Living as a Jew in Hanoi

Please welcome our newest contributor to God of the Desert Books.

May 07, 2025

There’s comfort in erasure. In Hanoi, no one knows what I am. I move through alleys and wet markets unnoticed. Cab drivers ask if I’m French. When I say American, they nod. When I say Jewish, they grin like I’ve shared a password. “Jew very smart. Money good.” One asked if I ran a bank. I said no. He laughed. “But you are Jewish!”

My wife says it too, but as prophecy. She thinks I should already be rich—brilliant, unstoppable, chosen. I tell her to stop. She smiles. I don’t. Praise becomes a knife when it hides expectation.

I came to Hanoi six years ago. Taught English like everyone else. It bored me. My health ended it. Neurology forced stillness. Now I write in a cement apartment flanked by two cats who treat my keyboard as disputed territory. I rarely go out. I live in static and stone.

Hanoi doesn’t wait. Motorbikes ripple through intersections. Horns snarl. Vendors chant into haze. The city churns like a body digesting its own weight. No one fights. No one steals. To lose face is worse than theft. But danger lives in motion. Every foreigner ends up in the hospital. One mistake in the swarm, and the asphalt takes your name.

You adjust. The absurd stops registering. Names like Phúc blur into traffic. A roasted dog turns on a spit—you smell it, then forget. The city doesn’t change. You evaporate.

The Old Quarter spirals in on itself. Streets bear dead trades—Silver, Paper, Medicine—but now sell smoothies and sneakers. Buildings lean like eavesdropping aunts. Balconies droop with laundry and tangled wire. No logic. No grid. You vanish inside it.

Judaism here has no shape. No shul. No school. Just a Chabad room above a shop, serving Israeli backpackers and lost boys. I mark holidays like you mark flood levels on a wall—not from faith, but to remember where the water reached.

Before COVID, Hanoi brimmed with half-invented expats. Rooftop bars. Plastic chairs. Benders that turned into side hustles. Then the borders closed. I quit drinking. The city dried out. The scene deflated without resistance—not a collapse, just a slow leak.

I don’t miss it. Hanoi never asked for us.

The pho disappoints. You find it everywhere—on sidewalks, in alleys, beside construction sites—but it rarely moves beyond utility. These are bowls built for volume, not care. Abroad, a chef might labor over broth for sixteen hours. Here, it simmers fast, gets poured, and leaves no memory. People romanticize Vietnamese food, but the romance evaporates when you live next door to it. Quantity wins. It survives on diesel and mangoes, incense and meat smoke. It never cared who I was.

My wife still waits. She thinks the myth will manifest. I tell her there’s no vault, no ancient code. Outside, someone yells about sweet potatoes. I feed the cats. The world continues.

There’s holiness in being overlooked. You leave no shadow behind you. Only presence. Only life.