke on the Vietnam War. And I played along! The novelty of moving to a place like Vietnam was not lost on me. No matter how you slice it, to the average American, Vietnam is still associated with the war. America is a bubble and that war is our last collective reference point for this obscure place, so most of us still hold those images in ours heads for what Vietnam is like. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

In Vietnam, attitudes are quite different. Of all the hundreds of Vietnamese people I met, not a single one of them ever even mentioned the war when they learned that I was American. I literally ate dinner in the homes of Viet Cong veterans, and they were SO happy to learn that I was American. Without exception, they smiled, shook my hand, and invited me to take a shot of rice wine (traditional home-made clear liquor) with them, which is a sign of respect between men in Vietnam.

I’ve learned that the Vietnam War is still polarizing in America, even all these decades later. Maybe we’re all just looking for more things to fight about at this point, but—if you’re an American—please put aside your personal politics for a moment and look at this dynamic from the Vietnamese perspective. There is no universe where America is not the bad guy in their story. They have gotten where they are today IN SPITE of America. These are facts. And even though I personally wasn’t alive for this conflict, I am—like the rest of us—beholden to the universal truth that we become representatives of our countries when we travel abroad. The emotional truth here is that I am one of the bad guys in the story of Vietnam.

Or… I would have been.

If Vietnam was still as hung up on the war as America is, this may have been true. But Vietnam has really turned the page. It’s a powerful narrative of forgiveness, and one that I think America can learn from.

And here’s the kicker: all of this was completely lost on me when I showed up in Hanoi as a 22-year-old. I didn’t even start to really learn any of this history until at least 6 months later. And nobody felt the need to educate me. Nobody felt the need to explain to me how forgiving Vietnamese society has been to Americans. Nobody even expected me to be interested in learning anything about Vietnam at all. They were much more interested in my story, and making sure that I felt welcome in their home. If hadn’t eventually visited the “American War Museum” in Saigon, my journey to discovering the ugly truth might never have began.

Knowing what I now know, my experience in Hanoi feels pretty profound.

And that’s what these songs are about.

I wasn’t as good a photographer back then as I am now, but I did come away with some decent pictures to remember this place by, and I’ve dropped a few of them below to give you a flavor of what life in Hanoi is like.

It makes me sad to think that this experience is finished. And it makes me even more sad to consider how many more years might pass before I return. I have no idea when I’ll be back… but I know I will be back eventually. I’m sure that Hanoi will look a bit different than the city I used to know—maybe there will be a few new tall buildings—but I can’t imagine that it will have changed THAT much. Hanoi has a timeless quality to it. If that quality has endured this long, I doubt it’s going anywhere in my lifetime.

In the mean time, all I can say to the people of Hanoi is this:

Thank you. I keep you with me.