SHIFTING WALLS, SHIFTING OUTLOOKS: THE HISTORY OF A HOUSE IN HANOI

The Vietnamese capital of Hanoi forms one of the most densely populated urban habitats on the planet.[1] The crowding, lack of privacy, and rapid change in this physical and architectural space exert a tremendous influence on the humanity it surrounds. Through the lives of the people who work, love, fight, and die in it, the urban environment becomes a social reality. Each house has witnessed immeasurable human achievements and tragedies. Over the past fifty years, a single room in one house has been home to the children of a mandarin, to revolutionary workers, and to high-ranking government officials. And to my own astonishment and good fortune, the record of inhabitants of this house also includes me.

Let me explain. I am an American married to a Vietnamese, an on- and off-again resident of Hanoi for the last seven years. Since 2000, my wife and I have lived in a house that was the home of her parents for the previous decade. Our address sounds nondescript enough: 86 ngõ 100 phố Tây Sơn, or house number 86 in alley number 100 off Tay Son (Western Mountain) Street. The house is about three miles southwest of the historical center of Hanoi (now referred to as the Old Quarter or Thirty-six Guild Streets) in a working-class residential neighborhood of small alleys, street markets, and the inevitable motorbikes. Our district, Dong Da, has the highest population density of Hanoi's twelve districts.[2] It is also far off the beaten path for most tourists who visit Hanoi, as well as for most foreign residents of the city.

Adjacent to our neighborhood is an important, though poorly maintained, historical site: Quang Trung Park or Dong Da Hill (Gò Ðống Ða), the site of a bloody 1789 battle between Vietnamese troops under Nguyen Hue (or King Quang Trung) and 200,000 Chinese invaders. Quang Trung won, ushering in the short-lived Tay Son Dynasty, named after his family's home district in south-central Binh Dinh Province.[3] The corpses of the dead were gathered in a mound and covered with dirt, forming today's Dong Da Hill, with a rundown temple-like structure on top. Every year on the fifth of Tet, that is, the fifth day after the Lunar New Year, the Dong Da Festival fills the park and surrounding streets with masses of humanity, some watching scripted cultural performances, others buying and selling snacks and cheap souvenirs, others just visiting with their neighbors. The rest of the year, the park is largely empty, except for a few children's amusement rides, early-morning badminton players, and a respectable bonsai garden. Beneath it, and presumably beneath most houses in our neighborhood as well, are bones, tens of thousands of bones.

A century ago, this area was pure countryside. The Hanoi city limits extended to the Coconut Market Gate (Ô Chợ Dừa) about a mile to the north. A French writer commented in 1914, "To the south of the citadel, the population is increasingly sparse. All houses have gardens. So that only 500 meters from the citadel, they feel as if they were completely in rural villages."[4]

A city wall came and went over the centuries, but the city was protected at all times by a dike, which still exists physically and in name as City Dike Road (Ðưng Ðê La Thành), one of the narrowest and most congestion-prone streets in the present-day city. The neighborhood around Dong Da Hill belonged to Thai Ha Hamlet (Ấp Thái Hà) and consisted of rice fields and fish ponds. Some of these rice fields, along what is now Thai Ha Street, persisted well into the 1990s; a few of the fish ponds are still functional, despite being increasingly polluted and hemmed in by new construction.

In 1920, according to the recollections of my wife's family and our neighbors, the family of a Vietnamese official in the French colonial regime built a four-room villa on about 1500 square meters (one-third acre) of land on the north side of Dong Da Hill—then an open park without fences or gates. The owner was the grandson of Hoang Cao Khai, a Nguyen Dynasty mandarin who collaborated with the French, and the son of a lesser-known official, Hoang Trong Phu. Befitting the family's French connections, the villa—two stories, with one ten-by-fifteen-foot room and one fifteen-by-twenty-foot room on each floor—was built in the colonial style popular at the time (a style that now exemplifies "traditional Hanoi architecture" for unsuspecting visitors). Walls are three feet thick, brick covered with plaster, painted in the ubiquitous pale yellow. The vaulted roof hangs over deep green shutters and French doors. Many of the original white and patterned floor tiles remain intact.

