Brock Eldon at Salmagundi:
At dawn Hanoi is already awake. Motorbikes swarm beneath balconies before the light has quite broken, a mechanical chorus that carries the city into motion. From the window of my apartment overlooking Tây Hồ, the lake lies bruised with mist until the first glare of sun turns it to metal. On the street below, vendors set down baskets of fruit, incense burns outside a pagoda, and the smell of French bread mingles with diesel.
In the Vietnamese capital, even silence is crowded. Horns blare and drills hammer, and as, within the old, French-colonial styled cafés, students bend over notebooks, a young couple exchanges muted laughter, and one senses here a discipline of attention beneath the noise. Hanoi thrives on density, on each body finding rhythm within the mass of the whole.
This is not Ontario—not the Canada I was born into, where winter silences mean absence, where a child can walk for hours without encountering another soul, where a man can freeze to death just for being outside too long. Silence, in Hanoi, is suspension rather than vacancy: a pause inside intensity. To write and teach here is to live against a double register—abundance and estrangement, presence and dislocation.
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