Faces Of Hanoi

Faces Of Hanoi Pictures and stories from the life of a foreigner in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Most Hanoians tell me they want family, familiarity. They get married, young, and have kids. Their parents die and they ...
22/08/2026

Most Hanoians tell me they want family, familiarity. They get married, young, and have kids. Their parents die and they go back to work the next week. They can focus on their family and making money, not smiling at random people in the street. They don't envy me going through the world alone. And why should they? You don't get a cookie for doing things alone. But you do get the opportunity to maybe create a unique kind of life, and maybe a unique kind of life is overrated too. Maybe that's just Western shorthand for having lots of fun until it's time to cry yourself into the grave alone with no one to wipe your ass. My mom said she thinks about her mom a lot lately as we walked up the street to visit my stepdad after his fall. We walked past old guys laying around on bus stops and park benches on the way to see an old guy laying around in a hospital room. And I realized that's what all the pressure is about. My mom just doesn't want me to be some old guy in the street one day. She says now she understands what it's like to be lonely like her mother was, to miss your children. This was a woman with nine kids. I said so that's it. You can get married and have a zillion children and a family and divorce and marry again and still end up lonely. You can jump through one hoop after another like they tell you to and it won't matter. Nothing can save you. "No," she agreed. "No."



Women doing their makeup in the side mirrors of parked scooters. Karaoke spots that caught fire reopened with boarded up...
19/07/2026

Women doing their makeup in the side mirrors of parked scooters. Karaoke spots that caught fire reopened with boarded up windows. Men with ci******es in their mouths push motionless people on stretchers across a street full of bikes while a siren wails from an idling ambulance. Old ladies teaching babies to clap and women fanning corn and men who paid a quarter to sit on a baby seat and check their phone in a dark alley. Fat children walking on their tiptoes. A woman walking her mother around in pajamas. A handsome old man who hangs out at the parking lots downstairs sings songs on the mic. Women in shapely black dresses smile briefly and put lit ci******es in their man's mouth while he sleeps. trẻ trâu with dyed blond hair nudges his girlfriend awake sat next to a giddy new family of three with button-cute daughter and equally button-cute wife. Looking at these people sitting in a bar like they're white people, as if they didn't grow up running for cover. I met a 100-year-old man in a hut by the Chinese border. Saw a car with rose petals on it and took pictures carefully in case the owner got spooked. Got a nod from a woman in a facemask, then one from a guy, then smiles from some ladies in a restaurant. Old people splayed around on the sidewalks. They live outside. No pretense. We can just drink and smile and slap each other on the back and it's enough.



When I imagine my life I imagine a balloon. It floats off quietly while nobody is watching, in weird directions for a wh...
12/07/2026

When I imagine my life I imagine a balloon. It floats off quietly while nobody is watching, in weird directions for a while then eventually straight up only because there’s nowhere left to go. The pressure hits when I look around, first down at the whole world then up at how much higher I could get. I imagine something that would bring me down just a little and something always does because ending good things is as easy as imagining it. You end good things because good things are often as hard as bad things, sometimes harder. You only have to get through bad things. But if you got a good thing you got something to lose. You can’t lose nothing. Nothing is always there for you. And after long enough with nothing but nothing nothing becomes something, with its own sound and feeling and weight and now you imagine something instead of nothing because, well, something is better than nothing, at least it’s not like staring at yourself in an infinity mirror like nothing is. You can choose something and if you’re lucky and smart you might even have a good choice. And if you get tired of something you can just go back to nothing, or you can just choose something else if you have another good choice which means you’re way more lucky than smart. You just have to be ready for the pressure, which is coming whether you got something or nothing. And the pressure grows the higher you go. My whole life I’ve been happy with nothing, but now I want something. I want to learn how to breathe at great heights.