The landscape design of the villa followed typical period tastes. The house was situated in the center of the lot, with a garden in front and a kitchen, well, and pond in back. Also behind the house was a garage, as this family was one of the first Vietnamese to own an automobile. The property was the nicest in the neighborhood by a wide margin, located about a hundred yards back from the road leading out of town (now Tay Son Street) and bordered on two sides by ponds and fields and on a third by Dong Da Hill.

The mandarin's family lived continuously in this house from its construction until 1954. When the French departed from Hanoi, following the battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords of that year, many northern Vietnamese who had worked for the colonial government left for the southern zone. According to some of the neighborhood's elderly residents, one member of the family hanged himself in the back garden rather than leave or admit defeat.

From Saigon, many members of the northern aristocracy emigrated to the West, either before or after unification of the country under a Communist government in 1975. The descendants of Hoang Cao Khai now mainly live overseas, to my knowledge. One of them may read this article, perhaps unaware of his or her heritage and the urban space that we, in some respects, share.

My mother-in-law's family comes from similar upper-class Hanoi origins. Before 1954, the family owned four large houses in Hanoi, including one in the embassy quarter. Her father was a successful businessman who worked for the French while simultaneously providing information and funds to the Viet Minh. This behavior earned him a one-year prison term when the French re-took Hanoi from the Viet Minh government in 1947, and later the loss of most of his property when the Communists returned. The family accepted these setbacks with equanimity.

My wife's maternal great-grandparents had fought in failed early rebellions against the French, then founded the renowned Cha Ca (Grilled Fish) Restaurant on a street in the Old Quarter that was later renamed after the restaurant. In recognition, perhaps, of the family's pro-revolutionary background, the restaurant remained open almost uninterruptedly through the French and American wars, one of the few private businesses in Hanoi to do so.

My father-in-law, by contrast, comes from the countryside, the son of a local revolutionary near Halong Bay. This pedigree, plus his own talent and hard work, earned him a scholarship to study in Russia during the worst years of the American War, then a job at the Ministry of Culture and Information. There he met my mother-in-law, the eighth of nine children but only the third who was able to attend university.

When my parents-in-law married, they lived in a one-room apartment in the dormitory area (khu tập thể) of the Ministry of Culture, in the middle of a block in Hanoi's central business district. Only in 1989, after my father-in-law was promoted, were they reassigned to a two-room unit—part of which was the original Tay Son villa.

After the departure of its original inhabitants, the house became government property. Like many other similar structures in Hanoi, it was divided up among families who had returned from evacuation sites in the countryside and had nowhere to live in the capital. The city authorities allocated the limited supply of available housing among the burgeoning population of minor officials, factory workers, and state-owned service company employees that made up the core urban backers of the new system. Privacy and comfort were at a minimum. The four-room Tay Son villa was assigned to be the home of five families: one in each room, plus a fifth in the garage—more than twenty people in all. Additional families moved into the front and back gardens, building temporary housing that later became more permanent, if still rudimentary.

Of these five post-revolutionary families, descendants of two still live in the property. One lives next door to us in the larger downstairs room of the villa and a portion of the front garden, with three additional rooms now built on to the front. The mother of another family, now ninety-five, still lives in the back garden.

In the second downstairs room lived the family of Nguyen Can, the brother of the well-known poet Nguyen Binh. Mr. Can, his wife, three sons, and daughter shared the ten-square-meter area. All the sons joined the army, the oldest returning from the American War as an invalid. The second son's military service extended after the war; when he left the army, he built a house of his own in the front garden.

All families living in the former villa compound shared a kitchen, a bathroom, and a single water source behind the house. The villa was the only multistory building in the immediate area. No internal plumbing existed in the house until the mid-nineties. The quality of sanitation left something to be desired, yet it was still superior to the common facilities in dormitory-style housing, with up to 200 people sharing a single bathroom.

