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A million dong and everything to buy

By Christina Verderosa

The next time I’m shopping in a huge, impersonal mall, can’t find anyone to help me in any of the stores, and see ridiculous inflated prices, I’ll think about shopping in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese currency, the dong, exchanges at 15,000 to the dollar. On our first night in Vietnam, I exchanged $100 for 1.5 million dong, bragging that I was millionaire. We had money, we were ready to spend it, and there were plenty of people willing to help.

Peggy Bullock, had visited Vietnam before, and warned us about swarms of peddlers who especially zoomed in on Americans. We got our first real taste of this on our bus trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang. We stopped at a service station and were immediately surrounded by a swarm of children selling all kinds of food. They thrust bread, candy, snacks, and little blocks of something wrapped in leaves at us as we got off the bus. I bought a loaf of crusty French bread for 1000 dong (about seven cents) but passed on the leaf wrapped items, which I found out were fermented pork.

That afternoon we stopped at the Cham Weaving Village, one of several villages in Vietnam, where the entire population practices a particular craft. The usual crowd of children swarmed around the bus as we got off. This time they weren’t looking to sell us anything, they were looking for what we had to give them, and they were in luck. Peggy, and other members of the Peacework delegation, Apropos, and David Flores handed out candy. I stayed back and took pictures. Then we went inside the small weaving shop. In the back, young women worked on the looms, weaving colorful patterns by hand. In the front we found piles of finished goods and it was time to get to work spending some of those dong. I picked out a large red change purse with a gold pattern, opened it up and saw two more purses inside. I cautiously asked how much. “One American dollar,” the proprietor said. I promptly picked out seven more. A frenzy of buying was soon unleashed, as we grabbed tote bags, tablecloths, back packs, unfinished fabrics, taking care of a considerable chunk out of many Christmas and birthday lists.

The dong stayed pretty much in our pockets for the first few days in Nha Trang. My buying was limited to a nearby stall where I went every morning to buy bottled water. The man who ran the stall didn’t speak much English, but it wasn’t necessary. I pointed to what I wanted, he held up his fingers for the number of thousands of dong, I paid and said thank you and he smiled and gave me a slight bow. I didn’t do quite so well when I tried to buy deodorant. I mimed putting deodorant under my arms; he offered me shampoo. But I did successfully buy Q-Tips, or cotton buds as they are called in Vietnam, by miming sticking something in my ear.

But we grew impatient for bigger purchases, especially after John Benjamin came back from the marketplace showing off the T-shirt he had bought for $2. One afternoon, we finished up work early and headed to the Hon Chong marketplace.

The marketplace is located near the Hon Chong Promontory, a large, unusual rock formation jutting into the South China Sea. It’s a small market, strictly for tourists, but it was full of T-shirts, caps, jewelry, figurines, conical straw hats, candy, and a riot of other wonderful things just waiting to come home with us. The vendors quickly recognized an opportunity. As soon as I went to one booth and picked up a T-shirt, the proprietor was right there, eagerly pulling out her wares and displaying them for me. I asked for a color, a size, or a style and she’d pull out half a dozen for me to choose from. I picked out some for me and some for friends back in the U.S. hoping I bought them large enough. Since the Vietnamese are generally much smaller than Americans, sizes tend to run very small. I bought a T-shirt at a restaurant one night that was an XXXL. I tried to get a smaller one, until I opened it up and looked at it. It may have been an XL for an American.

I picked out three shirts and asked the price. “Six American dollars” or 90,000 dong. I happily paid up. Our Vietnamese hosts had explained to us that we were supposed to bargain at the markets, but most of us found we just couldn’t do it. When asked for $2 for a T-shirt that would probably cost at least $15 in the U.S., we paid without a whimper and boasted about what a bargain we’d gotten. In Vietnam, however, where the per capita income is $1700, $2 is a lot of money. Only Jean Hershey tried bargaining, something she had learned to do quite well during her previous stay in Vietnam. Peggy said she couldn’t bring herself to bargain because, “they need that dollar a lot more than I do.”