I avoid the bar. I walk up my block with "Sons Of Pioneers" playing. A girl in a messy sewing room, deep in concentratio...
02/06/2026

I avoid the bar. I walk up my block with "Sons Of Pioneers" playing. A girl in a messy sewing room, deep in concentration. A woman in kimono at a desk of her massage parlor in front of a big glowing fishtank. A young girl doing a goofy dance because she thinks nobody's looking. I keep going. Pretty young ladies selling sodas on dirt scrap piles under filthy awnings. Old ladies beating discarded furniture up with hammers. A kid crying insanely sat on a filthy sidewalk with precarious construction above. Guys casually squatted in flipflops and shorts next to a bulldozer perched on trash bringing a building down. An old lady walking backwards fanning herself. The top floor of a building, casually on fire. A car driving slow with the hood up and a guy squatted inside the engine area, tinkering around. Everyone in the streets. People need each other. They do the simple things. They sit together in the dark, eat pumpkin seeds, picnic by the lake. She leaves and I walked to food street, every square inch a spectacle of people just living unabashedly in their skin, smiling and crying and barfing and sweating and stroking their kids. I do what I normally do there; I roam for a vaguely inviting place then end up at the one in the center that really is no more inviting than the others. I ask for rice, b**r and the bathroom. A young boy who works there stares at me. I give him the smile. He gives it back. His little sister is sitting across from me at the table when I return. She looks straight through me, unimpressed, for a long time, then leans over and vomits in the little bucket by the table, then goes back to looking through me. An average date, really.








You’re traveling. Your Hanoi apartment is locked up and you will return to moldy clothes. The air is clean here but you’...
16/04/2026

You’re traveling. Your Hanoi apartment is locked up and you will return to moldy clothes. The air is clean here but you’ve been in Hanoi too long to care. The plates, the bill and the people are all three times the size. Everyone is old unlike Hanoi, where only you’re old. Nobody is driving their bike down the completely wrong side of the road as if they’re not. People at the gym here do not flit from machine to machine flinging around 2.2kg weights between 11 minute scrolling breaks. 15 teenagers in Lo**ta dresses are not taking pictures of each other trying to look nonchalant at coffeeshops. Sapporo is only on tap at sushi restaurants. The convenience store does not sell pig intestines. The only people on the streets are homeless. Everyone here speaks your language and you still don’t want to talk to them. You think about all the time and money and planes it took to be here and you try to take your eyes off your weird little life for 15 seconds and walk around and breathe and try to feel where you are, but surely you know by now that’s not how life works. There’s life and then there’s your mind where most of us live, and the two sync every blue moon. You’ll be in Noi Bai Airport soon enough, standing in the wrong line for 20 minutes and grabbing your bags alongside guys hoisting gigantic duct-taped cardboard boxes off the belt that are bigger than they are and walking into the arrivals lobby to excited families running up to the person just behind you. In Hanoi you dreamed about being here and now you’re here dreaming about being in Hanoi, or at least dreaming about being someone who doesn’t always dream about being somewhere else, or even better, someone who just dreams a little less in general.




You’ve moved to Hanoi alone to start a business. You relocated from the Somerset condos to an apartment deep in an alley...
12/04/2026

You’ve moved to Hanoi alone to start a business. You relocated from the Somerset condos to an apartment deep in an alley with a balcony like a zoo cage. You hauled vast sums of local bills in the middle of the night out of the few ATMs that accepted your card while a guy you met eight minutes prior sat outside with the meter running and now you have an office next to a dog restaurant, and 3 Vietnamese business partners handling floor plans and electric lines because apparently that's all common knowledge here. You have a membership to a gym you have a feeling will be shuttered in a week, a barber who gave you a Dragonball Z haircut and a Vietnamese tutor with the same haircut. You had an “agent” who showed you a series of stuffy apartments with submarine windows and old men downstairs who want to see the ID of everyone you bring home, then you figured out Facebook runs Vietnam and now you have an apartment with big windows and a landlady who is also your butcher and took you to Korean BBQ where you spent all night typing stuff into Google Translate and holding it up to each other’s faces. You have a little old smiley neighbor who wanders around the park in a Santa Claus hat holding a stick in one hand and her granddaughter’s hand in the other. You have a lawyer named Miss Hue. Every time you come to her office a girl gets everyone water nobody drinks, you take your shoes off then step in a puddle, then you sign and stamp 11 documents you don’t understand. The second time you met Miss Hue you shook her hand and she said “we already met”. You have a cleaning lady who looks confused when you tip her. You have an empty fridge because sometimes you’re too hungry to play charades with cashiers to figure out what you’re buying and what it costs. A local girl you’re seeing says men are lazy. She should have seen what made the security guard laugh: you closing a cab door with your feet while holding groceries in one hand and an umbrella in the other while it rained.