During the years when the U.S. bombed North Vietnam, the larger upstairs room of the villa—easily the most attractive in the house, with windows on three sides—was used by the People's Army of Vietnam. According to a neighborhood rumor, an American prisoner of war may have come to this room at some point. My wife and her family only heard of this unusual aspect of the house's history in 2000, after I moved in. One of the neighbors exclaimed, "Oh, he looks just like the other American that used to stay in that house!" The other American? we asked. "The pilot," she said, but gave few additional details.

The neighborhood around Dong Da Hill was never bombed during the war. Other nearby areas, such as Kham Thien Street on the other side of Coconut Market Gate, were not so lucky. On December 26, 1972, American bombs apparently aimed at the railroad line fell instead on Kham Thien, killing 283 civilians and injuring 266.[5] My mother-in-law took part in the volunteer teams that aided the injured and cleared the rubble. Although much has changed in Hanoi since those dark days, and in U.S.-Vietnam relations as well, the twisted minds that brought us the phrase "collateral damage" still hold positions of power—a fact of which I am reminded every time I ride down Kham Thien Street. It is only by a roll of the dice that any house was spared.

After the war ended, an army official and his family were assigned to live in the upstairs room of the Tay Son villa. As part of force reductions in the peacetime army, he was transferred to the Ministry of Culture and Information. In the late 1980s, he built a second room on the side of the second floor, over the alley that the back garden residents use to reach their homes. Compared with the original house, this room is simple and inelegant, composed of whatever building materials were available in the depressed economy of the time.

In 1989, the official's family was able to move into a house of their own, about a mile away along City Dike Road. My parents-in-law were assigned to the two upstairs rooms, one old and one new. At the time, my wife recalls, the area seemed poor and remote compared with the center of Hanoi, "like moving to the end of the world." The streets were virtually empty of commerce or traffic. From the upstairs windows, she could look out at the socialist-realist statue of Quang Trung erected in the park on one side, fields and ponds on the other.

Not long after my wife's family moved in, however, far-reaching changes began to transform both the human and architectural environments of Hanoi. The Communist Party and Vietnamese Government launched Renovation (đổi mới) in 1986. (The double meaning of "policy change" and "fixing up old buildings" is accidental; a better English rendering of đổi mới would be "renewal," but I employ "Renovation" for both its political and physical aspects.) The fact that families like my future in-laws were able to move from cramped quarters to more spacious ones was itself a consequence of Renovation. More sweeping effects took several years to be felt, in both the overall economy and in the housing market.

All land in Vietnam belonged (and still legally belongs) to the state. Urban housing, as a public good in short supply, was assigned by the city People's Committee to those with residence permits (hộ khẩu) for the capital. This household registration system still exists, but in the early 1990s the state's control over movement within the city, and later from the countryside to the city, began to loosen.

Buying and selling of land-use rights remained illegal until the implementation of a new Land Law (passed in 1993, but only put into effect several years later). With Renovation, however, households with greater access to capital began to trade housing on the basis of private, extra-legal agreements. The name on the land-use certificate remained the same, and in many cases the hộ khẩu was also unchanged.[6] In other words, many people "bought" housing space that still legally belonged to the original owner.[7]

In the Tay Son villa, this redistribution of housing began in earnest in 1993, when Mr. Can, the poet's brother, "sold" the smaller downstairs room to another family. Mr. Can's second son, who had built his house in part of the front garden, also left, and a disabled barber and his family moved in. A year later, the woman living in the smaller upstairs room, Mrs. Dinh, moved to the suburbs to reunite with her estranged husband. My wife's family "bought" her room, followed in 1994 by the smaller downstairs room, bringing three of the four original rooms into a single family for the first time in fifty years.

During the same period, additional families began to move into the former back garden area, building more permanent (but still single-story) structures there. As the common outhouse and kitchen became more crowded, residents installed an internal kitchen, first upstairs, then downstairs by the back door. In 1995, my wife's family added two small bathrooms, one on each floor.

