Released on The Guide, No 4, April, 2010

Written by Di Li

Nowadays, not many people still remember the name Faifoo of the golden days, when Hoi An was still a prosperous port, which day in day out received the boats which brought goods and merchants in a hustle from Japan, China, Portugal, Italia …  After nearly five centuries, Faifoo has become a gentle and quiet Hoi An.  Here, time and space seems to stand still, and even though the footsteps of the travelers are still on a rush day and night, the sweetness does not diminish, on the contrary it increases its attractiveness and romance.

The ancient town Hoi An consists of four main streets Tran Phu, Nguyen Thai Hoc, Le Loi, and Bach Dang, which have stores essentially of fabric, and artworks.  In the day time, the ancient town Hoi An with houses in the form of the cylinders that run from one street to the other, with tile roofs covered with lush green moss and the pillars of precious wood still shining for hundreds of years  but they look as if they were built up just yesterday.

In the sixteenth century, The Vietnamese moved to the south developing their country and had come to where the Japanese, the Chinese and later the people from the west had settled and had done business and had made Hoi An the busiest town in South-East Asia and at the same time the point of cultural intersection of Vietnam. 

Many travelers from the foreign countries had set up a formula when they came and visited Luang Prabang.  The ancient capital Luang Prabang = Hoi An + Sapa.  It is possible that Luang Prabang with  its quiet and narrow streets, looking ancient with hundreds or thousands of paper lanterns lighted in all over the night market area would remind of a far away Hoi An, but there is definitely one thing, that is if anybody that has come and visited Hoi An just once on the 15th of the month would see there is no other place such moment would be repeated.  Since the year 1998, the ancient town Hoi An has returned to the previous period hundreds of years ago, by hanging lanterns on their front verandas and limiting the use of the electric equipment.

 
One time, I came to Hoi An on the birth anniversary of Buddha, and felt giddy among the streets flooded with flowers and lantern lights. On the riverside of Thu Bon the streets are brilliant with a pearly radiance of thousands of lantern lights in harmony with the effulgent lights coming from each ancient shopping store.  Hoi-An, at this period of time is reliving its golden days of yore.

The ancient houses with elaborately carved wooden pillars showed off their  resplendence in the lights of the lanterns.  The grocery stores and the high fashion stores were crowded with customers.  I came into a dress-making store, rolls of cloth piled on one another in immensely high heaps, flaring up brightly under the lights.  The room with tiled floor reached as far as the inner yard, unexpectedly large, but if we just looked at the narrow front hardly could we figure out what a large back part the building had (that is the Chinese familiar structural style).  I pretended to be a customer, but my eyes were looking sideways enjoying the interiors of the building, trying to imagine how people had lived five hundred years ago.

Everything stayed the same, from the pulling door to the unuphostered wooden sofa, the horizontal lacquered board, the parallel sentences and the walls of a brownish black colour.  A girl attendant took me inside to try on a dress.  She wore a long dress, flowing under the foliage during the night with the moonlight flickering in the inner yard, smiling sweetly.  As an attendant serving at the counter, the young girl from Hoi An looked just like a high born damsel, walking gently and self-confidently in the luxurious and elegant but mysterious precinct.  In the streets, thousands of lanterns, round, square, oval, tube of all kinds of colors hung along the streets forming a area with miraculous colors different from  any modern lighting structural work, which infatuated the travelers at every step.

Perhaps the space as well as the ancient structural style in here looks just like the Hoi An people.  Are the Hoi An people influenced by the living atmosphere or is the living atmosphere determined by the Hoi An people?  The Hoi An people are experienced, warm, elegant but not mannered, and especially if we meet them for the first time, we would feel that we have known them or been acquainted with them for a long time.  Although almost every family has business and has been in contact with other businessmen through several generations, I am very surprised about the way they deal with other people, so sincere, open-minded and refined - the characteristic that they have absorbed from the tradition, not from books.

Any store in Hoi An you come in, you can try on some dress, inquire about the price, freely bargain and after half an hour if you can’t get what you want and have to leave, you will certainly receive a friendly smile as if she would like to say sorry and expect  you to come back next time.

You can ring the bell of a Buddhist temple at midnight just to buy a pack of aloe wood, ask somebody to show you the way and he would be glad to walk with you for as fas as two kilometers until you reach the destination.  You can rent a motorbike then leave an identification card with the owner or you don’t have to because you look so trustful.   You buy a painting from a small gallery, then you will be escorted home by the artist, and he would heartily buy you a bottle of peppermint oil as a gift for your coughing, then he would leave in a hurry without even deigning to receive a word of thanks or leave a name or an address.