There’s nothing like that first cab ride from the airport after you land in a strange city. The cab smells weird and the...
01/04/2026

There’s nothing like that first cab ride from the airport after you land in a strange city. The cab smells weird and the money is funny and you’re trying to learn what you can about the country from the back of the driver’s head, while the sound of whistles being blown by old men in baggy uniforms fade into Roxette and Richard Marx and all the other songs Asian radio plays like they dropped last week as the car floats down freeway offramps and up highway onramps while you try to remember the names on the signs so you can impress locals later. The view out the window is a Tom & Jerry cartoon chase; a few scenes on loop. In Hanoi, lamplit soda shacks and sleepy trash fires give way to moms under neon aiming their kids while they p**s and doors open so you can see people watching TV and see what they’re watching too and businesses that you can’t understand how they make any money. College students walking down the street talking in sign language past girls pretty enough to be models folding mountains of clothes and extremely short men building homes at night while smoking a cigarette. Towels like the exhausted flags of a thousand countries cover the balconies of cooked apartment blocks hovering over lots packed with cars you’ve never heard of. You give up trying to catch it all and unfocus a little like you’re looking at one of those Magic Eye posters from the 90s. Government building. Bia hoi. Pho. Photocopies. You imagine living in one of those lit windows. Some people actually live here and this is all normal to them. But in your world, this is an adventure. And eight years later when you’re watching Seinfeld naked in your apartment because spring is verging on too hot to walk around trying to understand something that’s not a mystery anyway while your landlady guts fish in the lobby and old ladies square dance to the same song 20 times in the park, it still doesn’t get old. You will, but it doesn’t.

You need flowers and a card. Every day of your life here you walk past two million stores selling a million cards and fi...
12/03/2026

You need flowers and a card. Every day of your life here you walk past two million stores selling a million cards and five million flowers but now that you need them you have no idea where to buy them. Walking jogs the memory. You rock up into that bookstore by the ATM and walk around looking for cards. Even when you walk up to her and say "alo" she looks at you up and down for a few seconds chewing gum like you could be a couch, a hatstand, anything. No cards. A bookstore has no cards. Okay. Walking jogs the memory. You walk past the j***y house where the old lady with the blackened teeth always sits and there she is like always and suddenly you're in the moment you've been thinking about for years. You take the shot of your life, then dive immediately into asking where the flower shop next door went. She gives you the same amazing neverending smile she always does while everyone around her tries to figure out what you're saying. You see a happy new year card and buy it. Happy new year it is. You walk past an old lady who sits outside her house every day never looking anything but sad. Is this your day for two holes in one? You walk past her and she smiles. Walking with purpose always gives you away, must remember that. You decide to buy flowers and walk back and give her one. Walking jogs the memory. The corner a few streets down is a bloodbath of flower flotsam every day. You buy a few and loop back to her door. She's gone. The friendly guy at the crab noodle soup spot sees your flowers and cards and claps. You walk home wondering how this place can blow your head off every time. It's just regular life. Is that why it's so good? Is that how far the world has drifted?














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Share a phở because phở almost always smells better than it tastes, just like booze is a great idea much more often than...
01/03/2026

Share a phở because phở almost always smells better than it tastes, just like booze is a great idea much more often than a great night, but you keep trying anyway because every now and then it knocks your socks, and now you’ve set yourself up for another ten mediocre phởs, you think to yourself as a lady with Down Syndrome selling nail clippers strokes your chin briefly before setting off. Make a note in your phone: phở nạm gầu is the one. Realized Vietnam is like pho. Like most things really. Sit in a coffeeshop thinking about how you used to stay up alone till 4 in the morning when you were a kid in a Vegas casino or some weird airport because you didn’t want to miss a thing. Every door in this town is a rabbithole into more stories and more moments that are all available to you because you’re just the kind of person who doesn’t mind getting their chin stroked by a stranger, and sometimes you feel like you could walk forever, taking pictures, sure, but also stepping into those salons because those women are already smiling at you so why not? Those men playing backgammon are already smiling at you so why not? Snapping your way from one b**r to another before falling into the nearest moldy hotel for the night then waking up and doing it again until you wake up one day on the other side of the world, which is to say back home because Hanoi is about as far as you can get from it, except after 14 years in moldy hotels, any moldy hotel is home now. But instead you're back to normal, trying to bottle what just happened into words while you gaze through a window at people in the street like they're fish in an aquarium, except they're living their best lives in a country they make sense in and you're probably the goldfish. But to be fair, who tried more than me? Who took more pictures of this place and went down more of its rabbitholes than me? At least I know my retirement plan now. Moldy hotels. Walk till I drop.





















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