Thus, in this first phase of Renovation, the housing stock remained basically intact. Some new structures were added, mostly to complement older buildings in place. Most change occurred inside the existing cityscape, as occupation patterns rearranged and stratified.[8] Those families who had begun to benefit financially from economic reforms expanded their living space to some degree, while those without new sources of income saw their allocated footage shrink or remain unchanged.

Hanoi's building boom began in the second phase of Renovation, beginning in the late 1990s and extending to the present. Although the land beneath each house remains state-owned, full legal ownership of the house itself is now possible. Many Hanoians put their entire savings into purchasing, upgrading, or constructing their family home—an asset that had been nearly impossible to obtain for most families during the collectivist period. My in-laws were late to follow this trend, paying approximately $50 in annual rent for their four government-owned rooms until 1999. At that juncture, they and several close friends each built new four-story townhouses on small lots[9] in an alley off City Dike Road. After my wife and I moved into the old house, the family finally obtained legal ownership rights to it from the city government at a cost of around $3,000.

Others with elite connections accumulated much more property, becoming rich even by international standards. Real estate established itself as a primary means for urban Vietnamese to acquire, store, and demonstrate wealth.[10] The most lucrative market lay in renting property to foreigners, especially the growing diplomatic corps and business community. Most foreigners are restricted to renting property whose owners have a permit certifying that the structure and facilities meet some semblance of international specifications.[11] In the mid-nineties, few families owned property that met this standard, and permits were difficult to obtain, resulting in an unnaturally inflated market. Rents of $500 to $1000 per month and up were usual, even for small houses or apartments—higher than comparable costs in most Western cities at the time. Many landlords demanded, and received, up to a year's rent in advance. With this cash, they could build a new house for themselves or purchase a second rental property. Early entrants to the market profited spectacularly. Some latecomers, however, got caught, taking loans to build or purchase a house, then finding themselves unable to rent the property. With the onset of the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the foreign rental market cooled.

As the domestic economy recovered, housing and land prices soared once again. One nearby house built in 1999 for 700 million dong ($55,000 at the time) sold in 2003 for 2.6 billion ($170,000). Luxury homes cost far more, especially those with more land. (Ironically, although houses are private and land is leased from the state, the major cost of building or buying property in Hanoi is now the land, not the structure on it.) If, against all historical odds, the original Tay Son villa and gardens had been preserved intact after 1954, it would now be worth a small fortune.

In actuality, the former land area of the villa now contains more, and taller, structures than could ever have been planned. The two-story house that once towered over the shacks around it is now surrounded by higher buildings. Four adjacent properties contain houses of three stories or higher. The barber's family in the former front garden added a second story to their house in 2001 and a third story just two years later.

When the current wave of urban construction began, there was little to no city-wide planning. Anyone can obtain a building permit by going to the local ward office, filling out a form, and paying a small fee. Unless neighbors complain that the new construction directly infringes on their property, the project usually goes forward without any interference. The result is emerging urban chaos, as roads and other public services lag far behind the private, market-driven real estate boom.

In a belated effort to keep up with rampant renovation, and the attendant pollution and traffic congestion, city authorities have implemented a height limit in the Old Quarter and around nearby Restored Sword Lake (Hồ Hoàn Kiếm). Street vendors have been banned from some parts of central Hanoi, their wares seized by police. Motorbike parking has been restricted on major streets.[12] Some of the more draconian aspects of this crackdown have been the subject of justifiable hand-wringing among both Vietnamese intellectuals and foreign observers, though sometimes for different reasons. What the critics have failed to notice is that most of the sellers, motorbikes, and tall buildings have not disappeared: they have merely moved to neighborhoods like mine.

The urban landscape of Hanoi has altered more in the past ten years than it had in the previous hundred. In less than a single human generation, the varied faces of Renovation have wrought an irrevocable transformation in both the outer appearance and the inner social interactions of the city. It is difficult to conceive of more rapid change taking place in any society at any time in human history. Nor is there any immediate sign of a slowdown.