The Hon Chong marketplace was small, but later we took on the main marketplace in Nha Trang. Although Vietnam is a communist country, here freewheeling capitalism reigns supreme. As we passed by each booth, the vendors called out, “Madame, Madame” to attract our attention to their wares. And the variety of wares was incredible! I stopped at booth after booth of lacquer ware, woodwork, jewelry, shells, embroidery and more. At one booth I asked for something with elephants and instantly ten elephants were whisked out and placed in front of me. That was just the tourist section of the market. Throughout the sprawling complex, one could buy food, fresh fruit and meat, clothing, shoes, jewelry, watches, kitchen equipment, and everything else one needs for daily life. We walked past lines and lines of stalls, trying to stay out of the way of the ever-present motorbikes that whizzed through the narrow passages between the stalls.

I did make a few feeble attempts at bargaining, but only when I had help. One of the YMCA volunteers, Troung Vu Thuy Loan and I were looking at some ball caps. I asked the price and was told 15,000 dong ($1).

“Is that a good price?” I asked Loan.

She said something to the vendor in Vietnamese; they went back and forth for a while, and then we tried the time-honored trick of walking away.

The vendor called back to us. He and Loan discussed the price (at least I assume they were, they may have been talking about the weather for all I know).

“Ten thousand,” Loan said. Sold!

Later, in Ho Chi Minh City, Peggy and I were shopping with Phan Thi Anh Han. She pretty much took over the bargaining for us. We found a stall in a marketplace selling some very nice clothing, so we stopped in to look for something to wear to our farewell party that night. I picked out a black top with gold elephants and a matching skirt. I asked the price. “Twelve dollars.”

I had bought similar outfits for four or five times that amount. “I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a good price to me.” Han, however, ignored me and continued talking. We settled on $10.

Later, when it was Peggy’s turn to buy, she asked how much. Han replied, “We’re still deciding.”

The aggressive vendors in Nha Trang didn’t bother me too much. I had some experience dealing with similar situations from trips to the Philippines. But when we got to Hue, aggressive marketing reached a whole new level.

At first I was lulled into a false sense of security. I went into a small bookshop and actually had to look for someone to take my money. But as I walked along the street, I was followed by a cyclo (a bicycle with a passenger seat attached in front) driver almost the entire way, who offered me all sorts of good deals. I should have taken that as a warning.

The market in Hue was bigger, closer, and noisier than the Nha Trang market. Vendors didn’t wait for me to pick something up, The minute I came within earshot, they began calling, “Madame, Madame!” and pulling out necklaces, coffee, shirts, hats, candy or whatever else they had to sell. The third floor of the market was a huge mass of clothing, and fabric crammed tightly together. At one stall, I stopped to look at a blouse. The vendor came after me at a run. But the final straw came outside when I stopped at one stall and picked up a Diet Coke. Two women came after me, grabbed me by the arm and started pulling me in opposite directions. I ran away and refused to buy anything else without protection. One of the YMCA volunteers, Tran Khanh Hung negotiated a good price on Huda Beer hats.

On our last day in Ho Chi Minh City, I went to a large bookstore that had English books, but if I was looking for Vietnamese literature in translation, I could find much more interesting books on the street. Vendors were selling some rather blurry, obviously pirated copies of the Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam, Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, contemporary Vietnamese literature such as Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind, and even Harry Potter books. I bought Huong’s book from the street vendor for $5. The cover said $12.95.

I finished the afternoon in a frenzy of buying, all the while fending off a few dozen shoe shine boys who kept telling me how bad my shoes looked. I had to agree, since these were the shoes I had worn while painting in Nha Trang. But I just kept saying “No thank you.”

Since I came home I have gone up to Little Rock for some shopping. I went to the mall, wandered into one store after another that looked exactly like every other one, searched in vain for someone who looked like they might actually work there, and put back overpriced merchandise thinking, “It’s great to be home!”

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Originally Published in the DeWitt Era-Enterprise (DeWitt, Arkansas), February 7, 2002

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