Of course, no economy can grow indefinitely. The geometric rises in housing prices will inevitably peak, plateau, or even burst. But with demand for housing in Hanoi far outstripping supply, this correction may be far in the future. Current development plans call for widened streets, new parks, and high-rise condominiums in some areas near Dong Da Hill.[13] The immediate area of the Tay Son house, however, is unlikely to be affected. Today's new middle class, seeking larger lots with parking for cars and ever more conspicuous displays of new wealth, is already moving to the new outer districts, where last year's ricefields and fruit orchards will become next year's luxurious, sterile suburbs.

The social processes that formed the Tay Son villa, thus, are at once cycling back and spiraling forward. The three-foot-thick walls and tiled floors shift in front of my eyes, a constantly renewing mandala of suffering and hope. Hanoi may metamorphose beyond recognition, but the house will remain.

NOTES

1. According to the Institute of Architectural Research of Vietnam's Ministry of Construction, the population density of central Hanoi was 88,900 people per square kilometer as of 2000 (Luu Minh Tri, ed., Bao ton, Ton tao Pho co Ha Noi ("Preservation and Restoration of Hanoi's Old Quarter," 2001), 28. A survey of global density figures shows only Cairo, Hong Kong, and Mumbai with more crowded urban districts. See http://www.demographia.com/db-dense-nhd.htm.

2. Dong Da district is officially home to 332,700 people, or 33,404 per square kilometer: Viet Nam Administrative Atlas (Hanoi: Cartographic Publishing House, 2002), 18-19. Since these figures do not count migrant and unregistered workers, the actual density is somewhat higher.

3. Nguyen Khac Vien, Vietnam: A Long History (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2002), 100.

4. J. Boissiere, L'Indochine avec les FranE7ais (Paris, 1914), quoted in Nguyen Thua Hy, Economic History of Hanoi (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2002), 57.

5. Hong Thuy, "Scars remain on Kham Thien," Viet Nam News, 14 December 2002 (http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/2002-12/13/Stories/14.htm).

6. Some families chose to change the official residence of one or more family members, while leaving others in the former location. In my wife's family, she and her parents shifted their residence to Tay Son when they were reassigned in 1989, but her younger brother kept his hộ khẩu in the Ministry of Culture dormitory area so that he could attend school in the city center. Fifteen years later, he still officially resides there.

7. Now that buying and selling of housing is legal, the effects of these extra-legal exchanges can be cumbersome. City authorities may have no accurate record, or conflicting records, of who actually lives where or who is the true legal owner of a piece of property.

8. According to urban planner Hoang Huu Phe, housing desirability in Hanoi is determined by dwelling quality and location. As one moves up the income and status scale, housing becomes not merely a function of use but also a commodity and status symbol. See Hoang Huu Phe and Patrick Wakely, "Status, Quality and the Other Trade-off: Towards a New Theory of Urban Residential Location," Urban Studies 37, 1 (2000): 7-35.

9. The custom of "tube houses," typical of Hanoi's Old Quarter, began as a tax-saving measure, since property in the nineteenth-century Nguyen Dynasty was taxed only by street frontage. The current proliferation of (often ridiculously) tall, narrow houses is in part a result of the tube-house custom, but can be largely explained by high land prices, crowding, and the desire of many Vietnamese to own their own homes with single private entrances. From a spatial efficiency perspective, of course, duplexes or apartments would waste much less square footage on stairways, and be more accessible for the elderly or disabled. See Nguyen Thua Hy, Economic History of Hanoi, 44-5, 66-7, 98-9; Barbara Cohen, "Hanoi's Old Quarter: The 36 Streets," http://www.thingsasian.com/goto_article/article.586.html.

10. Hoang Huu Phe, "Investment in residential property: taxonomy of home improvers in Central Hanoi," Habitat International 26 (2002): 471-486.

11. As an immediate family member of a Vietnamese citizen, I am exempt from this restriction.

12. See, for instance, "Central Ha Noi ward bans bike parking on footpaths," Viet Nam News, 9 October 2003; "Hanoi to Round up the Homeless to Have More Order," Thanh Nien [Youth], 21 August 2003.

13.